Rock Salt for Dummies

halite (rock salt) crystals

Today's a sort of "back-to-basics" day, one in which our Antisocial Network staffers bully greedy freelancers for faking knowledge and misinforming the public, all just to grab a few dollars at a content farm. Today, we'll make fun of yet another J-school graduate attempting to explain simple science, and doing a lousy job of it. She's kiwi Alice Hudson, who displayed a less-than-charmingly vague relationship to science in "The Properties of Rock Salt" for Leaf.tv. We assume it was originally posted on eHow, but who knows? Whatever the case, it now lives at Sciencing.com, where it fits right in...

Hudson gets most of the basics right – after all, how hard is it to just reword some website where the authors know what they're talking about? Isn't that what they teach people to do in journalism school these days? However, we did notice that Alice had a few little problems with her copy-reword-paste job. Here are some of her misstatements:

"Rock salt is that which is sedimentary — that is, it is found in hard layers underground." "Halite’s chemical symbol is NaCI [font ours]..." "...when you shine a light on it, its luster is vitreous, meaning it appears shiny and glassy..." "Rock salt forms in crystals with a simple cubic symmetry. When it is broken, it will break evenly into cubes and when it shatters, the pieces will be of different sizes and shapes" "It is rated 2.1 to 2.3 for 'specific gravity' meaning it is light in weight." "Rock salt has hygroscopic properties, meaning it is able to induce or sustain dryness."

...and our "translations," so to speak:

1. "Sedimentary doesn't mean "found in hard layers underground," it means that the rock was deposited from water or air (as opposed to crystallizing from a melt)
2. Halite is NaCl. That's a chemical formula, not a "symbol," not to mention that the symbol for chlorine is "Cl," not "CI" as Hudson and her content editor apparently think.
3. A mineral's luster is vitreous whether you "shine a light on it" or not: luster is an inherent physical property.
4. Halite forms isometric crystals, not cubic. And when it "shatters" the pieces will all be some form of rectangular solid, including cubes. That's what's known as "cleavage."
5. Specific gravity is not a "rating," and is not a measure of "weight" as Alice seems to think: it is a measure of density, which is weight per unit volume.
6. Hygroscopic means more than "able to induce or sustain dryness" – it means that the substance absorbs water vapor from the air.

Apparently Leaf Group people moved this rubbish to their pseudoscientific niche site Sciencing.com; we suppose because someone determined it didn't belong under – get this – "cooking skills" at Leaf TV, Whether it's used for cooking or not, we'd certainly hope that any factoids people learn about rock salt be correct. That's as opposed to badly mangled by some J-school graduate like Hudson, who just reworded something she didn't understand to get her $15US. Oh, and she also collected one of our Dumbass of the Day awards for her efforts, or lack thereof.

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