Reply to Jurdy & Stefanick comment

Abstract

We disagree with virtually all of what Jurdy & Stefanick have written. Part of our disagreement stems from personal opinions about what is ‘simple’, ‘arbitrary’, ‘artificial’, ‘undesirable’, etc., but other disagreements are more profound and reveal a very different understanding of finite rotations. Jurdy & Stefanick raise two basic objections. One concerns statistical questions that were not meant to be part of Chang et al. (1990). The other addresses the main issue of our paper, the parametrization of uncertainties of rotations. They suggest that both our approach is flawed and that theirs, outlined in Jurdy & Stefanick (1987), is better. Except possibly for their opinion of what constitutes a covariance matrix, we try not to indulge the reader with long discussions of questions of personal preference, but instead to confine our response to these basic questions.