Nah. I have had one whole class in Hydrology. I read books about water (rights and development history, for example) for fun. [1]

I just tuckered out before getting to the part of trying to look up average river width for my home state of Georgia. I'm just tired today, as is often the case, or I would be all over that.

[1] Citation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19782650

FYI, my point about river width was not a put down in any way. I'm not sure if you took it that way. It seems like other people did.

Average river width is not representative because there are often big population centers near wider parts of rivers. For example, when the east cost of the US was settled, people built cities on the wide, navigable (for big ships) parts of rivers that were close to the ocean.

Taking offense at a bit of Latin doggerel which wasn't even addressed directly at you is lame, javert.

Responding with direct insults and threats is completely over the top. This is the Internet. Calm down.

It was, at least somewhat, cruel

While his follow-up comment isn't ideal, it is in response to an ugly personal attack. I deleted my reply to that now flagged-to-death comment because I don't want to make this about me.

I'm quite confident the intent was to be kind to me, not commentary aimed at javert at all.

One of the challenges of interacting on the internet is that it's very hard to say a thing aimed at one person that cannot be wildly misconstrued as being something ugly about someone else. I think that's all that happened here. The comment was aimed at me because my behavior looked extremely defensive rather than looking like "Oh, river factoids! I wonder how wide rivers are? (starts googling)"

I wish people would drop this. It's an unfortunate incident rooted in a well-meaning comment and I hate seeing this go sideways.