Speed for the Scientific Dummy

Newton's 3rd Law

A week or so spent delving into sites other than eHow.com (and its associated niches) wouldn't be complete without a visit to the celebrated content farm known as HubPages.com. A visit to HubPages would definitely be incomplete without a look at the output of the queen of DotDs, Joan Whetzel. So let's see what the lady has to say in her post, "Measuring Speed." For whatever reason, the site (or Joan herself) has the content filed under "education." We think not...

In its entirety, Whetzel's opus is more than 1300 words long; pretty much par for the course for HubPages (and the Squidoo "lenses" converted to "hubs" in 2014). It would certainly be shorter had Joan not repeated some passages verbatim and paraphrased others at least once. Such is the urge to... "create."

There's no sense in going into detail on all of the bogosity and dumbassery present in the post, so we'll just concentrate on two sections. The first is Whetzel's discussion of Newton's Third Law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction:

"The Third Law of Motion says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Let's say a ball, hurled at miles an hour [sic], hits a vase. The vase will continue on the balls [sic] path of motion at about 10 mph, while the ball rebounds in the reverse direction at about 10 mph."

This particular bit of stupidification appears to be an attempt to reword a problem from a high school physics class. Unfortunately, the scientifically illiterate Whetzel left out some key facts, especially the speed of the ball. Even if she had managed to type some number in that space, she'd still need to include references to the masses (or what she calls "weight") of the two objects and the factoid that the collision is elastic and occurs in a frictionless space. In other words, the bulk of the variables needed to determine the results of the collision.

Oh, yeah, we were also curious about why Whetzel chose a "vase" as the second object...

Moving to the end of Whetzel's post, we find her section on "Speed Measurement Math." That's where we learn that,

"60 mph x 0.86897699264 = 5.2138614 knots"
"60 mph x 4.61 kph = 276.6 kph. You would be travelling at 276.6 kph."

It sure looks as though Joan had some problems with her calculator. According to ours, 60 mph x 0.86897699264 = 52.14 knots, not 5.214. And while we're at it, the conversion factor between mph and kph is NOT 4.61, it's 1.609. We have no idea where she came up with that number!

Only a Dumbass of the Day could publish that sort of "math." Dumbassery of that type is the reason that Whetzel is collecting yet another award – her thirty-first

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