Area Conversions for Dummies

Our researchers constantly prowl the internet looking for people who make, or hope they can make, cash by pretending they can tell their hind ends from holes in the ground, even if they can't. Sometimes the search process takes a strange path, and today's one such case. The team member pulled up an eHow post by a known dumbass and followed a link in that article to another post on a related topic that, on inspection, looked stupid. He then pulled up that contributor's profile to find a gold mine of stupidity across multiple topics. So without further ado, here's our new discovery: eHow's Greyson Ferguson, doing his thing in "How to Convert Square Feet to Inches" (now found at the niche site Sciencing.com).

Now this is obviously one of the eHow "titles" that someone who knows the aforementioned rectum from said depression would have rejected as, well, making no sense. You can't convert area to linear measure: you can only convert area to area (it's no surprise, though, that we see eHowians happily tackling similar questions on a regular basis). So a mathematically literate answer to the question should have opened with something along the line of, "You mean 'convert square feet to square inches,' you dummy!" Not so Greyson, who opened with the monumentally stupid

"If you are working outdoors or even in your home, you may find you need to know the amount of square inches in a room or specific area. Counting up each inch, however, is going to be extremely time consuming. Actually there is a much easier way of determining the number of inches in any square foot radius."

We're almost certain no one "working outdoors" measures area in square inches, but hey, what do we know? Apparently we know more than Ferguson, given the nonsensical "the number of inches in any square foot radius." WTF is throwing "radius" into that phrase even supposed to mean?

Whatever... the real answer, as just about any fifth-grader knows, is to multiply the area in square feet by 144; the number of square inches in a square foot. Greyson's example, a 10' x 10' room, therefore has an area of 14,400 square inches. Done and done...

But not according to Ferguson. This yutz says that the process is... different:

Find the amount of square feet in a room or given area by multiplying the length by the width (so far, so good)... Determine the square root of the footage if you do not know what the length and width are (huh you just told us to use length and width -- how do you know the square footage otherwise, dumbass?)... Write this number down. More than likely it is going to be a number with a decimal in it (if you're using a calculator, why write it down?)... Multiply this final number by 12 (the number of inches in a foot). This number is going to give you the total number of inches, per side, in a square foot area. To determine the entire area in square inches, multiply the number in inches by itself.

Wait a minute: you just said it's the "final number"; so why do you multiply it, Greyson?

Ferguson's apparent innumeracy results in a partial answer that involves unnecessary steps and false starts (the better to meet the DMS minimum word-count and number of steps). It's compounded by the pretty but ultimately useless images added in an update by photographer Pamela Follett. What is most damning is that neither Follett nor Ferguson actually provides the correct answer!

For an answer that has more meanders than the Amazon but more to the point, an answer that doesn't actually provide a solution; the Antisocial Network sadly presents to Greyson Ferguson the Dumbass of the Day award. In a perfect world, the dumbass would share his award with photographer Pamela Follett...

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