Titrating Solutions for the Dummy Chemist

Titration stand setup

So, readers, what do you think would happen when one of the bazillions of money-hungry freelancers out there happens to run into an assignment he or she doesn't understand? An assignment for which he or she has no background at all? If you guessed "run with it anyway," then you've hit upon the reason why it's rarely a problem for one of our researchers to dig up another of the Antisocial Network's Dumbass of the Day nominees (trust us, they have hundreds more still waiting in the wings). Yep, people who know nothing will type the topic title into their search engines (we hope using quotation marks) and then reword the first hit in the list. At least we suspect that's what happened to eHow.com's Jack Ori (him again!) who set aside his "coaching" duties just long enough to make a mess out of "Titration Explained" at Sciencing.com.

It seems that Jack's web search sent him to a site called "Getting Started With Chemistry - Acids and Bases," and, in a hurry to collect his fifteen-dollar stipend, Ori didn't bother to find out whether chemists ever use titration for anything other than acids and bases (hint: they do!).  Having determined, at least to his satisfaction that titration is always used to determine the pH of an acid, Jack runs with it. That's why in a post theoretically explaining the process of titration, he included sections entitled "Properties of Acids" and "Neutralizing Acids with Bases." And, for his "Example of Titration" he prattles on about a nitric acid solution (the steps in which, admittedly, he more or less gets right). Of course Jack, who knows jack about chemistry, didn't extend his "research" far enough to learn that chemists titrate all manner of solutions, not just acids. And then eHow's vaunted "content editor" who had, like Ori, never been in a chemistry lab, didn't know enough to call him on his bullshit and it got published. That's how the stupidification of the internet continued to spread before Google Panda...

Had someone who knows at least the basics of chemistry been called upon to write the post, it's a fairly safe bet that he or she wouldn't have explained that, after adding the titrant to the unknown solution, the chemist

"...performs a series of calculations to figure out the ratio of standard solution to the nitric acid and convert it into moles..."

While true (in the most simplistic sense of the word – and the process), it's a pretty safe bet that both Ori and the CE on the topic strove desperately to avoid being forced to write either of the words "stoichiometric" or "stoichiometry." Combine this form of scientific illiteracy (avoiding a topic because it's "too hard") with the incomplete research, and it should be no surprise that Jack is collecting his second Dumbass of the Day award. Duh.

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