[frankus]

Maybe I’m misremembering but isn’t torque usually expressed as a cross product of force and radius?

(Making pound-feet the pedantic but correct phrasing of the colloquial “foot-pounds”)

That way the torque vector points in the direction that a screw would move if you turned it in the direction it’s being forced.

[catblast]

That is the correct way to express torque with vectors.

The definitions in the blog post are not vectors, they are scalars and the dot is not a dot product, just multiplication. (F_t there is what is commonly notated as F_perpendicular). I agree it is confusing to those of us used to seeing bold letters usually used for vectors (and I would argue that using more conventional notation at even a basic level is better), but it's not wrong.