Acreage for Dummies

complex polygon outline

Today's nomination is a little different from most. While we usually pick apart a post for such sins as inaccuracy, misinformation, and downright dumbassery; today we're just going to point out the fallacy of the entire eHow pantheon of niche sites (for those of you who've missed it, the vast majority of content at the once and former eHow.com has been moved into "niche" websites). The cause of that fallacy was, and remains, the site owner's insistence on a  minimum word count (MWC). Today, Brenda Scottsdale falls victim to the MWC with her Sciencing.com post, "How Is an Acre Measured?"

Like many an eHow "title," this one suffers from the clumsiness of its wording. If we assume that the question was, most likely, asked by a middle-schooler; then the answer is quite simple: the dictionary definition of an acre says that an acre is a unit of area equal in size to 43,560 square feet (one 640th of a square mile). A little deeper digging might reveal that the standard definition is "one furlong by one chain," or 660 feet long and 66 feet wide.
Scottsdale never mentions the origin of the term or its standard definition. Instead, she prattles about the various methods for calculating the area of regular polygons and dividing the calculated square footage by 43,560 or the square yardage by 4,840. Yeah, well...

Scottsdale has a few problems with facts and accuracy. Let's take a look:

• "A standard deed will have information regarding the distance, usually in feet, of the length and width of the parcel." – True, but man! that's sloppy writing!
• "An acre is actually an expression of the total area of a land mass." – No, not of a "land mass."
• "Area of Parallelogram: If the lot has two parallel sides take the measurement of one of the sides, known as the base and measure the distance from this base to one of the non-parallel sides." – Brenda, a polygon that has two parallel sides and two non-parallel sides is not a parallelogram: it's a trapezoid, and the formula for its area is different. Plus, that's not the height of a parallelogram!
• "If the lot is irregularly shaped, break down the lot into triangles, rectangles, squares and parallelograms and measure the area separately of each..." – Another clueless freelancer who thinks you can do that with any irregular lot. Well, try that on the polygon above, Brenda!
• "In this example, 5,400,000/43,560 = 124 " –  Actually, 5,400,000 / 43,560 = 123.967. Round much, Brenda?
• "600,000/4,840... is 124...." – Nope: 123.967 again! In reality, 124 acres is 5,401, 440 ft² or 600,160 yd². So much for the math skills of the CEs!

Scottsdale chose to interpret the OQ's query in the manner that allow her to reach MWC, but then she blew it. Now do you see why Brenda's picking up her second Dumbass of the Day award?

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