Sound Waves for Dummies

We often find that the "contributors," as eHow.com called their freelancers, were flummoxed by the constraints of the site's formatting rules. One such rule that caught a lot of them was the minimum word count (MWC). In olden days (we think that Leaf Group has changed the word-count restrictions), each submission was required to be somewhere in the 300 to 500 word range, regardless of how many words actually needed to address a topic. That's what caught today's nominee, Chris Burke, in his post "Importance of Sound Waves" at Sciencing.com.

Burke, who's been here twice before, found himself on the horns of a dilemma. Despite the astounding breadth of the topic, the answer is pretty damned simple: sound waves let us communicate. Of course, that answer is too short for the MWC, and even expanding on it would be a combination of boring and repetitive. As a result, Chris had to... reach out. It's there that the young "international affairs" student ran into difficulty... with the science.

Here's what Chris thinks is the importance of sound waves: "...Your vocal chords [sic] generate sound waves that are then transmitted through the air to the ears of listeners... radios and televisions, use this same basic concept to transmit sound to your ears." Sorry, Chris, radio and television use the electromagnetic spectrum, not sound waves. Next boner? "Geologists use sound waves to search for resources such as oil under the earth. They bounce sound waves into the ground and measure the way in which they travel through the earth. "

Well, kinda, but we think "measure the way" is a pretty open-ended description of seismic technology. And while we're at it, those are geophysicists, not geologists. And then there's,

"Many creatures use sound waves to hunt for food."

Yes, Chris, it's called "hearing." Oh: you meant echolocation? Well, that definitely reduces the count from "many" to "several"; maybe even to "a few." It includes bats, cetaceans (orcas, whales, dolphins), a couple of birds, and some rodents. Not what we'd term "many," ourselves.
We think Chris blew it when he didn't mention the use of echolocation by the visually-impaired (see Auggie in the television show "Covert Affairs"), but that's nowhere near his most serious fault. As it is, he'd qualified for Dumbass of the Day even before he forgot that!

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