Measuring Diameter for Dummies

The straight lines of a circle

Some people may have gotten the impression that we here at the Antisocial Network are picking on eHow.com. Well, they're probably right, but consider this: we wouldn't be able to "pick on" eHow if the site were not so target-rich! Combine eHow's vast stable of un- and under-informed writers with the management's picky rules about formatting and style, and you've created a nexus of dumbassery that HubPages.com and the others have no hope of attaining (besides which, HubPages hides its worst rubbish). But, any carping from our critics aside, we've come here today to pick on eHow yet some more: as usual, it's because they let their writers get away with some true bullshit. Take, for instance, Damon Koch, caught here telling his Hunker.com readers "How to Use a Measuring Tape for Diameter."

Like InfoBarrel's Howie Romans, recently exposed in this blog for a similar sin, Koch insults his readers' intelligence by providing detailed instructions on how to use a simple tape measure. We crown him our Dumbass of the Day, however, because of his instruction number one: "Find the center of a circular area and mark it in some way." Sure, we know that knowing the center of a circle is necessary to measure either the radius (one end of which is at the center) or the diameter (which, by definition, passes through the center). But Damon doesn't bother to give instructions on how to find the center, which renders his instructions completely useless – also known as being the Dumbass of the Day.

By the way, we know how to find the center of any circle, even if Koch doesn't... and we also know that the easiest way to use a tape measure to find the diameter of a circle is to measure the circumference and divide it by pi.

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