> Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer. No, I meant specifically the opposing point on a globe, and chose the correct

> Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer. No, I meant specifically the opposing point on a globe, and chose the correct word to denote that concept. Metaphor is not error. To the rest, knowledge of the concept of orthogonality would have saved you several paragraphs. So would exhaustively defining your terms. You've cast hard/soft as orthogonal to rigorous/fantastic and I can imagine no intuitively less coherent thesis; much work remains to make it make sense. It has not escaped my notice that you've implicitly projected from my metaphor's three dimensions in a sphere, into two on a flat plane. I think that has so far escaped your own notice. Let's see if pointing you directly at the error helps you find the root cause. Also, while HN's markup does not predate Markdown, it fails to emulate. Delimit with asterisks, not slashes, for emphasis.