The Ring of Fire for Dummies (Tectonics Week 3)

Ring of fire

Day three of Tectonics Week, and the Antisocial Network's staff geologist is happy as a pig in poop with all the material. He's already begging to turn this into Tectonics Month (or maybe year...), but a week's all he's going to get. There's just too much other material out there.

Speaking of material, today's Dumbass of the Day hails from a new site (at least one that's new to these pages) suite.io; the one-time Suite101, supposedly with the dreck trimmed out (we'll see about that). She's Linda Sue Meagher, aka Lindasue M, writing on the topic "Increased Earthquake Activity in the Pacific Rim."¹ Linda Sue got her geography kinda mixed up in that first paragraph, where she says,

Subduction For Dummies (Tectonics Week 2)

Slab rollback in subduction setting

It's hard for us to determine whether the Antisocial Network's staff geologist is having fun this week or is gradually becoming more depressed every day. All he did for Tectonics Week was run a web search on the word "tectonic" to learn how the term's been used by dummies writing for money, and he was simply flabbergasted to see the level of scientific illiteracy out there. Today's example comes, once again, from good old eHow.com, where Andrea Stein leveraged her B.A. in English to "answer" for readers the question "What Is Slab Rollback?"  (eHow files it under "gardening"? really?)

Seafloor Spreading, the Dummies Version (Tectonics Week 1)

Aerial view of the mid-Atlantix rift passing through Iceland

Our staff geologist wanted a theme week, so we assigned him to find as many possible dumbass statements by a google search on a single word. He tried coprolite and geopetal, but quickly realized that it would take a word in semi-common use: that word turned out to be "tectonics." The first candidate he spotted for this week is eHow.com's Scott Thompson, holding forth on "What Is the Primary Force That Causes the Seafloor to Spread?"¹ at Sciencing.com. Unfortunately, Scott, par for the eHow.com course, pretty much screwed the pooch with his answer.

We know: we read that answer and referred it to the staff geologist, who told us so (note that Thompson's bio says nothing about a geology degree).

Oil and Gas Exploration for Dummies

Pumpjack on oil well

The self-proclaimed category experts at eHow.com are a source of endless amusement (and disgust) for our staff here at the Antisocial Network. One of their specializations seems to be the reduction of a complex process to a simple lists of steps, usually by omitting 99.99% of the detail. Take, for instance, the eHow Personal Finance Editor, the anonymous dummy who was paid something like fifteen bucks to write "How to Drill for Oil (6 Steps)"¹...

We say "dumbass" because... well, because he (or she) is a dumbass. The six steps, according to this moron, are:

Geometry for the Dummy Eighth Grader

Oil drum (cylinder)

The late Emily Litella (aka Gilda Radner) was often forced to say, "Never mind!" when she had a particularly dumbass moment. You know, such as thinking people were talking about necklaces and bracelets when she heard them say "Save Soviet Jewry." Online freelancers rarely if ever do so, leaving the evidence of their obtuseness for all to see; and worse, for the uninitiated to take at face value. For an example, take eHow.com's (yes, them again!) Matthew Anderson writing on "How to Convert Oil Drums to Volume."¹

Matt's problem? He didn't read the question! Matt goes completely off the rails in his very first sentence:

Power Tools for Dummies, Part II

Saber saw, aka jigsaw

It's been said that, "Those of you who think you know everything are annoying to those of us who do." Think how annoying it must be to those who know everything to read some of the utter rubbish published by internet freelancers lusting after pennies. Take, for example, InfoBarrel.com's 44tracyann44, who pretended to know a power tool from her rear in "Portable Saber Saw Facts and Safety Tips." Those of us at the Antisocial Network who do know power tools from our hind ends were not amused...

Tracy Ann reveals her level of power-tool dumbassery right from the get-go, telling her readers in paragraph one:  

Power Tools for the Dummy SAHM

Hammer drill

Online reviews are a pet peeve of ours, especially reviews written for money, probably because so many of them are either fake or based entirely on one minute's exposure to the product. The popular wisdom is that reviews of "anything with a cord" are more likely to earn, so total dumbasses desperately seeking pennies have been prone to writing reviews of electronics, vacuum cleaners and power tools about which they know next to nothing - or nothing at all. A dead giveaway is a review that opens with the writer claiming he or she is a total beginner in the field — like the Powerbase Xtreme Hammer Drill review¹ written by Laura Gabrielle at Recommender.com. 

Now Laura's written over 600 reviews for the site, the majority of them reviews of various cosmetics. That probably explains why her opening paragraph reads,