Lazy Research
October 30th, 2002 by Will
I was interested in Wired’s coverage of an quaternions. According to the story, a quaternion is an equation used in calculating vectors and other physicsy types of things. They also seem in some weird way to have led to the development of radio. Thing is, Wired doesn’t describe what the equation is or how it works. They don’t describe it at all - not even a very dumbed down version. They only describe the impact.
Maybe that’s all most of their readers are interested in. I found it pretty annoying though. I was about to go google up some information for myself. Then I realized - this is the kind of thing that will probably end up on MetaFilter in a day or two. Whoever posts it is probably going to go dig up a bunch of links to hide the fact that their post is completely lame. So, rather than doing the research myself, I’m going to wait to see what turns up on MetaFilter. I suspect the post itself won’t have very many interesting links, but somebody in the thread will point me towards a remarkable resource for understanding quaternions. Of course this is all just a wild ass guess at this point. It may not show up there, and if it does it may not be formatted in the way I expect, but does anybody want to put 5 bucks down against it happening just the way I describe?
3 Responses to “Lazy Research”
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Just realized this is my 300th blog entry. Who would have thought anybody could say so very much about so very little.
quaternions are like weird vectors. so they’re not really equations, but collections of numbers that appear inside equations. you can think of them as a nice way to simplify writing a bunch of equations - you collect a bunch of equations that refer to different numbers, stick all the numbers in one quaternion, and end up with one equation that acts on the quaternion.
that’s not very exciting, but then i’m not trying to fill a whole article with a detail of notation ;-) but you can take it a step further - you can argue that if ordering numbers using quaternions is useful (if the equations become easier to udnerstand) then somehow the structure of the quaternion - the way the different numbers are related - reflects something important about physical reality. in the end this comes down (as always, really, in physics) to introducing symmetries in mathematics that also exist in the outside world….
anyway, come on - who’s that cease and desist from? i hope i don’t have to feel bad about that new bike i just bought…!
I guess if my research goals don’t make it to MeFi, I’ll have to bring MeFi to my research goals. Thanks
About the other thing, there’s more information here. My lawyers are handling it, and I don’t want to stoke the fires anymore than I have to, so keep it on the QT OK?
Long story short, as far as I’m concerned you should feel perfectly fine about that bike. Does it have your name on the license plate like the one Mr. and Mrs. Brady got for Bobby? ‘Cause that bike was totally sweet.