Soil Volume Calculations for Dummies

Measuring hole depth

As our research staffers wander aimlessly about the internet in search of freelance dumbassery – we'll be honest, most of them spend the bulk of their time at or near Demand Media's sites like eHow.com – they come across all manner of strange questions and answers. When it comes to mathematics, many of the queries seem to have been posted by fifth-graders who've gotten lost in a word problem. Really, how else do you think you'd find a question such as "How to Calculate the Volume of Dirt Removed" except for someone trying to work out an elementary-school question for arithmetic class? Then again, the question could have arisen from someone with the math skills of Athena Hessong, who attempted to answer it at GardenGuides.com... and failed. Maybe that's why they took away her byline (although we note that it's back now).

According to Hessong,

"The hardest part of finding the volume of dirt removed is the digging, because the calculation part takes only moments to do."

That comment only makes today's DotD ceremony all the more amusing, because Athena apparently skipped arithmetic class the day her third-grade teacher was talking about conversion between units of measure. Oh, she starts off all right, instructing her readers to measure the length and width of the hole (although she doesn't state the units). Next, you're supposed to measure the depth in inches – we aren't really certain why. And then comes the good part, beginning with step 3: Divide each of the measures by 12 to determine the number of feet for the length, width and depth measurements... Multiply the length, width and depth of the hole in feet to find the total volume in inches...  Divide the area by 27 to find the volume of the dirt in cubic yards (because 1 cubic yard = 27 cubic feet).

Now we didn't bother with her example; a simple hole about  big enough to bury the family hamster in a shoe box (although a little shallow, at six inches). No, she got the arithmetic mostly right; it's her wording that gave us pause. Go back and read step 3 again: "Divide the area [sic] by 27 to find the volume..."

The Antisocial Network researcher who found this example of mathematical dumbassery simply shook his head in wonderment: it's bad enough that Hessong and the content editor both think you can divide area by a number to convert it to volume, her post neither mentions converting the length or width measurements to feet nor calculating area at all (although why would you?). Yet this peabrain got paid to post this crap. Well, this particular peabrain is getting more than a fifteen-dollar stipend for her work: she's also getting a Dumbass of the Day award.

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