Frequency, Hertz and Waves for Dummies

In the Antisocial Network's staff meeting last week one of our researchers noticed that we hadn't revisited one of our favorite DotD winners for a while (not since the beginning of the month, anyway), which is something considering that she's already a 21-time winner of the award in nine – count 'em – nine different categories! We (think we) first found her holding forth on the physics of sound, so what better topic to revisit the one and only Joan Whetzel except watching her make a fool of herself in her HubPages.com post, "Frequency, Hertz, and Waves"¹ (Joan's a big fan of the Oxford comma).

Joan, as is usual, cranks up her well-oiled misinformation machine in the very first paragraph:

"...sound is not the only thing that produces waves; light produces waves as well. Frequency is used to measure both sound and electromagnetic radiation waves."

We know a lot of physicists – all of them, in fact – who would argue that light doesn't "produce waves," light is waves (sort of) (sometimes). But never mind such piddling details as definitions... let's get to some of Joan's more "interesting" statements:

She published a figure caption saying, "The prefix in front of the word Hertz indicates the cycle speed in Hz per seconds or fractions of a Hz per second...": no Joan, a millihertz is not a thousandth of a Hertz per second: it's a thousandth of a cycle per second! "Hertz per second" -- if there were such a thing – would be the acceleration of a wave... we think. "In essence, each Hz is measuring the space between waves...": no, Joan, Frequency measures how often a point on the wave passes an observation point: it's related to time, not distance! Joan's math is every bit as suspect as her science: "the... velocity [is] 1,320 feet ÷ 60 seconds, [or] 220 feet per second...": No Joan, it's 22 feet per second! We've seen this one before out of Joan: "The petrahertz [sic], on the other hand is extremely fast...": Sorry, Joan, there's no metric prefix "petra"; it's peta. "...the highest 'A' on [a piano] keyboard as [sic] a frequency of 7040 Hz...": no, Joan, it's frequency is 3520 Hz. Or think of "...10 cycles per second x 1 cycle per second = 10 cycles per second...": yes, Joan, that's right... we think.

There's probably more dumbassery scattered throughout Joan's post, but those are the lowlights. Besides, it always makes our researchers' heads hurt when they read her rubbish. Those stupid statements ought to be more than enough to show why Joan well deserves this, her twenty-second Dumbass of the Day award. Let's see: that's 22 DotD awards in 635 days, or a frequency of about 35 millidumbasses...

¹ The post has been deleted, but you can still see it using archive.org's Wayback machine. Its URL was   hubpages.com/education/Frequency-Hertz-and-Waves

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