Formulas for Mathematical Dummies (Math Week 2)

Formula for volume

It's a central tenet of the teaching process that part of explaining a new process is providing an example. Heaven knows we've seen a slew of such examples as we wander the internet looking for more dumbassery. Naturally, the careful teacher makes certain that the path through the example is straightforward and, perhaps most importantly, that the example is actually correct. Just as importantly, the examples should be easy to visualize and all of the steps and operations clear to the student.  It appears that eHow's Marie Mulrooney¹ (supposedly a former math tutor) forgot how to create usable examples in the post titled "How to Calculate Volume in Cubic Centimeters" at Sciencing.com. Duh.

We're not really sure what difference units of distance make when you're calculating volume. Obviously (at least to the staff of the Antisocial Network, that is), the formulas are the same whether the results will ultimately be stated in cubic centimeters, cubic meters, cubic miles, or cubic light years. Marie attacks the question gamely, however, although we'd have preferred that she make some mention of that fact. Fair enough. Where Marie -- and eHow -- gets screwed up, however, is in the presentation of the examples. Marie's first example is for rectangular solids:

"Calculate the volume of a square or rectangular cube using the formula V = l w h. "

That's at best badly written and at worst just plain stupid: you can't "calculate the volume of a square" (it only has two dimensions), and Marie? There's no such thing as a "rectangular cube." We also have to wonder what symbol you used for multiplication: it doesn't show up in the source code and it's not in the archived version, either. Oh, wait: we figured it out: you're italicizing one of the terms... Moving on to the volume of a cylinder: "Calculate the volume of a cylinder using the formula V = r^2 (pi) h..."  Two problems there, Ms Mulrooney: first, still no multiplication symbol: what's wrong with printing an asterisk (*), a bullet (•) or a lower-case x? And by the way, that's the formula for a right circular cylinder: it's not the general formula for a cylinder...

In the end, we fact-checked Marie's examples with a calculator and found them to all be mathematically correct, but let's be honest: on what planet is italicizing one of the terms in a formula preferable to writing out the operations symbolically? We know which planet: the Dumbass of the Day planet, also known as eHow World. Yeah, that's right: only eHow would be stupid enough to publish Mulrooney's content in this form...

¹ Weird: Leaf paid someone named "Lisa Maloney" to rewrite this post, but all she did was fix the notation problems with the formulas. It's still worthy of that Dumbass award.

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