Defining an Acre for City-Dwelling Dummies

An acre of downtown San Francisco

Time and time again, the Antisocial Network's research teams run across one particular phenomenon when on the hunt for DotD nominees; and it's especially true when they start poking around at eHow.com. The phenomenon? eHow's algorithm captures a search phrase and hands it off to their contributors without the benefit of a reality check; which results in a stupid question. Back in the site's halcyon days (pre-Panda) any query, no matter how boneheaded, was fair game for their stable of equally boneheaded contributors. That's probably how Mallory Malesky ended up writing instructions for "How to Measure an Acre Wide and Long"¹; a question that, when you come right down to it, makes little or no sense in the real world.

Mallory, apparently one of those people whose familiarity with "acreage" is limited to having seen the word in print a time or two, immediately wikipediaed the term and learned that there's a general definition: an acre is one chain wide and one furlong in length, or 66 feet by 660 feet for a total area of 43,560 square feet. It's a good thing that Malesky wrote her article early in eHow days, since otherwise she would have been forced by the site's "standards" to state the dimensions in the metric system (that'd be 20.117 m wide and 201.17m long, or 4046.86 m²), which would have made zero sense. Besides, she would have probably mis-copied a number or extended the dimensions to nine decimal places. 

Whatever the case, Mallory's instructions – get this! – were to cut two pieces of string 66 and 660 feet long to "measure" your area. For some reason, Malesky thought you could cut both of those lengths of string out of 700 feet of string (we think she'd need at least 726 feet...). And then you are supposed to: "Anchor both pieces of string into the ground with a heavy object or steak. Take one of the strings and walk out in a straight line until you run out of string. Repeat with the other string." We certainly hope a hungry dog doesn't come by the anchor point while you're out at the end of the longer string, or your measurements may be... inaccurate.

Malesky said nothing at all about forming the two strings into a right angle. She said nothing at all about the opposite corner of the rectangle. She said nothing at all about using tape measures (which you'd better have for measuring your string). More importantly, Mallory ignored (or didn't know) the fact that an acre is ANY area of 43,560 square feet, which means you could use a square a little more than 208 feet on a side, a rectangle 240 x 181.5, or even a circle 235.5 feet in diameter. Nope, to Malesky it had to be a 66 x 660 rectangle. Sheesh: what a maroon!

A knowledgeable person would answer that question by instructing the questioner to calculate the area of their polygon in square feet and divide by 43,560. Malesky was in too big a hurry to get her ten bucks to get it right and for that, she also wins our Dumbass of the Day award.

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_10032162_measure-acre-wide-long.html

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