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.
