[NT] Indulgence in highly trivial subjects.

[Magic Poriferan]

I have never encountered anyone with the surname South. I have seen North, West, and East on many occasions. Is South not a surname, or have I simply missed it? If it's not, why?

 

[Magic Poriferan]

Isn't it pointless to qualify a sentence with the word "obviously"? If it's truly obvious, you don't need to explain it.

I find myself doing this a lot, but I realize there's no reason to. Basically, the only thing it comes across as is an insult. The only reason you'd need to explain something obvious is if the person you're explaining it to is exceptionally imperceptive. Of course, that doesn't accomplish anything.

 

[Matthew_Z]

I have never encountered anyone with the surname South. I have seen North, West, and East on many occasions. Is South not a surname, or have I simply missed it? If it's not, why?

Perhaps it's based on your geographic location or your level of interaction with people

Last Name South - WhitePages

To be honest, I've yet to hear of a person with the last name East. The better question is why the surname west is the most common(more common than the others combined) of the 4 cardinal directions. Perhaps due to a linguistic root not related to these 4 orientations?

 

[entropie]

Robert South - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

How come you didnt know him more than obviously !

 

[Two Point Two]

Isn't it pointless to qualify a sentence with the word "obviously"? If it's truly obvious, you don't need to explain it.

I find myself doing this a lot, but I realize there's no reason to. Basically, the only thing it comes across as is an insult. The only reason you'd need to explain something obvious is if the person you're explaining it to is exceptionally imperceptive. Of course, that doesn't accomplish anything.

I think it's just a communicative technique. It's a way of indicating that you perceive something to be obvious, and that you think the other person should have been able to come up with the same thing.

It may not be nice, but there are instances in which someone might want to use it. If employed for humour, it needn't really be unkind.

Can also be used when describing a realisation you yourself came to, to indicate that you think you should have been able to do so earlier.

Oh, and a third use - when you're explaining a thought process you had to someone, and you have to include some qualification, but you don't want them to think that you think they wouldn't have thought of that themselves, so you say 'obviously' to indicate that you take it to be something they'd already be aware of.

...Quite a useful little word, actually.

 

[Magic Poriferan]

It fascinates me how the color sets you get from dividing the color wheel into even portions never look natural, and generally are not aesthetically pleasing.

It also fascinates me how when you evenly divide the wheel, some pairs of colors look far more similar to each other, even though they are all equally different.

I'm not sure if I will say more on this.

 

[Matthew_Z]

It fascinates me how the color sets you get from dividing the color wheel into even portions never look natural, and generally are not aesthetically pleasing.

It also fascinates me how when you evenly divide the wheel, some pairs of colors look far more similar to each other, even though they are all equally different.

I'm not sure if I will say more on this.

The cones in your eyes aren't evenly divided among the visible light spectrum. It's only natural for any division of a color "wheel" to be distorted.

That, and the cones more closely correspond to a Green one, a Blue one, and a Red one. An RYB system is destined to mispairing based on this fact alone.

 

[Magic Poriferan]

The cones in your eyes aren't evenly divided among the visible light spectrum. It's only natural for any division of a color "wheel" to be distorted.

That, and the cones more closely correspond to a Green one, a Blue one, and a Red one. An RYB system is destined to mispairing based on this fact alone.

I don't care about RYB and am not talking about RYB because RYB is not an even distribution. It is imbalanced toward the red.

But for example, if we quartered the visible spectrum. That is red to violet. Let's say we did purple (128, 0, 255), chartreuse (128, 255, 0), red (255, 0, 0) and cyan (0, 255, 255). That would be a symetrical arrangement of colors, but it looks really strange.

In fact, even the pallete suited to our eyes, the light primaries, RGB, is a pretty aesthetically displeasing and unnatural looking set of colors. And I know you may say aesthetics are subjective, but there are patterns in human opinion.

 

[Matthew_Z]

I don't care about RYB and am not talking about RYB because RYB is not an even distribution. It is imbalanced toward the red.

But for example, if we quartered the visible spectrum. That is red to violet. Let's say we did purple (128, 0, 255), chartreuse (128, 255, 0), red (255, 0, 0) and cyan (0, 255, 255). That would be a symetrical arrangement of colors, but it looks really strange.

In fact, even the pallete suited to our eyes, the light primaries, RGB, is a pretty aesthetically displeasing and unnatural looking set of colors. And I know you may say aesthetics are subjective, but there are patterns in human opinion.

It's subjective. Large squares of FF00FF make me feel happy.

Like the following, but its non-square quality bothers me slightly:

 

[sofmarhof]

Oh, and a third use - when you're explaining a thought process you had to someone, and you have to include some qualification, but you don't want them to think that you think they wouldn't have thought of that themselves, so you say 'obviously' to indicate that you take it to be something they'd already be aware of.

This is what I usually mean. It's like saying, "This is almost too obvious to point out, but for some reason I feel the need to do soanyway, so I'm pointing out that I realize it's obvious."

 

[Magic Poriferan]

Anti-hero is a poorly constructed term. An anti-hero is no where close to the opposite of a hero, it is merely someone with heroic ends that lacks heroic aesthetics and ethos.

 

[thisGuy]

Isn't it pointless to qualify a sentence with the word "obviously"? If it's truly obvious, you don't need to explain it.

I find myself doing this a lot, but I realize there's no reason to. Basically, the only thing it comes across as is an insult. The only reason you'd need to explain something obvious is if the person you're explaining it to is exceptionally imperceptive. Of course, that doesn't accomplish anything.

purpose of 'obviously' is not to explain stuff; its to direct the listener's train of thought in a particular direction.

 

[thisGuy]

I have never encountered anyone with the surname South. I have seen North, West, and East on many occasions. Is South not a surname, or have I simply missed it? If it's not, why?

South can loosely interpreted to mean 'down' as in when you hear the figure of speech...'that project as gone south'...south is taken to mean 'to the wolves' or 'to shits'

its almost a bad omen

 

[thisGuy]

It fascinates me how the color sets you get from dividing the color wheel into even portions never look natural, and generally are not aesthetically pleasing.

It also fascinates me how when you evenly divide the wheel, some pairs of colors look far more similar to each other, even though they are all equally different.

I'm not sure if I will say more on this.

aesthetics is based on quality not quantity. when you place EVERYTHING side by side, how the hell is that supposed to look good

they look similar because you have synesthesia

 

[thisGuy]

Anti-hero is a poorly constructed term. An anti-hero is no where close to the opposite of a hero, it is merely someone with heroic ends that lacks heroic aesthetics and ethos.

same as anti-matter

 

[Magic Poriferan]

same as anti-matter

Well, I suppose in some sense they are both material. But it must be said that matter and anti-matter have inverse compositions and do negate each other. I can see considerably more reason in calling that anti-matter than calling unromantic heroes anti-heros.

If one were to interpret the word in a more literal way, one would conclude that anti-hero sounds like another way of saying villain.

 

[Magic Poriferan]

I do not understand the term "single strand DNA"! Is that not RNA? I've tried looking up some explanation as to what single strand DNA might be as oppose to RNA, but while I've found information on where it comes up, I've found no explanation as to why it's not just called RNA.