Powers for Innumerate Dummies

Ummm, Bob? 

We don't usually tweak the freelance nose of one of our DotDs two days in a row, but it happens occasionally. As a matter of course, once we've discovered people who habitually write about unfamiliar topics, we check on the rest of their work. We saw that yesterday's nominee, Bob White, had managed to write a Sciencing.com post so doofus that we couldn't bear to wait another day to point it out. Without further ado, then, here's "How to Calculate the Volume of Water in a Square Tank."

We aren't sure why White decided that the OQ wanted to know the number of gallons in a tank, but that's where he went. After all, according to Bob,

"Calculating the volume of water in a square tank is a useful life skill..."

We'd be inclined to say that math is a useful life skill, but, then, none of us has a "BA in Computer Science" to back up our claims. Unfortunately, that education (combined with a "diploma in home inspection") didn't seem to have included the definition of "square" – otherwise, White would have known that his instruction to "Measure the width of the tank with a measuring tape. If your tank is a rectangle, also measure the height and depth..." ...might have been a little off-target. After all, a rectangle isn't the same thing as a square, is it?¹ Of course, if that had been Bob's only bit of dumbassery, we wouldn't have bothered with his post – there is so much more out there to make fun of.

No, Bob informed his readers that,

"To make this calculation, you first need to figure out the square footage of the tank, and then multiply that by the constant number of gallons per square feet..."

...and finished by telling his readers that,

"...7.48 is a the [sic] number of gallons in a square foot of space."

No, Bob, 7.48 is the conversion factor between cubic feet and gallons. There are exactly zero gallons of water in a square foot of space!

Not only is White a blithering idiot for not knowing the difference between area and volume, so was the moron content editor who passed this on for Demand Studio. It's been up on eHow and Sciencing since 2012... so we aren't quite sure who is really the Dumbass of the Day here...

¹ We here remind you that a square is a special case of rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square...

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