"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
The Right To Be a Jerk
"Being a jerk is not a crime. That's a lucky break for many of us, but it wasn't enough to keep Nate Cox out of hot water. On a fine spring day in April, Cox was driving down the street in Richmond, Virginia when he spied a member of the VCU campus Police Department nearby. Cox grabbed a bullhorn and shouted, "Stop harassing people, we pay your paychecks!" (Why did he have a bullhorn? That's an interesting question, but orthogonal to the issues here.)"
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Quick, anyone, without looking it up, what's the word "orthogonal" mean?
At right angles to? Or something like that?
In terms of concepts, it means irrelevant or beside the point.
G'day Evan,
If you truly did that without looking it up, go to the head of the class. Two out of four, is certainly better than I did, which was none out of four; I had to look it up.
Quick definitions from WordNet (orthogonal)
▸ adjective: [1]having a set of mutually perpendicular axes; [2] meeting at right angles ("Wind and sea may displace the ship's center of gravity along three orthogonal axes")
▸ adjective: [3]statistically unrelated
▸ adjective: [4] not pertinent to the matter under consideration
A friend of mine recently introduced me to the concept, and so naturally I see the word everywhere now. Strange how that happens... you can go years without ever seeing a word, (or if you do your brain just conveniently forgets it,) and then when you learn it you notice it all over the place.