Wood Classification for Dummies

Softwood vs. hardwood

Although the Leaf Group family of niche sites (merely content redistributed from the mother lode of misinformation, eHow.com) gets much of our attention here at the Antisocial Network, there remain several other websites filled with freelance rubbish. One such is HubPages.com, where slaphappy writers posted some extremely sorry content back in the pre-Panda days. A lot of it's still there, and we are more than happy to debunk it whenever possible; which is why today's nominee is repeat visitor Hassam with a scary stupid post he called "Types of Wood."

Hassam's already picked up four DotD awards in the sciences (mainly for earth science), and here he dipped his toe into botany. We figured out he was writing rubbish from his very first sentence. Not only does it not make grammatical sense, it's just plain wrong. Here, take a look...

"Wood is a hard structured formed naturally on the bark of trees due to accumulation of dead cells."

We're sorry, we just don't know where to start with that one. Maybe if we rewrote it? Or just let you look at the wikipedia definition:

"...a porous and fibrous structural tissue found in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants."

We guess the point is that anything that starts with so monumentally stupid a statement as Hassam's pretty much deserves a DotD award. Still, we figured you'd like to see more evidence of how deserving this one is:

"Different types of wood are differentiated on the basis of their strength, color and grain. Basically there are two main categories of wood: Hard wood [and] Soft wood": FYI, Hassam, the difference between the two has nothing to do with "strength, color and grain"; it's whether the tree is deciduous (hardwood) or a conifer (softwood). "Hard wood is used to make things which require strength such as cabinets, cupboards, desks, boats etc.": Strange: there sure is a lot of pine furniture around, and don't they use a lot of spruce in ship-building? "[Hardwoods] usually have a very fine structure as their grains are quite tight.": Clearly, he's never looked at oak... "Soft wood is obtained from evergreen trees and is light and flexible wood.": Wow: "light and flexible," huh... "Hemlock... is used in making of boards, planks...": Duh -- you think maybe it's used to make cement?

Hassam obviously knows little or nothing about wood, having instead just harvested some factoids and run them through his misinterpretation algorithm before pasting them into a "hub." The main reason he's getting his fifth Dumbass of the Day, however, is his claim that hardwoods are, by "definition," harder than softwoods. That's complete bull.

copyright © 2017-2022 scmrak

SE - LUMBER