Sometimes the universe gives you a sign that you're on the right path. I was wondering how to apply metaphor of frenet-serret formulas (coordinate-free ways of describing curves) to twitter and blog threads, and look what I found on the wiki page: RIBBONS! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenet%E2
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Think of the frenet-serret formulas as a way of keeping track of your driving using the odometer, steering wheel angle, road bank angle (nonzero on turns), and uphill/downhill gradient. If you logged all 4 numbers precisely at all times, you'd know where you were without GPS
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This is a better approach to doing math on twisty-turny paths like roller coasters or spirals or... threads... than the usual way of extrinsic coordinate systems (either explicit like y=f(x) or implicit like f(x,y)=0) but it's not super intuitive.
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huh... am I thinking about this right to interpret it as a kind of dead reckoning? In the sense of recording change over time in terms of the internal vars of a system (with the implicit promise of replaying that change, given sufficient capture fidelity)
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