Geographic Grids for Dummies

Longitude lines

We snicker a lot at the journalism and "communications" grads who believe that they are capable of writing about any topic, no matter how esoteric, because of the superior research skills bestowed by their educations. Ha! We're especially amused by the ones who tackled technical and scientific topics at the erstwhile eHow.com, managing to show their ignorance in just a sentence or two. Take, for example, today's DotD nominee, Tamara Runzel, who took on "What Is the Geographic Grid?"¹ for Sciencing.com.

Runzel, veteran homeschooler with a communications degree, reworded a couple of sites for her "answer." We didn't look at them, but assume that they were reasonably accurate, although just why Tamara thought an introduction to topographic maps would explain lat-long remains a mystery. Nonetheless, she managed to screw things up... with dreck like this:

"The geographic grid uses latitude and longitude lines. Latitude lines are invisible lines that run east to west around Earth. Longitude lines run north to south around the length of Earth."

A sphere has "length"? Even if she were attempting to be completely accurate, Earth's polar circumference is actually a few miles less than the planet's equatorial circumference. Moving right along, Runzel (mis)informs her readers thus:

"Both latitude and longitude lines divide the Earth into 180 equal sections from north to south (latitude) and from east to west (longitude). The lines are measures [sic] in degrees."

Sorry, Tamara, but while you're (sort of) right about the count of latitude "lines," there are 360 degrees of longitude. That's not to mention that the earth isn't divided at all; latitude and longitude are imaginary reference lines. Moron. More Runzelism:

"The equator... marks the center of the Earth from north to south. The prime meridian... marks the center of the Earth from east to west."

The notion that latitude and longitude "mark the center of the Earth" makes the heads of both our geographer and geophysicist throb. And finally, there's this:

"Pilots or ship captains use latitude and longitude lines to find the shortest distance between two points."

Although there's the barest kernel of truth in that sentence, it remains completely useless. We won't even dignify it with an explanation, except to say that it certainly helped win Runzel the singular honor of a Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ The original has been sent to the cleanup team by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   sciencing.com/geographic-grid-6732808.html

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