Meter, Liter, Dummy

Liter vs. cubic meter

In case you haven't noticed it, the average American still can't figure out how the metric system works. A lot of our staffers wonder whether that's because so many of them avoided science and math classes like the plague during their educational careers. Be that as it may, SI units and conversion among them still confuses the heck out of some people. Who they gonna ask? the 'net of course; which is where they might run across eHowian Amy Dombrower trying to explain "How to Convert Meter to Liter" at Sciencing.com.

Because the model of Demand Media (now Leaf Group) essentially prohibited Dombrower from saying, "You can't do that, moron!" Amy plunged right in. Along the way, she collected her fourth DotD award. She collected it for doofus statements like,

"...the liter is the basic unit of volume... Volume also can be expressed in units of cubic meters (m3) [sic], which describes the volume of a cube that has equal edges of one meter in length"

Perhaps she confused m³ with the name of the company that makes Scotch Tape® (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing)? And maybe she needed extra words to fill out the minimum word count, hence the business about some "cube that has equal edges"? That one had us wondering: is there another kind of cube we don't know about? Dombrower proceeded to "explain" how to convert volume in m³ to liters, but let's face it: either Amy was handcuffed by the MWC, or she was crippled by that BA in journalism. Why else would she say crap like,

• "If you are determining the volume of a cube, measure the length in meters. Measure the width and height as well." – Amy apparently forgot the definition of a cube...
• "Multiply these three metric figures together. The unit will be in cubic meters." – Did Dombrower not take English grammar classes to get that BA?

If that's the route Dombrower chose to take, she neglected to mention any other formulas for calculating volume. That's a loss of credibility right there.

Ultimately, the AN staffers decided that Amy's award-worthiness is a combination of qualifications: first, Dombrower should have stated up front that a meter-to-liter conversion makes no sense. Second, Dombrower blew it with that whole "m3" thing. And third, no one who thinks you have to measure all three sides of a cube to calculate its volume should be writing about science and math.

Given those three qualifications, we couldn't help but give Ms. Dombrower another Dumbass of the Day award.

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