Simple Math Conversions for Dummies

Marathoner

It's been a while since we checked in with some of the Antisocial Network's most dependable dumbasses. Take people like Lacy Enderson, who regularly holds forth on construction techniques yet never seems to realize she knows nothing at all about building. We've also missed Joan Whetzel – capable of screwing up almost any information – so we decided to visit Joanie again. This time around, she's displaying her innate dumbassery at HubPages, where she once addressed a topic so simple that we had a tough time figuring out how she managed to turn it into a post of almost 500 words: it's "How to Convert Miles Per Hour to Feet Per Second."

Whetzel's main problem this time out is that she doesn't check her work. Heck, she apparently doesn't even read her work. Joan cobbled together a table (by careful googling, we assume) listing a number of fairly useful conversion factors, although even it contains some errors. One of those conversion factors is between miles per hour and feet per second, a conversion factor of 1.46667. That's demonstrably true: most of our staffers are aware that a land speed of 60 mph is 88 fps, and 88 divided by 60 is pretty much 1.4666. Actually the conversion factor is a repeating decimal, 1.4666..., but who cares after five decimal places or so?

Where Whetzel whips out that well-worn dumbass stick of hers and bonks herself on the head with it (repeatedly, we suspect), is when she starts giving examples: "To convert a miles per hour to ft/s reading the formula is ___mph x 3.2084 = ___ ft/s. In the case of the marathon runner who ran an average of 6.55 mph, the equation would read: 6.55 mph x 3.280840 = 28.49 ft/s."  WTF? Not two inches above her example, Joan's cute little table says that the relevant conversion factor (miles per hour to feet per second) is 1.46667... Where the hell did she get the number "3.280840"? As a matter of fact, we recognize the number: it's the conversion factor between meters and feet, which has not one darned thing to do with miles per hour...

So, Joan, the marathon runner who took a fairly respectable four hours to complete the race (the example pace of 6.55 miles per hour) was, in reality, running 9.61 feet per second. That 28.49 fps number you calculated? it works out to a land speed of 19 MPH. Your sample marathoner would have set a new world record by completing the 26.2 miles in a time of under 1 hour, 21 minutes. It's about the same pace as FloJo's women's world record in the 100 meters, except over more than 26 miles! Talk about your "performance enhancing drugs"!

No, in the case of our Joanie, PED stands for performance enhancing dumbass – and that's why Ms Whetzel is, once again, the Antisocial Network's Dumbass of the Day.

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