I Work With Nerds

In a real conversation that took place at my office, my boss used the word "orthogonal" to describe two threads of a discussion that were being inappropriately linked. Someone asked what that meant and was told that it meant "perpendicular". Another co-worker added that it really only meant perpendicular in a 2-D space, and that in a 3-D space it described vectors whose dot-product equals zero.

Of course, we were using the more statistical meaning (a derived meaning from the literal definitions above) that describes two sets whose data have no correlation. But, either way, can I get a "Yay math"?

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