Cylinder Volume for Geometry Dummies

A circular fire pit

According to our one of our staffers, there's something called "chicken-sandwich luck," Updated for the 21st century; a person with chicken-sandwich luck could stick his hand into a port-a-potty  and pull out a neatly-wrapped chicken sandwich; presumably grilled free-range chicken breast slices on gluten-free ciabatta bread with aioli mayo and a slice of heritage tomato.... Ehow's Carson Barrett appears to have such luck, given that the monumental error he made in "How to Calculate Gravel Needed to Fill a Fire Pit" at HomeSteady.com did not make his answer wrong. Stupid? yes: wrong? no...

Judge's Paneling, the Dummy Description

Judge's Paneling

One of the ways TV set decorators suggest to viewers that a character is wealthy is to show rich wood paneling in the guy's study or library. That's not a design feature you find in the average suburban tract home, after all. If you wanted to install it yourself, you'd need to know what it's called; and the answer is, sometimes, "judge's paneling." If you asked about DIY judge's paneling, however, you might well run into someone else who didn't know the name; though that didn't stop eHowian Tracie Harris from pretending to explain "How to Install Judges Paneling."¹ Never you mind that missing apostrophe...

Designing a Home for Dummies

A Small house plan

At the Antisocial Network offices, we spend a portion of each day hoping to expose the sort of factual rubbish that arises when greed intersects stupidity in the form of internet freelancers. Although the model is dead as a doornail now, at one point just about anyone could pick up a few bucks pretending to be 1) a professional writer and 2) knowledgeable on some topic or other; and not necessarily number two. Once those criteria had been met, the mother lode of misinformation, eHow, would pay "contributors" flat fees to answer questions harvested from the internet. They didn't pay well, but the contributors generally didn't deserve what little they got. Take, for example, Kelly Sundstrom, seen here attempting to explain "How to Make a Floor Plan on the Computer" (moved to the niche site ItStillWorks.com, and then deleted¹).