pH Calculation for Dummies

If life gives you lemons,
you have citric acid

As our Antisocial Network research staffers fan out across the internet in search of dumbass freelancers, it gets harder every day as more and more content farms disappear: EliteVisitors, PersonaPaper, WritEdge, DailyTwoCents, and Bubblews have all bitten the dust since we started this blog, and Suite.io was "re-deployed" for more than a year before disappearing. Good old eHow.com, however, is still kicking. Although they've moved a lot of their content to "niche" sites, we can still count on finding people blathering about subjects in which they have no background over at former eHow.com sites like Sciencing.com. That's where we ran into George Lawrence, proud holder of BAs in English and Criminal Justice and – gasp – a JD, who nonetheless knows jack about chemistry. He proved that when he pretended to explain "How to Calculate the pH of Lemon Juice."

Lawrence opened with a discussion of pH filled with blithe misinterpretations such as

"Chemicals can be loosely divided into two extremes: acids and bases." [and]
"Water, for example, has a pH of 7 and is considered neutral (neither acid nor base)...."

...neither of which is technically correct: a pH measurement places a solution on the acid-alkaline scale, not a chemical, and only pure water has a pH of 7.That's apparently close enough for eHow, even if it's at best an oversimplification and at worst utter bushwa. Where George truly earned the ire of our researcher, however, was his next statement: "You can determine the pH of a chemical by using a pH indicator strip and checking the strip's color to a pH chart. For fun, measure [bolding ours] the pH of lemon juice." Did you catch that? We did: George was supposed to explain how to calculate the pH of lemon juice, not measure it. Dumbass.

Well, we looked online and found a couple of places that explain the process of calculating the pH of a solution. Here's one from a Purdue University chemistry lab, a much more likely place to find such an answer than in an English class. We won't go into all the dirty details, but we'll just say that it's a bit more of a calculation than Lawrence's answer entails:

1. Dip [a] pH indicator strip into a glass of lemon juice...
2. Wait for the pH indicator strip to change color...
3. Compare the color of the pH indicator strip to your pH color chart...

Ummm, yeah: like we said, that's measurement, not calculation! To calculate, you need to determine the concentration of the hydronium ion (H₃O), because pH is simply the negative of the logarithm of that ion concentration in a solution.
Instead of demonstrating knowledge of chemistry and posting a method of calculating the pH of a solution, Lawrence instead posted a method of measuring pH that you can find on the back of any swimming pool test kit. For leaving his readers uninformed after wasting their time reading his twaddle, the Antisocial Network hereby awards George Lawrence, JD, the singular honor of Dumbass of the Day.

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