Survey Acreage for a Dummy Fifth-Grader

irregular polygon

We strenuously avow that no one here at the Antisocial Network has made a living out of assuming that the average person is dirt-stupid. We regret that we cannot make a similar statement about the fine folks who populated the archives of eHow.com or the niches into which Leaf Group has dumped old eHow.com content. For a classic example of assuming abject stupidity, let's take a look at the Sciencing.com post "How to Calculate Acreage From a Survey," as barfed up by C. Taylor (the C. seems to stand for Chad).

It's our considered opinion that this question originated from someone who had a land survey in hand and wanted to verify the quoted acreage. That pretty much blows Taylor's first "step" out of the water:

"Have a land survey conducted by a professional surveyor."

Ummm, dumbass, a professionally-done survey will state the acreage of the parcel, so there's no need to go through the ensuing steps. Those steps are, by the way,

"Multiply the length and width measurements to calculate the land area in square feet."

and

"Divide the square footage by 43,560 to convert in into acres."

We'll grant that most people don't know the conversion factor between square feet and acres (we already did), but that's pretty much the only thing Chad had to say that was worth repeating. His assumption that the parcel in question is a perfect rectangle borders on insulting. Few lots are actually perfect rectangles, especially in modern subdivisions with curving streets and cul-de-sacs.
Heck, Taylor didn't even have the balls to suggest breaking irregular lots into smaller, regular polygons; much less using an algorithmic approach such as that suggested by our sister blog, The Fixit Zone. In fact, we were so insulted by Taylor's assumption that we were as stupid as he seems to be that we named him the Dumbass of the Day.

We mean, really: hire a surveyor?

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