Monday, June 1, 2015

Birefringence for Dummies

calcite crystal displaying
birefringence
We've heard it said that people who think they know everything are especially irritating to those of us who do (insert rimshot). On that note, we should note that it royally pisses off many people to see the sort of bull published by some freelancers grubbing for money out there especially when they demonstrate total ignorance of a topic about which we happen to know something. Today's example is serial dumbass Jennifer Fleming from the website eHow.com (perhaps better known around our office as SerialDumbass.com), who once explained (and we use the word loosely) "How to Calculate Birefringence."¹ 

Fleming starts out stupid and only gets worse as she continues. One need only read her introduction to the subject of birefringence to have no doubt that she has absolutely no concept of what she's talking about:
"Birefringence is based on the concept of the physical orientation of light as it passes through a subject. There are three conditions under which this can occur. There must be a non-zero difference in two of the samples under observance. There must be net orientation within the sample, and the sample must be oriented correctly. For example, if light passes through a sheet of tissue paper, the emerging light on the other side must be parallel to that which was initially beamed inward."
In case you, like Fleming, don't know; birefringence is an optical property; essentially birefringent substances allow light to pass through them at different velocities depending on the direction to the light source (it's more complicated, but that's close enough for government work). But that paragraph!? What does Jennifer think "There must be net orientation within the sample, and the sample must be oriented correctly" means in this context? Especially "...must be net orientation": WTF is that supposed to mean?

Like so many of her fellow eHow contributors, Fleming simply attempted to reword something she'd "researched" on wikipedia. Like so many of her compatriots, a complete lack of knowledge about the topic meant she totally screwed it up. 

And like so many of her compatriots at eHow, Jennifer Fleming is our Dumbass of the Day. In her case, again...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_8786573_calculate-birefringence.html
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