Temporary Magnets for Dummies

Magnetic field

Our staffers have spent more than a decade on the internet -- some of them more than two decades. You'd think that by now nothing much surprises them, and you would be right, at least in a general sense. One thing they learned long ago is that the people who teach our children sometimes know barely more than their students. Unfortunately, we're not talking about the TA in your daughter's college chemistry lab; we're talking about your fifth-grader's science teacher... Let's hope your kid doesn't have someone like Daniella Lauren (aka Diane Lockridge), whose science chops, and lack thereof, are prominently displayed in "Types of Temporary Magnets" at Sciencing.com.

Lauren (Lockridge) opens with a monumentally stupid explanation of magnetism, which we'll reproduce here for your amusement:

"An object is considered to be magnetic, or magnetically charged when the electron particles [bolding ours] of an object all point in the same direction. "

Say WHAT?! The "electron particles"? The ridiculous concept that a particle can "point" in any direction notwithstanding, we think maybe that's Daniella's attempt to explain polarization, or perhaps the "spin" of electrons... errr, "electron particles." So let's see what Lauren has to say about temporary magnets: according to our teacher here,

"Temporary Magnets [sic] only exhibit signs of magnetism when exposed to strong magnet fields. When temporary magnets are exposed to permanent magnets their atomic composition adjusts so that the poles point in the same direction..." ...at which point we wondered, what "poles"? what "atomic composition"? An answer is not, however, forthcoming... The rest of Lauren's (Lockridge's) post is a mere copy-reword-paste job of some (better) reference, to which her unfamiliarity with the topic has introduced a few boners:

• "Common temporary magnets include nails and paperclips..." Those are "common... magnets"? No, they're common examples.
• "Electromagnets are used in common objects such as doorbells and complex objects such as motors." From a grammatical standpoint, we think maybe she meant "simple" instead of "common" here...
• "Magnets are created when all the atoms in the object are aligned with the north pole in one direction and the south pole in another direction..." But wait: aren't the north and south poles already opposite one another? That's sure a clumsy way to describe the orientation, probably because Danielle didn't understand it in the first place.
• "When the atoms are jarred, such as being dropped on the floor, the object will return to its normal non-magnetic state." We howled at the idea of dropping an atom or two on the floor...

All in all, a Lauren performed a remarkably uninformed job of describing magnetism and temporary magnets, not to mention confusing things further with lousy writing. This is just one more example of the sort of half-baked material that made eHow.com the laughingstock of the internet, and yet another reason the website (and its successors) is the mother lode of Dumbass of the Day recipients.

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SI - MAGNETISM