Buoyancy for Dummies

Buoyancy principles

Freelancers: you gotta love 'em... well, no, you don't. We don't, except perhaps in view of just how amusing some of their bull-bleep turns out to be once you get past the flowery bits generated by all the J-school and Creative Writing grads. Once in a while, however, we run across some who claims to have a BS in science instead of a BA in liberal arts, and we regard their failure to deliver on technical questions with something approaching horror. That's what happened when one of our staffers ran across John Brennan fumbling the question, "Does a Balloon with Helium Rise Higher than One With Oxygen?" which he posted to SeattlePI.com's education section.

Density for Dummies

Immiscible liquids

There's an old joke about a helicopter pilot lost in the fog who deduces that he is outside Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, offices because he receives "help" that is technically accurate but totally useless. We've seen this happen many times before, cases of dumbassery in which an eHow contributor regurgitated factoids aplenty, yet still failed to address the real question. Today's dumbass is another Demand Media/eHow freelancer writing under the pseudonym Serm Murmson. Serm addressed the topic "How to Explain Density"¹ for the Seattle PI education (I use that word loosely) blog.