Frequency, the Dummies Version

Frequency comparison

Some of the misinformation you find on the internet would be riotously funny of there weren't people stumbling across it searching for real information. For what little it's worth, here at the Antisocial Network, we identify these little nests of bull when we find them and explain the errors. Hope that helps... but it's a thankless task, and one will never end as long as sites like HubPages.com and eHow.com keep publishing. Oh, well...

Today's DotD has graced these pages before, usually spreading the kind of scientific illiteracy shown in this post on sound. Well, Joan Whetzel is back on a closely-related topic: we already know she doesn't understand wavelengths, so who would ever assume she can explain "How to Calculate Frequency in Hertz"¹ for Sciencing.com? It's pretty clear she can't.

Joan opens her cornucopia of misinformation by explaining,

"Hertz measures phenomena like sound waves (hearing, music) and electromagnet waves (radio, light). When waves pass from medium to medium, such as from a musical instrument to an ear, their wavelength changes, but the frequency remains virtually the same."

Right away we know she's talking through the proverbial hat when she mentions "electromagnet waves" -- WTF? -- and further misinforms her readers that a musical instrument or an ear is an example of a medium. We had to wonder how that might affect her comprehension of Snell's Law... 

Whetzel continues in that vein with the rest of her... "information":

"Hertz (Hz) measures frequency, or how often an episode cycles within a certain timeframe. Finding the frequency means first choosing the unit of time (second, minute or hour), and then counting the cycles within that timeframe. Hertz frequency equals 1 cycle/sec, so hertz only cycles once per second."

Ugh... that made our heads hurt. "...hertz only cycles once per second"? A hertz is the unit of frequency equivalent to one cycle per second. A hertz doesn't "cycle," the wave being observed cycles. Dumbass! And speaking of dumbass, how about Joan's explanation of metric prefixes: "Electrical and audio signals pick up wide ranges of hertz, with prefixes like kilo and mega, giga and tera. A kilohertz equals 1,000 HZ, a gigahertz is equivalent to 1 million Hz, and 1 quadrillion Hz add up to 1 petrahertz. Frequencies less than 1 Hz use decimals--1 kilohertz 10-3 equals .001, and 1 gigahertz 10-9 is equivalent to .000000001."

OMG, is that brainless! Some corrections to Whetzel's misinformation:

1. 1 million hertz = 1 megahertz, not 1 gigahertz. 
2. A gigahertz is one billion cycles per second (one thousand million in U.K. parlance)
3. There is no such thing as a "petrahertz," though there is a petahertz.
4. 10^-3 hertz is 1 millihertz
5. 10^-9 hertz is 1 nanohertz

We repeat: Dumbass! And in her usual dumbass way, Joan never even answers the original question, "How to calculate frequency"! And yet she got paid for writing this bull - maybe she's not such as dumbass after all. The Antisocial Network is disgusted to award Joan Whetzel yet another Dumbass of the Day. This is getting to be a habit...

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/facts_6933510_calculate-frequency-hertz.html

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