The Corner

Quaternions.Com

I meant “possible take on quaternions.doc,” of course. I am a slave to

MicroSoft Word, like every other hack. (Though at least it’s not as bad as

MS Outlook, which is *******THE MOST UNSPEAKABLY AWFUL PIECE OF SOFTWARE

EVER DEVISED BY SATAN FOR OUR TORMENT*********. Outlook story: I got one

of those irritating boxes asking me if I wanted to archive my old items.

Foolishly, I said yes. Outlook went ahead and archived every e-mail older

than one month. And do you think I can find them now? Where the hell did

the wretched program archive them? In the fifth dimension? Grrr…)

Back to quaternions. A helpful reader: “Interestingly, if one formulates

the rotation kinematics in terms of quaternions, the resultant 7×7

covariance matrix (the solution of the Riccati equation) is singular,

because of the linear dependence of the 4-parameter Euler symmetric

parameters.”

Well for heaven’s sake, everybody knows THAT.

John Derbyshire — Mr. Derbyshire is a former contributing editor of National Review.
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