Orthogonal
December 12, 2012 3:13 PM Subscribe
What does the word orthogonal mean in this context?
I recently went to look at the Wikipedia entry about Glogster. While reading the history section, I read that it was created as a response to the boring and orthogonal internet.
I was curious about the word orthogonal and did some research. The term seems to mean direct, left/right, yes/no, either/or thinking; however, I ran across people proudly describing themselves as orthogonal thinkers, almost as a synonym for creative.
What does orthogonal mean in this context? How could creative be derived from the definition of the word orthogonal?
I recently went to look at the Wikipedia entry about Glogster. While reading the history section, I read that it was created as a response to the boring and orthogonal internet.
I was curious about the word orthogonal and did some research. The term seems to mean direct, left/right, yes/no, either/or thinking; however, I ran across people proudly describing themselves as orthogonal thinkers, almost as a synonym for creative.
What does orthogonal mean in this context? How could creative be derived from the definition of the word orthogonal?
It's being misused. Generally two things are orthogonal if they are mutually independent (for example: The winner of the presidential election, and the winner of the world series)
I have no idea what they mean to say by it there.
posted by empath at 3:21 PM on December 12, 2012 [6 favorites]
I have no idea what they mean to say by it there.
posted by empath at 3:21 PM on December 12, 2012 [6 favorites]
When people praise themselves as "orthogonal thinkers," they mean to say that their thought is orthogonal to that of others (Definition 1, meaning "perpendicular").
Glogster's usage sounds kind of silly, though. Maybe they mean to contrast the orthogonal internet to their diagonal version?
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:22 PM on December 12, 2012
Glogster's usage sounds kind of silly, though. Maybe they mean to contrast the orthogonal internet to their diagonal version?
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:22 PM on December 12, 2012
Yeah, I'd take it as an overly-creative way of saying "outside the box" (almost a case in point). So if everyone else thinks in 2-d, x and y axes, like on a plane, the axis orthogonal to those two, z, comes straight out of the plane.
Pretty dumb.
posted by supercres at 3:31 PM on December 12, 2012
Pretty dumb.
posted by supercres at 3:31 PM on December 12, 2012
Glogster is using a hot business cliche, like "paradigm" or "kaizen", that they don't really understand.
The correct meanings are above.
posted by IAmBroom at 3:32 PM on December 12, 2012 [3 favorites]
The correct meanings are above.
posted by IAmBroom at 3:32 PM on December 12, 2012 [3 favorites]
It sounds like a mis-use by a non-native English speaker who probably meant 'orthodox'. But I was curious if the phrase had any meaning, so I Googled it. Scroll past the Wikipedia copies and a few coincidences like "...orthoganal. Internet ... " and you get what appears to be a whole pile of Markov-chain auto-generated spam pages. Here are some nice summaries:
"The fermentation offers a 19th orthogonal internet between the pinkish faculty provided and the produced water controlled, what is my visa card ..."
"After a multiplex leash to the pakistan plot-lines's orthogonal internet amount angle, khan is presided from the fan. united 93 full movie ..."
"the volume purses for sale of solid brand products, operating in the power orthogonal internet retailers, dealers, shops and major department ..."
"Superscript sound frankly bottle through orthogonal internet dating high times somatology. Apiece marginal quatrain tomorrow wrathful steeple..."
" Clearly quiescent theodote that that adats wavelength analog orthogonal internet the a denquent aout the quadrature onne alet a ..."
Positively poetic.
posted by PercussivePaul at 3:49 PM on December 12, 2012 [3 favorites]
"The fermentation offers a 19th orthogonal internet between the pinkish faculty provided and the produced water controlled, what is my visa card ..."
"After a multiplex leash to the pakistan plot-lines's orthogonal internet amount angle, khan is presided from the fan. united 93 full movie ..."
"the volume purses for sale of solid brand products, operating in the power orthogonal internet retailers, dealers, shops and major department ..."
"Superscript sound frankly bottle through orthogonal internet dating high times somatology. Apiece marginal quatrain tomorrow wrathful steeple..."
" Clearly quiescent theodote that that adats wavelength analog orthogonal internet the a denquent aout the quadrature onne alet a ..."
Positively poetic.
posted by PercussivePaul at 3:49 PM on December 12, 2012 [3 favorites]
I had a (thankfully) former business partner who used "orthogonal" as a synonym for "not to the point" or "irrelevant." It's a pretentious and academic way of expressing those ideas.
posted by Mr. Justice at 4:24 PM on December 12, 2012
posted by Mr. Justice at 4:24 PM on December 12, 2012
Mod note: Folks, if you can't answer the question without needling other members, it's okay to just keep moving.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 4:34 PM on December 12, 2012
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 4:34 PM on December 12, 2012
The creators of Glogster are from the Czech Republic. It is my sense that this usage of "orthogonal" is probably an English-as-a-second-language problem. For starters, the sentence At that time boring and “orthogonal” internet was another inspiration. is not grammatically correct, let alone anything that comes from a third-party objective source. Anyway, I tagged the article for improvement; it's needed. Your confusion here is not your fault.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the word per se. The colloquial meaning is, I strongly suspect, derived from its usage in statistics (specifically, I believe, from factor analysis, where it is something of an antithesis to correlated) more than in algebra and geometry. As such it has crept into business jargon and thence to more general usage. I don't think most people who are using it this way are really cognizant of its specific meaning, though, and it's one of those "best avoided" terms stylebooks advise you about.
posted by dhartung at 4:42 PM on December 12, 2012
I don't think there's anything wrong with the word per se. The colloquial meaning is, I strongly suspect, derived from its usage in statistics (specifically, I believe, from factor analysis, where it is something of an antithesis to correlated) more than in algebra and geometry. As such it has crept into business jargon and thence to more general usage. I don't think most people who are using it this way are really cognizant of its specific meaning, though, and it's one of those "best avoided" terms stylebooks advise you about.
posted by dhartung at 4:42 PM on December 12, 2012
dhartung, I think you've gone a little esoteric about the origin. I have understood it to be derived from high school level classical physics - Orthogonal force vectors do not affect each other's magnitude. I would guess the use in statistics come from there, as the physics has been around a while longer.
posted by mzurer at 4:59 PM on December 12, 2012
posted by mzurer at 4:59 PM on December 12, 2012
All instances of 'orthogonal' in the factor analysis article linked above appear to be senses coming from 'orthogonal' in the sense of 'inner product is zero', which is generalising 'perpendicular' or 'at a right angle'. ('Orthogonal variables' in the sense of 'not correlated' have inner product zero in some inner product or other.)
posted by hoyland at 5:17 PM on December 12, 2012
posted by hoyland at 5:17 PM on December 12, 2012
I'm saying how I think it crept into business jargon. Statistics is used in business far more than physics.
posted by dhartung at 5:22 PM on December 12, 2012
posted by dhartung at 5:22 PM on December 12, 2012
Techies use orthogonal casually to mean "separate from" and maybe "a distraction from." These meanings are described in the Jargon File of MIT and Stanford tech slang circa 1985.
posted by zippy at 5:32 PM on December 12, 2012 [1 favorite]
posted by zippy at 5:32 PM on December 12, 2012 [1 favorite]
This is a promotional blurb for Glogster copypasted verbatim onto a variety of sites, not just Wikipedia. I assume it will get deleted from Wikipedia shortly.
Like other commenters, I'm familiar with the usage of the phrase "orthogonal to" to mean "unrelated to" or "irrelevant", but the usage here makes no sense to me. The scare quotes around "orthogonal" in the relevant bit of the article might imply that it's a translation of a Czech slang term. I can see a word meaning 'right-angled' being used as a synonym of boring or dull, maybe analogously to the English slang word "square" from a few decades ago. But I don't think there's anything about the English usage of the word "orthogonal" to get here.
posted by nangar at 8:38 PM on December 12, 2012
Like other commenters, I'm familiar with the usage of the phrase "orthogonal to" to mean "unrelated to" or "irrelevant", but the usage here makes no sense to me. The scare quotes around "orthogonal" in the relevant bit of the article might imply that it's a translation of a Czech slang term. I can see a word meaning 'right-angled' being used as a synonym of boring or dull, maybe analogously to the English slang word "square" from a few decades ago. But I don't think there's anything about the English usage of the word "orthogonal" to get here.
posted by nangar at 8:38 PM on December 12, 2012
Orthogonal is not a stand-alone term but has meaning only with respect to something else. E.g., you are an orthogonal thinker, you think differently from the mainstream.
You might say an object can have one purpose, and also an orthogonal purpose. That is, this jacket serves to keep me warm and it has an orthogonal purpose to make me look pretty.
Orthogonal sort of means the same thing as independent, but the tone is a bit stronger than independent. It has a shade of "completely separate," complementary, or even contrary. Something orthogonal can be just as important but completely different. When two things are orthogonal to one another, there is not necessarily one that is primary and one that is secondary. That might be true, but not necessarily. They're just different, with the are two different pieces contributing to a larger and complete whole.
--
The term comes from math where you can transform a matrix into a "basis set" of orthogonal vectors. These vectors that are independent in that they equal zero if you multiply(-ish) them together, and they are also sufficient to reconstruct the original matrix by combining them in various ways.
posted by kellybird at 6:55 AM on December 13, 2012
You might say an object can have one purpose, and also an orthogonal purpose. That is, this jacket serves to keep me warm and it has an orthogonal purpose to make me look pretty.
Orthogonal sort of means the same thing as independent, but the tone is a bit stronger than independent. It has a shade of "completely separate," complementary, or even contrary. Something orthogonal can be just as important but completely different. When two things are orthogonal to one another, there is not necessarily one that is primary and one that is secondary. That might be true, but not necessarily. They're just different, with the are two different pieces contributing to a larger and complete whole.
--
The term comes from math where you can transform a matrix into a "basis set" of orthogonal vectors. These vectors that are independent in that they equal zero if you multiply(-ish) them together, and they are also sufficient to reconstruct the original matrix by combining them in various ways.
posted by kellybird at 6:55 AM on December 13, 2012
As mentioned above, orthogonal is a technical term from mathematics, particularly linear algebra, for something (usually a vector or vector space) being at right angles to another thing (usually another vector or space). Orthogonality is often a desirable quality for, e.g., coordinate systems.
Both the perpendicularity aspect and the connection with coordinate systems and their significance seem to creep into everyday usage: the perpendicularity aspect suggests a sense of "varying in a way which has no impact on the other factors", so one might say (as a friend of mine has), for instance "the awesomeness of a movie is orthogonal to its actual quality" as a way of saying that given that a movie has qualities regarded as "awesome" (e.g. Snakes on a Plane) they don't actually have either positive or negative impact on the movie's quality.
The coordinatization view is, I think, where the idea of orthogonality as creative came about. If you view "idea-space" as being some sort of vector space (for instance, the 2-dimensional xy-plane), then something orthogonal to it (e.g. the z-vector) is shooting off in a direction of heretofore unexplored territory, and is thus creative.
As a point of mathematical pedantry, orthogonality is not actually necessary in order to lie outside of a plane (and thus achieve the same connotations of "outside-of-the-box" creativity), but I think most non-mathematicians would be loathe to use a phrase as cumbersome, or as made up of commonplace words as "linearly independent" to describe their thought processes.
posted by jackbishop at 9:44 AM on December 13, 2012 [1 favorite]
Both the perpendicularity aspect and the connection with coordinate systems and their significance seem to creep into everyday usage: the perpendicularity aspect suggests a sense of "varying in a way which has no impact on the other factors", so one might say (as a friend of mine has), for instance "the awesomeness of a movie is orthogonal to its actual quality" as a way of saying that given that a movie has qualities regarded as "awesome" (e.g. Snakes on a Plane) they don't actually have either positive or negative impact on the movie's quality.
The coordinatization view is, I think, where the idea of orthogonality as creative came about. If you view "idea-space" as being some sort of vector space (for instance, the 2-dimensional xy-plane), then something orthogonal to it (e.g. the z-vector) is shooting off in a direction of heretofore unexplored territory, and is thus creative.
As a point of mathematical pedantry, orthogonality is not actually necessary in order to lie outside of a plane (and thus achieve the same connotations of "outside-of-the-box" creativity), but I think most non-mathematicians would be loathe to use a phrase as cumbersome, or as made up of commonplace words as "linearly independent" to describe their thought processes.
posted by jackbishop at 9:44 AM on December 13, 2012 [1 favorite]
(things can also be independent but non-orthogonal)
posted by solipsophistocracy at 5:39 PM on December 13, 2012
posted by solipsophistocracy at 5:39 PM on December 13, 2012
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posted by facetious at 3:19 PM on December 12, 2012 [1 favorite]