Measuring a Screen for Dummies

Screen Diagonal

There are some truths in this world that are simply unavoidable. One of those truths it that there is no cure for stupidity. Oh, you can cure illiteracy and lack of education, but stupidity? it's in their genes. We know that because we see examples of this incurable condition almost every day. Take, for instance, eHow's Kristi Roddey, who demonstrated just how dumb you can be and still earn a BA in journalism when she penned "How to Calculate a Screen Diagonal."¹

It's really pretty simple to do (heck, there are all kinds of online calculators set up for the most innumerate among us), but many a high-school freshperson knows that you just use the Pythagorean Theorem. You plug in the screen height and width for the A and B terms, and the diagonal pops out as the C term.

Roddey, believe it or not, got that right – we said "high-school freshperson," after all, and she's a college graduate, albeit in journalism. Yep, her instructions were to start with a tape measure and a calculator, then

Measure the length and width of the screen in inches. Insert the length and width measurements into the equation X^2 + Y^2, where X is the length and Y is the width. Add the two numbers together. Calculate the square root of the sum in the previous step to determine the length of the diagonal in inches. We think Kristi's number 3 is superfluous, since there's already addition in step 2, not to mention that the result of her step 2 is a single number, but we'll let Roddey get away with that bit of dumbassery. What we won't let her get away with is this:

You have a measuring tape in your hot little hands: why the heck don't you just measure the diagonal directly? That way you don't have to tax your tiny brain trying to figure out what "X^2 + Y^2" means!

But no, that wouldn't require three steps; and if there weren't three steps, eHow wouldn't pay. Yes, Roddey got paid -- and probably surprisingly well -- for her little instructions, stupid as they may be. In the process, she earned something else as well: the Antisocial Network's Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was ehow.com/how_7484071_calculate-screen-diagonal.html

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