Dimensions for Dummy Geometry Students

One of the Antisocial Network research staffers commented at a recent staff meeting (after the first round of craft beers) that we could probably keep the site running almost indefinitely simply by searching all the Leaf Group¹ niche sites for the words "conversion" and "calculation." The number of stupid posts we've found so far on those two topics is enough to choke your average horse – and today's is just one more of them. This time, it's some character who claims to be named Matt McGew (it's probably really McGrew or McGee), who demonstrated his tenuous connection to geometry when he wrote "How to Calculate the Feet per Square Foot"² for eHow.

Just about anyone who remembers his or her 8th-grade geometry class could tell you that the question is nonsense: feet are one-dimensional (length) while square feet are two-dimensional (area). It is possible to calculate area from one-dimensional measurements, but there is no general method of working that calculation backward. That did not, however, stop McGew from trying – or in reality, spraying about 160 words of nonsense on the page just to pick up his fifteen smackers.

According to Matt, "You can... calculate the feet per square foot of a space by using a tape measure..." ...at which statement several people found coffee erupting through their noses. "Say what?!?!?" Oh, yes, that's what this dude – holder of an MA in journalism (naturally) – said. His instructions? Read on: Measure the length of the space... Measure the width of the space... State the resulting measurements as feet per square footage...

Yep: that's all you have to do to "calculate" that number: "state" it. This blithering idiot just told people how to calculate the square footage from the measurements of a rectangular room (which, by the way, was only 10 x 5 – a bathroom? a closet?). Dumbass.

We won't even bother to explain why that set of "instructions" is so stupid, but we will suggest that this may well have been one of the worst examples of innumeracy or scientific illiteracy we've seen in a while. That alone is more than enough for us to give today's Dumbass of the Day award to Matt McGew. McGrew. McGee. Whatever.

¹ Leaf Group used to be named Demand Media Studios, or DMS (you can't spell "dumbass" without "DMS"!)
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_7855509_calculate-feet-per-square-foot.html

copyright © 2017-2021 scmrak

MM  - GEOMETRY