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Providing Addresses for 4 Billion People Using Three Words (mondaynote.com)
HughPickens.com writes: 75% of the Earth's population, i.e. four billion people, effectively "don't exist" to modern computer systems because they have no physical address. The "unaddressed" can't open a bank account, can't deal properly with a hospital or an administration, and can even struggle to get a delivery. Now Frédéric Filloux writes at Monday Note that What3Words, a London startup, is seeking to solve this problem by providing a combination of three words, in any language, that specify every 3-meter by 3-meter square in the world. Each square has a 3-word address that can be communicated quickly, easily and with no ambiguity. Altogether, 40,000 words combined in triplets label 57 trillion squares. Thus far, the system has been built in 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swahili, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish and, starting next month, Arabic. All together, this lingua franca requires only 5 megabytes of data, small enough to reside in any smartphone and work offline. Each square has its identity in its own language that is not a translation of another.
Messy addressing systems have measurable consequences. UPS, the world's largest parcel delivery provider, calculated that if its trucks merely drove one mile less per day, the company would save $50m a year. In United Kingdom, bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year. "One might say latitude and longitude can solve this. Sure thing. Except that GPS coordinates require 16 digits, 2 characters (+/-/N/S/E/W), 2 decimal points, space and comma, to specify a location of the size of a housing block," writes Filloux. "Not helpful for a densely populated African village, or a Mumbai slum." The system is already being used to deliver packages in the favelas in Brasil with Cartero Amigo, solar lights to the Slums in India with Pollinate-Energy and mosquito traps in Tanzania with in2care. For What3Words, the decisive boost will come from its integration in major mapping suppliers such as Google Maps or Waze.
Messy addressing systems have measurable consequences. UPS, the world's largest parcel delivery provider, calculated that if its trucks merely drove one mile less per day, the company would save $50m a year. In United Kingdom, bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year. "One might say latitude and longitude can solve this. Sure thing. Except that GPS coordinates require 16 digits, 2 characters (+/-/N/S/E/W), 2 decimal points, space and comma, to specify a location of the size of a housing block," writes Filloux. "Not helpful for a densely populated African village, or a Mumbai slum." The system is already being used to deliver packages in the favelas in Brasil with Cartero Amigo, solar lights to the Slums in India with Pollinate-Energy and mosquito traps in Tanzania with in2care. For What3Words, the decisive boost will come from its integration in major mapping suppliers such as Google Maps or Waze.
This is a great solution. I hate lat/long, it's so damn clumsy. If it were two integers or even floats, that would be fine. But it's a half dozen different numbers to store two, with all kinds of stupid syntax all to get you down to a huge space. This is nice.
I can't imagine this being useful for a post office in developed countries. Drones on the other hand, are going to deliver packages in a back yard and if you can tell the drone search for a place to drop a package in a 3m by 3m square that's definately useful. Especially if there is a designator nearby to better pinpoint the landing zone.
Inefficient for a computer, but very efficient for a person, who has significant dedicated hardware for language processing. That's why using combinations of words makes a good password for a human to remember, but hard for a computer program to crack. https://xkcd.com/936/
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
75% of the Earth's population, i.e. four billion people, effectively "don't exist" to modern computer systems because they have no physical address. The "unaddressed" can't open a bank account, can't deal properly with a hospital or an administration, and can even struggle to get a delivery.
Because those Kalahari tribes are really desperate to receive pre-approved credit card spam, hospital bills, and their Amazon Prime deliveries.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Well, think this is an example from TFA (Japanese characters removed):
Apparently, in some places addresses can get pretty screwed up.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Sure, but how much brain space does it take to remember "58.169564, -153.170992" versus "leave aura corrugated"?
We're not computers - we remember words and phrases much better than we remember arbitrary number strings. How many bits it takes to store that information in a computer is irrelevant.
You're missing the point. Words are easier to remember. IP addresses are often shorter than most domain names, but we still use domain names because they can be easily remembered.
news.slashdot.org uses more characters than the ip address 216.34.181.48. You can even remove the dots in the ip address and save some space. Or better yet you can encode the ip address as hex. Now you have an 8 character string vs an 18 character string. I still prefer news.slashdot.org.
Japanese addresses are so generally screwy that it is normal behavior to draw maps when giving directions.
https://plus.codes/
Do you know what the real "lingua franca" is? Numbers. And numbers don't need a fancy encoding that requires the use of a computer to map it back to actual location information.
Not when someone in the US has to speak these 3 words to someone whose primary language isn't English.
Words become much harder to comprehend over the phone with someone in India when they are used out of context.
Also, what problem are we trying to solve?
"People without addresses can't open bank accounts"
Well this isn't an address. And people without addresses can't get mail so why would the bank accept this as an alternative.
How could someone ever prove they lived at this 3 word address.
It's not really unambiguous: http://www.getzipcode.us/en/in...
Meaningful words are also likely to cause idiots to start political wars.
(Though even meaningless stuff, such as in this case, may be at risk of dipshit politicians if it ever takes off).
Also, most places this is intended for have little in the way of any nameable thing, including cities.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
http://www.mondaynote.com/wp-c...
Nice job, dingbat. Your image shows an address collision within about 500 metres.
And you need to learn about drop shadows, or at the very least adding outlines to text.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
In a high rise residential building, 3x3 meters isn't precise enough. We also need to know elevation.
The point can be found at highway.treble.lemon, and you completely missed it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Besides, everyone can use a healthy reminder not to decorrugate their aura.
You're just mad because your square is Poopy Smelly Fart.
And I still have the same thought: "Hidden Forbidden Holyground".
You can extend GPS to any arbitrary granularity, it's just not much use if you can't locate the spot because GPS can't give that accuracy.
No you can't remove the dots. You can however turn it into a number after doing a little math for each section.
As with all systems that blindly pick words and string them together, you're bound to encounter some that are less than flattering. "danger" and "skunks" appear in one pair of three, etc. Thankfully, this is only a parking lot, but imagine a person's place of residence with something like that.
Klaatu, Verata, Nickto.
bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year.
So how will this system solve that? A sender can still give a bad address. Most badly addressed mail that I nevertheless get has the postcode wrong, a fairly arbitrary set of letters and numbers. This new system is a totally arbitrary set of words. People do not remember post codes - they copy them from an address book, incoming letter, or database and can copy it wrongly. Likewise, people are not going to remember these word triplets (I've got 50 Xmas cards to send), they will copy them from an address book, incoming letter, or database and can still copy it wrongly. Get one word wrong (I gather pluralisation matters) and it will go to Timbuctoo instead of Kansas.
It would save the Royal Mail and other couriers a lot if their guys actually rang my doorbell when they arrive instead of just posting a "You were out" card through - they seem to have a phobia about it. But I live in a remote scenic area and I think they like the idea of a second morning's relaxing drive this way instead of fighting city traffic the following day.
For delivery, having a "radio homing beacon" mode on your cell phone would be more useful. It would also be a great feature for emergencies.
What an idiotic system. There already exists a solution to this problem.
Generate an IPV6 address for each 3x3 square. Encode the same address in a chip and implant this chip in each individual who is allowed to occupy the 3x3 space. Any person whose implanted chip does not contain the correct address may not occupy that space and will be subject to immediate detainment and questioning. We can also look into walling off each 3x3 square so that no illegal square immigrants come in.
Do you people have any other problems you need me to solve for you today?
Sincerely Yours,
Donald Trump
I can't imagine this being useful for a post office in developed countries.
Japan
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Not that this guy doesn't know that already; he needs to get his startup funded so let's just skip over that.
If you just need to pin-point a spot on the earth, GPS is your goto method. But as others point out, identifying a spot on earth != usable address for commercial/social/infrastructure purposes.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Whichever one you want.
what3words is a word -> lat/long service. It works extremely well for lat/long information. Perfect for saying where your geo-cache is, or even telling people where to meet in the park, or approximately where you are in some rural area. Its not a replacement for an actual address, but certainly can help if you don't have an actual address.
Neither.
Klaatu, Verata, Nickto.
barada! for Gods sake man, it's barada!
I have the perfect location for the drone dropping at cuties.exciting.layover ! I'll fetch the package (and the drone) from the trees once it's here :)
There's one thing which I don't like; it's not open source // using a generic & simple algorithm and they want to charge for lookups. That kills it for me, no matter what kind of discount based on country they are using. It is very simple (and not the fist time) such algorithm are used. I favor precision-adaptives one like which isn't wasting address space but anyway...
Do I share my 3 words with my downstairs neighbor?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
This seems like a cool idea, but are we really going to get the world to start using an algorithm for determining location that appears to be proprietary and closed-source? I was looking to find specifically how it works and as far as I can tell you can only implement this by downloading apps or APIs from what3words, and their closed code will do all the work mapping locations to words and vice-versa.
Why would anyone build any type of important solution or process on top of this and have their hands tied to this one vendor to use it going forward. Its not like you could upgrade or convert to a different process later if your plan was to get people to use this new method for specifying their location.
Four digits gives 11m squares, which is close enough for anyone making deliveries to figure out the exact location within that square. If you want a 5th digit, you now have precision that can tell the difference between trees.
Twin four-digits aren't hard to memorize, and there's not as much of a benefit for bringing it down to 3x3 squares.
Memorization is from use, not by picking a random block and asking people to memorize it in 60 seconds. Also, if one can't memorize their own postal code through normal use, then they probably can't function normally in society.
Granted, this is not a perfect system. As some have already stated, it dot not address elevation, and the words are not in a predictable order. This is not supposed to replace GPS, it is, in a small, easily *PRINTABLE* or storable form, a way to refer to places that don't have conventional addresses, and do it in a way that a person can easily remember. This is invaluable for hikers, campers, archeologists, doctors, aid agencies. Pretty much anyone that needs to find a place in the back of beyond, or convey a location in the back of beyond easily. As as to elevation, should the need arise, it is fairly easy to tack on "3rd floor" or "10 meters up" to the address to get an exact point in the universe.
So I checked the site, and the tree words that it picks for the location it guessed I was at are "meto.pienso.coger", which in Argentinian Spanish would translate to something like: "I put (something) in. I think. To fuck" Somebody didn't think this through.
Why in the world would they have a completely random set of three words for each location? I move ten feet down the hall and go from "abruptly.irrational.badger" to "cohesive.iguana.baseball"? Instead of, say, "abruptly.irrational.badminton"?
I don't get it. If you can go to their app and get the location for any set of words, then the process is reversible, so what would be lost by making it ordered? That way you would eventually develop a brain mapping, for familiar locations, of roughly where "abruptly.irrational" is.
Which ever one is easiest to remember.
Go explore the map.
I'm at generates.flat.quaking temporarily.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
But I know that 58.169564, -153.170992 is very close to 58.16957, -153.170988.
How close are pound.banana.hamster and dome.words.zone ? Are they right next to each other, or across the planet? Other numbering schemes are better. MGRS will let you specify general area to exact location. And you can figure out very easily how far points are from each other. I also like zip codes. I know that 22207 is close to 22206. I can get fine grained by going to 22207-2345. Having an 'address' that provides an exact point, but gives a human absolutely no idea where they are is terrible.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
You live at horse.battery.staple, correct?
This signature is false.
An older slashdot story about the same thing
"Describe Any Location On Earth In 3 Words"
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
You are in luck! Your three words are:
off.the.radar
What a shame, I was looking forward to your contribution.
"Look, maybe I didn't say every single little tiny syllable, no. But basically I said them, yeah." Also, the developers of EverQuest have their own take on it: http://everquest.allakhazam.co... Check the prompt just before receiving a tattered cloth note.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Either one can be proved the same way: Address a piece of mail to it, and then ask me to produce it in person a week or so later. That will suffice to prove that the address can lead content to me. Anything further, that can't be proved about the address, is outside of the scope of an address's purpose.
www.wavefront-av.com
Words are easy for humans to remember, but they're awful for processing, which is why most of the world switched to numbers a long time ago. Many European cities used to use house names when there were only a few hundred houses in the area, then they switched to using street names and numbers when it became too difficult to keep track of everyone's movements.
Using coordinates allows you to estimate distances just by knowing two locations. You can use them for direct-path navigation, as well as (except for extreme latitudes) travel constrained to cardinal directions, as most large cities tend to support. Given a location, you can also know roughly where you're going without the aid of any electronic device, and with some experience, one can get quite skilled at figuring out their location by only dead-reckoning.
This scheme provides what is effectively a hash of each location on the globe. That's wonderfully useful for determining "am I here?", but not very good for figuring out "how do I get there?". To effectively navigate, the three-word addresses must be translated into coordinates anyway, then compared to a graph of potential routes, and a path derived from that. Effectively, it's just an extra step (which requires a computer's help, or a book of lookup tables) for anyone trying to find a particular location.
A more useful scheme would be to divide the world into regions and subregions, using easily-memorized or safely-assumed names. Then divide those large areas into small blocks, and give them numeric addresses, which can be subdivided as necessary to reach any level of precision. For example, the Central City Recreation Center is located in the nation of "United States of America", in the region "Utah", subregion "Salt Lake City", at a grid location of "615 South 300 East". It pretty much covers the area from 600 South 300 East to 640 South 350 East, so if you really needed to specify a particular 9-square-meter room, you have a reasonable way to do it with the existing system. Having only visited Salt Lake City once, I can tell you that it's not too far from City Hall, which is centered around 450 South 150 East.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It works extremely well for lat/long information.
Hardly. There is no easy conversion, you have to go online (or have the database on a smart device) to find out the translation.
Its not a replacement for an actual address, but certainly can help if you don't have an actual address.
Except UTM can easily address down to the nearest meter (or better), is a world-wide global standard (is both known worldwide and applies worldwide), and is found in most GPSs, if not all. For addresses within the same grid square, it is trivial to determine how far away and in which direction the destination is. It uses a global character set and needs no translation from one language to another -- which 3words cannot do anyway.
But OMG, it is so much easier for everyone to learn the new three words system in all the different languages than for me to learn a handful of numbers.
I want to go where the Super Awesome Dragons are at! https://map.what3words.com/sup...
I'm impressed by the idea, but it won't be fully realized until the language set includes Klingon and Elvish.
Japanese addresses are so generally screwy that it is normal behavior to draw maps when giving directions.
Yes, I've heard that map programs for finding addresses are the first thing that Japanese install on their phones. Outside of every train station and otherwise scattered around are maps of the neighborhood that show blocks and buildings with their numbers. See, everything is divided up by Prefecture, City, Neighborhood, Block, Building (floor, office) and numbered in no particular standard order for streets that are certainly not even laid out in a grid pattern. There's no way to find an address without a map in in someplace like Tokyo as sometimes the building isn't even marked with their number (because they expect you to be following a map). Much worse than London and their need for AtoZ.
But which tier??????
They would charge companies to use it, which makes it unusable in the bigger picture. If they opensource their algorithm and word list under a good license, this has a chance. Until they do that, this won't go anywhere.
Imagine the big mail/freight carriers having to pay them every time they have to translate a 3 word address. Not going to happen.
The world's population is 7.3 billion. 75% of that is over 5 billion. How did they get 4 billion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For zip codes, it depends a lot on the geography and history. 50061 and 50062 are 40ish miles apart, while 66206 is adjacent to 64114.
MGRS has benefits over lat/lon, but it's back to somewhat arbitrary long numbers, and to at least match 3m it needs 5 digits of easting and 5 of northing, plus the 4 characters for grid and square, so the benefits are not huge.
This system does require machine translation, granted; if you're trying to avoid that, then this system will definitely not work for you. But if you assume machine translation is available (and machines that can handle it are getting really common), then this system can be an easier way to pass the important parts of the data around.
In Mexico:
https://map.what3words.com/glo...
The giver of the data will probably have used it enough to have it down pat. The receiver, on the other hand, may not, and words are more resistant to transposition errors than coordinates.
First 2 letters, like DEarborn 5-7500
rewriting history since 2109
"The 'unaddressed' can't open a bank account, can't deal properly with a hospital or an administration, and can even struggle to get a delivery."
Putting a "can even" or "can't even" at the end of a list implies that that last option is especially surprising or shocking. However in this case struggling to get a delivery is pretty much a no brainer.
If you want someone to send you something, the person you're asking needs to know where to actually send it. If you can't accurately describe where you are then they have no way to get to you.
Opening bank accounts or going to a hospital on the other hand are things that shouldn't actually require you to have a permanent place of residence, labeled or not.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I've always thought QTH locator (aka Maidenhead Locator System) was pretty neat gets you really close with few letters DM26PA13VM is a parking at the hoover dam but if you cut two letters off the end DM26PA13 only gets you to the hoover dam.
A 5MB database shouldn't be a problem considering most gps units have had maps in the 1GB+ range for many years now.
w3w however seems to provide high precision with easy to remember phrases such as "start deflects tuxedos"
And you can turn them into jokes.
Why did microsoft bring back the start menu in windows 10?
Because start deflects tuxedos. Bad-pun pish.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Yes, your system requires an addressing system. They are talking about including places that do not have an addressing system.
rewriting history since 2109
The problem being that there appears to be no rhyme nor reason to the three words being used for squares in contiguous space. Use their website to look at a few squares that are all part of the same piece of property - it appears to be completely random.
I'm never going to tell someone that they can find my driveway at 'slope.radioactive.massaging' because they have no fucking clue what that means to anything but this database. Whereas if you tell them some thing like '390 SE Hawthorne St.' they can at least have a clue depending on how the city and addressing scheme works.
I think it'd work best as a way to double up your address--for example, UPS absolutely refuses to deliver to my address unless I write it in a 'weird' way because they can't work out how my apartment complex's numbering system works. (This is impressive in all the wrong ways.) Given that some places don't necessarily tell me who they'll ship my packages through, if I can give them both the address in the form the government puts it and a three-word set, I think it's reasonable for me to be rather annoyed with them if they still fail to figure out where I am.
This also might help the nearest pizza delivery place manage to find my apartment on a regular basis, too. No, I've no idea how they manage to inconsistently fail.
I don't really see this as a way to replace street addresses, but rather a way to give two different means for determining your address, in case the !@#$ delivery person cannot locate you--and if designed so all the words work as a phonetic alphabet and you can safely work out what three words are meant if you know it's S*.R*.M* and local, it could possibly be a faster & more robust way to tell Emergency Services where you are.
Actually, it was the first 2 characters of the exchange, and a number. I still remember our house phone number from the 60's
DUdley1-7xxx. Morphed into 381-7xxx.
Oh, yes, I could pay them extra money to deliver it someplace else that they ALREADY GO TO EVERY DAY where I actually am during delivery hours, of course. It would cost them less than trying a second delivery to the same address, but I should pay more for it.
over.whoosh.head
rewriting history since 2109
If the first word were alphabetical by lattitude, and the second by longitude, and the third very different for nearby squares, this would be a much better system. From the first two words you could get a good general idea where someone was, and the fourth would act as a checksum.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There were different dialing plans..
"In the United States, the most-populous cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago used telephone numbers consisting of three letters and four digits (3L-4N)" (from wikipedia)
I'm in the Boston area, so this is what came to mind. But yea, yours is another one of the many variations. 3L-4N was a standard before the whole thing was dropped.
"Three, sir!"
"Third! Third would act as a checksum!"
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm not sure why human memory vs computer storage needs to come into play here at all. Are all the delivery drivers memorizing these 3 words for delivery, or are they instead written down on the parcel or a manifest and checking against a computer system??? Seems the latter is more likely. Do the people at these addresses intend to stay at their location which would justify a sane simple numbering system. Or, will they roam around like nomads picking up their tents and/or makeshift housing every so often, thus justifying their need for a simple 3 word system??? The example given is shacks in Brazil that just don't have a decent addressing system. Seems a coordinate system would work better for stationary locations and delivery systems. There's no need to translate into random words and back when the underlying GPS system works just fine as-is.
Perhaps you are not as likely to recall a string of numbers as you are words, but many others do just fine. I recall my zip code, SSN, and the complete address of the many places I have lived without issue. I have no trouble remembering my phone number -- even with the area code! I'm sure I could remember my GPS coordinates if that were the system I regularly relied upon to send and receive mail.
The first 3x3 digits before the decimal of GPS are for a 110 Km x 85 Km area. That's a much larger area than most zip codes at the cost of maybe a digit. If somehow you forgot your 110x85 km code, you could ask your neighbor... or generally anyone within your city. As for the latter digits after the decimal, 4x4 digits is usually enough to specify a location to the precision of this new method. 5x5 is even better than the new method.
Saying you can't recall 4 to 6 digits for your city plus 8 to 10 digits for your house is ridiculous (Total 12 to 16). Most Americans know their 9 digit telephone number, 9 digit SSN, and their house number and zip code which are usually 9 digits as well. I'm sure human beings can adapt to memorizing 12 to 16 numbers with ease -- especially when many are the equivalent of a "zip code" that all neighbors share.
Also, for delivery drivers, it helps when distance is easily measurable or at least approximated. With this awful new system, you're completely reliant on the database and an active GPS signal to find out which direction to travel and how far to your destination. Purple.Monkey.Dishwasher could be miles from Battery.Horse.Stapler -- and in any direction! Even if the database works offline without an internet connection, how does a driver sync that database to walking/driving without an active GPS system? With GPS, at least if the power goes out or stormy weather blocks signals, you can know to drive in a general direction and approximate how far you had left to go or ask locals who know their own GPS coordinates for help in which way to go based on the coordinates of where you are and where you want to go.
ITheir algorithm automatically maps similar sounding words to vastly different areas of the world. If you are looking for an address in New York and your three word combination maps to Ah-So,China , you know something is up.
I'm where it's at...
DAMMIT! I am at penis.turtle.fatass.
Who thought this shitty system up?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I too thought of my Maidenhead grid square (I'm typing this from CN89lg).
The most generally whacked-out addresses I've seen are in Costa Rica. No house numbers or anything, mail is addressed by landmarks. One hotel I've stayed at had the postal address "300 meters East of the Escazú Country Club, Old Highway to Santa Ana, Escazú, Costa Rica". Mail may be addressed with respect to any well-known (to locals, at least...) landmarks; I've seen stuff that referenced the town square, the bus station, even the local McDonald's.
...laura
Four digits gives 11m squares, which is close enough for anyone making deliveries to figure out the exact location within that square. If you want a 5th digit, you now have precision that can tell the difference between trees.
I think the point of the 3 ft squares is for very compact places, like slums in India, where there might be several "houses" in an 11 m square. So, to be comparable, it appears that you'd need that 5th digit. But it isn't really 5 digits. It's 5 digits after the decimal place. In each direction. Plus you need something to indicate direction (for brevity, I'd think +/- would be better than N/S/E/W). So, my address is XX.XXXXX,-XX.XXXXX, according to Google Maps. That makes 14 characters to memorize assuming I don't waste any brain power on the decimals and negative sign. This is approximately double the number of digits most people's brains supposedly prefer.
From what I gather from the comments, the benefits of the current GPS system are:
1) It already has a foothold.
2) It's easy to tell by comparing gps units where two places are compared to each other.
3) It can be more or less precise by adding or removing digits.
4) The digits easily translate to other languages (or, rather, they need no translation)
The benefits of the 3x3 system are:
1) It's really easy to remember the "address" for a very specific place.
The drawbacks I'm hearing for GPS are:
1) It's hard to remember the "address."
I think I'm now convinced that the GPS system is better. For example, in the 3x3 system, you can't say its in the vicinity of rabbit.tree.hook without having to look up what on earth (literally) that means. You need a whole new address for every language. In English, my address might be tree.rock.squirrel, while in spanish my address might be tango.juevo.puerta (because they can't use translations of the same words for the same place--here aren't enough words in the other languages and also words often don't translate cleanly). I was playing around with the map--squares very close to each other have completely different "addresses." And there is no way to address a larger quadrant, which is trivial in GPS by simply removing a digit.
I understand the issue with a GPS user's device having accuracy problems, but I don't see how the 3x3 system solves that. I think the versatility of the GPS system compared to the 3x3 system makes it ultimately superior, despite the comparative difficulty of memorizing "addresses."
Then what would you rather enter into your browser when setting up Thunderbird? imap.example.com or 162.150.32.54?
Memorization is from use, not by picking a random block and asking people to memorize it in 60 seconds. Also, if one can't memorize their own postal code through normal use, then they probably can't function normally in society.
It's easier to memorize a phrase than a group of numbers unless you can attach meaning to the numbers--I lucked out with my mobile phone number and only have to worry about transposing the last two 'elements' I use to remember it. If it was simply by 'use,' then we'd not bother with street names and use the 9-digit zip codes which do give a precise location.
You're missing the point. Words are easier to remember.
Words might be easier to remember but their system is broken. They would be better off ordering the words alphabetically and mapping the first word to latitude and the second word to longitude and the third word to a checksum. Instead, what they have is dinosaurs.masks.established is in Minnesota while dinosaur.masks.established is in Missouri so being off by a single trailing 's' changes your location by hundreds of miles.
I think "leave aura corrugated" was more of a warning that anyone nearby should leave, as the aura has attained corrugation and may become unstable at any time. Everyone knows an unstable aura can be both moist and schizophrenic, and as such, pose a danger to anyone within 3 inches vertically or 50 miles horizontally. Except magnetic due-west, in which case, safe distance is around 10 feet.
Japanese addresses are so generally screwy that it is normal behavior to draw maps when giving directions.
Yes, I've heard that map programs for finding addresses are the first thing that Japanese install on their phones. Outside of every train station and otherwise scattered around are maps of the neighborhood that show blocks and buildings with their numbers. See, everything is divided up by Prefecture, City, Neighborhood, Block, Building (floor, office) and numbered in no particular standard order for streets that are certainly not even laid out in a grid pattern. There's no way to find an address without a map in in someplace like Tokyo as sometimes the building isn't even marked with their number (because they expect you to be following a map). Much worse than London and their need for AtoZ.
If there's maps outside the train stations, I never saw one--I ended up just buying a map of the city while I was in Tokyo. The numbering of buildings actually is, however, in a particular order--by age, more or less. (Good luck.) Neighborhoods and blocks do follow sequential order if you're wandering the right direction--for example, 4-3 followed 4-2 and 4-1, and sometimes 4-4 did as well. (Exactly what direction to go is something you have to learn, but it can be picked up quickly, and you can generally work out where to start looking for the koban or a person to ask with a bit of wandering. Worth it if you are living in the neighborhood, since that means you can get it down to the building number and thus having a good chance of finding somebody who knows where that is.)
Street names are a rarity in Japan because they think more of intersections--which has its own logic, really--and in Tokyo you should be thinking of all of it as being like NYC with about 4 times the boroughs because, well, that's...pretty much what's going on. (This is why Tokyo is called a metropolitan area and not a prefecture.)
Well, think this is an example from TFA (Japanese characters removed):
Apparently, in some places addresses can get pretty screwed up.
Address systems are difficult to change. If it was easy to change a system then all the Japanese addresses would be changed to something sane. The hierarchical address designation in the in the US follows the same uniform format almost everywhere and seems to be simple enough for most people to follow. I think most people prefer this to what is more or less a GPS location. The hierarchy is typically, country->state->city->road->address. Although we get screwy with zip codes. Some cities have multiple zip codes and some cities share zip codes, so feel free to replace city with zip. It's funny though that zip codes are more designed for processing the mail, which much of it is done by machines now. I still think this structure is far better for post offices because post offices interact with people. Machines can care less about these things that humans use to organize locations. Finding a postion based on GPS location is much simpler for a machine. Even if machines use roads the mapping GPS positions to roads is quite trivial. The 3 word combination is more for the machines than it is the humans.
Just because they claim it does that doesn't mean that it actually does. Human language is a difficult thing to handle with computer algorithms. Especially when you get into localized dialects that can significantly alter the pronunciations. That's going to be a big problem considering the problem they're trying to solve, areas that civilization hasn't touched yet.
Why didn't they just go to 1m x 1m and 4 words? It's Zip+4 all over again.
Yes the initial choice of the word combination is arbitrary. Having worked on a (massively expensive) project that merged several national address databases, I think this idea is brilliant. Address databases are created for different purposes, eg: council is only interested in property numbers (lot number), post office is only interested in the letterbox (street address), utilities are interested in access points (easements). For a normal house on a normal house lot the data in the different databases refers to the same location, for something like an office inside a football stadium, things get very confusing. When you get down to details, the number of variations as to how people enter an address into a free form text field is mind boggling. The system they propose fits inside a 10mb file, it's easy for humans to remember, easy for computers to manipulate, and would be a vast improvement on what is already our there.
The obvious problem is getting everyone to use it, as they say in their video it would need to be added to services such google maps and integrated into GPS apps. Places like Africa, India, SE Asia, even outback communities here in Oz would benefit greatly.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
But OMG, it is so much easier for everyone to learn the new three words system in all the different languages than for me to learn a handful of numbers.
Yes, you understand. It isn't about you remembering your own address. Certainly easier to remember 3 words someone tells you than it is to remember lat/lon.
It reminds me of the Chaos Gate field codes in the .Hack series....
http://dothack.wikia.com/wiki/...
Problems in Manhattan:
3x3 meter square is probably bigger than average apartment there.
What about Z coordinate? 90 story condo probably has 90 other people (1 on each floor) in the same 3x3 meter square for X and Y coordinate.
This may be covered in the article. I did not read.
too bad that each letter in each of those three words probably requires (UNICODE) 2 bytes of 4-5 digits worth of numbers PER CHARACTER to store
Well, that assumes you use a poorly chosen unicode encoding. In UTF8 you only need one byte per character for these particular strings. In fact you don't need unicode at all; since the words only use lowercase latin alphabet you can store them as just five bits per character.
But even that's a lot more space than you can get away with for storage. You don't need to store the string at all; since the triplets are made up from words selected from a 40,000 word dictionary, you can simply store a three-tuple of indices into that dictionary (x1, x2, x3), where each index takes 16 bits [log2(40,000) < 15.29]. So the total storage you would need for an address is 48 bits, or six bytes, which is less than it would take to store a lat/lon coordinate as a pair of single precision floating point numbers (32 bits each x 2 = 64 bits = 8 bytes)
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'd find them fairly often. Never had to use them much while I was there but I looked for them as they tended to be cool looking bronze plaques mounted usually around where the train station would dump you out on the street.
focal.email.opera
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I thought this was what ipv6 was for.
who wants an address like 'cuts.goats.shut'. really?
Oftentimes you will have the option of picking an adjacent address bloc, which will be entirely different.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Have you actually verified that this is a real problem? Try punching in any random three words. I just tried 10 combinations, not a single one existed.
I think you're worried about a problem that does not exist. A mishearing is almost certain to lead to no address, not a wrong address, let alone a believable wrong address. In fact, the search space seems to be so significantly larger than the actual space that it should be possible to add suggestions for if a person searches for an address that doesn't exist.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
Who cares about those people anyway? They don't contribute, they don't produce, they don't pay taxes, or grow the economy.
The worst thing is that they are apparently incapable of coming up with things like street names or block names for themselves (according to TFA anyway).
Come on you 75%, it isn't rocket science.
I was waiting for you 3 hours at "write.plain.genes" no....not "right.plane.jeans"!!
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Why not use a existing system like Geohash?
9mu-wym-wdx-qyh-####
The -#### would be extra data for room/suite
Certainly easier to remember 3 words someone tells you than it is to remember lat/lon.
Three random words? No, I don't think so. It will lead to assumptions like yours that "this is so easy to remember, I don't have to write it down." And then, you forget. Or you remember a homonym or synonym instead of the actual word. It will go into your short term memory and you'll try to dredge it back up a day or two later and fail.
At least a UTM coordinate is hard enough to remember from the beginning that you will write it down. And if it is important to know where it is, you'll enter it as a waypoint in your GPS. Which you cannot do with three random words.
They make it sound like mapping squares to a sphere only introduces a minor deformity near the poles, but it inflates the required addressing space by a factor of four. If instead they used an efficient and nearly uniform mapping like a Goldberg polyhedron, it would reduce the set of words required from 40k to about 25k to address a similar area.
It would require a little more calculation for the mapping, but it seems more consistent with the goals of the system. The icosahedral symmetry also allows for another interesting possibility of using one of the faces of the Dymaxion map as a part of the address. The region would then be specified by a single letter, and then 3 words chosen from a set of less than 9000. Even if the region is not made explicit, the mapping could take advantage of the fact that a number of the faces are primarily water.
The three word address is an interesting idea, but it may not be wise to assume that every language has 40000 words at its disposal. I also question the value of being able to specify an arbitrary address, when people may not have the hardware to do the mapping translation, or a means of navigating to the location. I'm guessing that many of those places without real roads may also lack things like electricity.
By this system your house probably has hundreds of addresses. This is a vague replacement for GPS coordinates, not for street addresses.
Even latitude/longitude coordinates give you some clue at all about where they are, which is all this system is attempting to crudely replace.
Where is 'correct . battery . staple'?
Is it near 'stupid . coordinate . system'?
How does this system help more than say, the UTM coordinate system?
The obvious problem is getting everyone to use it, as they say in their video it would need to be added to services such google maps and integrated into GPS apps.
Which they plan to charge them money for.
Anyway, I love one of the blocks that could map to my place: "drones totally toasted" ;)
Not that anyone would go to Iceland anyways, but you just gave your physical location to within 4.2 meters on an internet forum.
Inefficient for a computer, but very efficient for a person, who has significant dedicated hardware for language processing.
True.
That's why using combinations of words makes a good password for a human to remember, but hard for a computer program to crack. https://xkcd.com/936/
True and wrong. In this 3word case, those 3 words are completely unrelated (random). Which makes them not so easy to remember, especially because you need a relatively vast dictionary to map the entire earth. For passwords, people will always keep a password where words kind of work together (if you enforce 4 words, then "this is my password" will definitely be the #1). It's hard for computers to know which combinations make more sense than others, but recent advances in machine learning could change that (and also show that stupid password policies currently in use are completely missing the point : length or special characters don't help, the only thing that makes a good password is randomness/unicity to the human mind).
Back to the map, maybe it would be good to improve the word distribution so that combinations making more sense are located in dense areas (and not in the middle of the sea). Or just create a colored map where you can see combinations which make more sense so that you can easily pick one if your place has more than one.
shhhhhhhhhhh.
It takes them 5 MB to store a 40,000 word dictionary? They must be literally storing a dictionary including the definitions, too. Average length of a word is 5.1 characters. Assuming 2 byte characters because they will probably want to use some multinational words just to use extra space, that gives an average of 10.2 bytes per word, or about 398.5k with no compression. Probably about 56k after compression.
More math issues, each specific location takes 3 words, which will be an average of 30.6 bytes. Another pesky problem of using words is they are not all the same length, so you can't specify a fixed record size, which you would undoubtedly want to do. If they used Lat and Long, those can be stored in a signed float for a total of 16 bytes, period. Need to add altitude, you can do another signed float for another 8 bytes, or you could cheap out an probably used a signed small int. The word approach doesn't even deal with altitude, so there would have to be another field to store an apartment number or floor number or use the GPS altitude.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Unlike numerical coordinates, word coordinates in this scheme don't have a natural topology. So when you search table.book.lamp and you find that it's a square in Johannesburg, there's no way to know what the neighbouring square is called. Worse, you might try to guess table.book.football, and that could be some place in Antarctica.
Suppose you communicate your 3-word coordinates with a Southern Texas accent to a Canadian. They might not hear the second word properly, and now you've sent them to Tokyo instead of New York.
Suppose you live in Idaho, and you need a package delivered but you type your address in with a typo in one of the words. Normally, with a proper human address like 1234 Pennsylvania Avenue, the truck driver first finds Pennsylvania Avenue, and then if 1234 turns out to be a typo and the correct address is 1235, the delivery will be close by and the neighbours might bring the package over or tell the driver it's next door. With 3 random words the cost of redelivery skyrockets to a distance of half of the world's circumference, on average.
Furthermore, the uniform grid sizing causes more problems than it solves. The world is not full of uniformly sized, 3x3 apartments which can be uniquely identified with a single address. Using this system, many places of interest in the world receive hundreds or thousands of effectively randomly assigned addresses which all refer to the same logical unit of location in the human world. That makes communication less precise.
Suppose you want to meet your friend in the park. How do you communicate the idea of "park", which is an aggreegate of so many addresses? You might simplify and say let's meet at the bench in front of the fountain. What if that bench is occupied? You won't be able to meet at those coordinates. Now suppose there are hundreds of people near there, you might not be able to meet your friend unless you agree on some square coordinates that are much further away. For example, you might want to meet at a concert, but where in the hall would that be, and how would you know an hour before then while sending an SMS?
Suppose you want to describe the idea of a kid skateboarding in that same park. With a traditional human addressing system, you can say there's a kid in the park, and that is valid for the whole duration of the event . With this system you'd have to say there's a kid at bridge.pool.steak, fifty.moron.quantum, blah.blah.truck, etc. since the kid is moving around the whole time.
Similarly you wouldn't be able to warn people about disasters efficiently. Say there's a flooded street or a shooting, you'd have to say don't go to a.a.a, b.b.b, c.c.c, ..., z.z.z etc By the time you've listed all the coordinates it might be too late, and never mind the world salad. It would also be a problem for television news presenters. Hash function sequences don't compress well.
There's a reason why the world uses many different coordinate systems simultaneously, inluding ultra precise ones like GPS. They all have their purposes and are the simplest systems for their purpose, respectively. This 3 word system however doesn't have good geographic locality because it's based on hashing, and suffers from complex aggregation issues. It tries to do too much and yet fails the analog test. It's badly flawed for human use.
People shouldn't need to be tied to any physical address. A virtual address should function perfectly well. This can be in the sense of a nomadic tribe, the homeless/dispossessed (of which there are far too many right now) but it can also be in the sense of the Donald Coxeters of the world, people who simply don't have conventional lifestyles.
(For those unfamiliar with Donald Coxeter, I strongly recommend learning some maths. Any maths will do.)
So what you need is a virtual address that can map EITHER to a physical location, OR a logical location (such as a tribe), OR a transient address (see the 1996 specification for IPv6), OR an Internet address. Since you want to leave room for expansion, I recommend using at least three bits to specify the address scheme.
IPv6 isn't long enough for this, although the concept is correct. The concept is that you have a prefix that tells you what you're doing, a routing segment that tells you where you're going, and a suffix that is absolutely guaranteed unique and allows you to transition to absolutely anywhere in any form without losing anything along the way.
You can't route parcels over the Internet, you can't route multicast packets by mail, so clearly you need a protocol type in there as well. There are something like eight packet-based protocols. If we leave room to expansion, you need four bits to identify the type of packet, two to identify mode (unicast, multicast, anycast, plus one spare) and four bits to identify layer 1 constraints (what you can't send over).
That's 13 bits to define the characteristics of an address. That's three bits reserved for future use to round it to 16 bits, or two bytes.
Because this scheme is independent of user and is just as valid for probes in the Kepler Belt as for people on Earth, we're going to need a more sophisticated prefix. It's hierarchical, so all routing is as local as possible. Which is great, if you can be certain of never having more than 256 downstream next hops and one upstream hop. Not really viable if part of the intermediate system (people on aircraft, trains, other planets) is ad-hoc, because you simply don't know the topology. (Yes, I'm assuming here that Joe Bloggs' laptop on a 767 can become a relay point for any packet from any source to any destination, if that offers the best routing metric for that packet.)
You need a routing strategy that guarantees that two unique endpoints can communicate over any/all multipath lines of communication by best method possible per packet. Here, IPv6' hierarchy is not so good. It assumes one path from start to end, even though the path can change without notice. Packets midstream are supposed to be redirected.
For computers, that's tolerable. For postal mail, not so much. For postal mail to a mobile endpoint, it's too expensive and risks routing loops. For anything else, it's a disaster.
The good news is that people have dealt with weird network topologies in computing and graph theory for a long time now. The bad news is the computer geeks doing this aren't interested in ad-hoc (not much call for it in supercomputing or anywhere else butterfly networks and hypercubes are used) and mathematicians aren't any further along than static coloured Petri nets. Dynamic networks aren't yet at the bleeding edge of technology.
Not to worry, if we layer an ad-hoc routing strategy below the main routing strategy, we can create a simulation of a fixed network even though the layer underneath isn't fixed and the nodes don't correspond 1:1.
However, this means we need to specify virtual waypoints on our virtually fixed network, where the waypoints are connected via the IPv6-like scheme but labelled by means of a unique, fixed designation the ad-hoc layer can use to find where to send stuff.
This assumes that your next hop wants to have a particular property, that of being able to send on to another stage that has the next designated property, and that exactly where it goes is unimportant. So it's now more of a fuzzy hierarchy
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
See, everything is divided up by Prefecture, City, Neighborhood, Block, Building (floor, office) and numbered in no particular standard order for streets that are certainly not even laid out in a grid pattern.
If I am remembering correctly, there is a standard order for numbering buildings on a block -- it's the order in which the buildings were built.
That's precisely what PayPal does
Also, does their math add up? "40,000 to the third power worth of word combinations...can be stored in 5 megabytes?" Sounds like they could make a lot more money in the data compression business...
I come here for the love
Beats being located at rusty.trombone.cafe
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm surprised nobody's brought up Open Location / Plus Codes yet:
* More concise
* Language-independent
* Flexible precision (8FW4V7FW+G2 and "Paris V7FW+G2" both point to the Arc de Triomphe)
* Can refer to cities (8FW4), suburbs (8FW4V7), blocks of a few metres (8FW4V7FW+G2), or even a specific door
* Can use just the last characters for near-by locations (e.g. FW+G2)
* Unique and easily generated from lat/long
* FOSS support
* Already supported by Google Maps
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Seems like it might be most useful as a random domain name suggestion tool.
"stupid.coordinate.system" wasn't found, but "silly.mapping.system" is in northern Texas, between Lubbock and Amarillo.
do not read this line twice.
from their website: "As it is an algorithm our solution takes up less than 10MB, small enough to install on almost all smartphones and works across platforms and devices."
do not read this line twice.
This will not only produce a finer grid, but it will also be identical to D&D squares. This will make live action soooo much more convenient.
no, Japan is a first world country that could have many, many floors of a couple hundred meter or taller building at that 3x3 square. useless.
Now all services will be delivered to the person on the first floor below your apartment because nobody will think about the vertical direction not specified by the three words. Not very helpful.
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That might be a feature rather than a bug. You're more likely to notice being directed to the wrong state than to notice delivering a block away from where you should.
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Your property is over 900 square metres? Nice.
I can pick from 2-3 squares, including my garden, although it's a bit awkward because my neighbour shares a couple of them.
I find the choice of languages to be a bit strange. Surely the whole world will be speaking Esperanto by the time this takes off.
If you transform it to hex and leave all leading zeros in, you're darn tootin' you can remove the dots without losing any information.
But you probably don't want to go there (https://map.what3words.com/cool.beans.dude).
What part of `yes no` don't you understand?
Many of those 4 billion people already have a partial address: the city or village they live in. This system throws that out.
Their algorithm also seems to be random. You'd expect people in one city to have part of the address in common, but the example shown doesn't do that. So there is no way for a human to estimate where an address may be. Horse.battery.staple could be next door to you or on the other end of the country.
Traditionally, address systems have been worked out by governments and/or postal organizations. At their best, they provide amazing accuracy. In the Netherlands, a single 7-to-10-character code (6-character post code plus house number) provides 100% address resolution.
Some systems are less robust. I can believe the UK example (£775M in incorrect addressing cost). In the UK, addresses use 3-6 lines of text because the UK Post office didn't introduce universal house numbering (so you have to identify houses by name), and because traditionally there are up to 3 names for the village/neighborhood/region.
So there is plenty of room for improvement. But I don't think this is the way to go.
On my way to find my house (the street address was quite a ways off) I learned that my house is near "agents.educated.account." That's not really *at* my house but it's where the pin was located while I was finding my house in their silly map thing. I'm not sure how to take it. I do think that's technically on property that I own. :/
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I would just call to the helpdesk and let them figure it out :)
- Raynet --> .
I was getting directions to a trout stream in the foothills of Maine and one of the directions was, "If you get to the red barn, burned down in what? 1976 Fred? Ayuh, 62 'twas. Well there. If you get to the red barn, burned down in '76, you've gone too far. Turn around and go back 'bout a half mile and look for the path, can't hardly see it, on the right - should have some ferns this time of year."
Eventually, I found a productive stream in that area so I'm assuming it was the right one. It turned out to be a beaver dam and I had brought fly and spin casting equipment in with me so I was happy.
At any rate... I probably would have had better luck with this system. We do have, here in Maine, a road called "Katie's Crotch." I do not know if that's the official name or not.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I got it in the second try.
https://map.what3words.com/fed...
I don't think it's a problem. I just wanted to see if I could find something fun. My first was green.eggs.ham and that was not a location on the map. I was a bit disappointed. Note: I have no idea why they think this will be a problem. I just wanted to see how many tries it would take. I tried a half dozen more, after that, and I found nothing.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Meh... Up thread, I gave an address that is probably on my property. It'd be easy enough to find me anyhow. What? Is some /.er going to come visit me? Well, I'm not home right now but I'll be back in the spring, at the latest. When you're at the door, turn around, look up, in the upper left, reach your hand up on the ledge (no, it's not a mouse-trap) and find the nail. On the nail is a key. Use the key and open the door - it's easier and less expensive than you breaking my stuff. The alarm code is obvious if you know me. Seriously, it's not hard - just think about it and you'll figure it out if you know me at all.
Someone will be by in the morning, there's some food already there and lots of it in the freezer and preserved in the pantry. There's booze in the cabinet - some of it is good. Try to not puke on anything nice. Kindly leave the PCs that are on, on. There's others scattered around, make use of them as you will but don't break anything. I can probably see you and will get a text telling me that the alarm is deactivated. There's one bedroom that is off-limits. It is locked. Everything else is unlocked, make use of it as if it were your own but with slightly more care 'cause it's not.
Don't be alarmed when the neighbor shows up tomorrow. She'll go get you some regular food and probably make you some food. She'll probably have my dog with her. He responds best to Stupid Dog. He's harmless and won't even ride your leg. There are three sets of car keys in the garage. They will allow you to use any of three vehicles. The rest are off limits. Basically, if it is locked or doesn't have a key in an obvious place - you're forbidden from accessing it and I'll be kind of pissed if you do.
There you go. Help yourself and don't trash the place. If you do, it's insured but I'm still gonna be really pissed. There's unprotected guest access to the wireless. The computer should, for the most part, all have a guest account enabled. You can probably find one that automatically logs in. Kindly update them, thanks. The password will be handy, look in a desk drawer for a sticky note. Avoid the basement, if you can. There are some dangerous things down there - mostly locked up. The server closet is locked up so that's off-limits as are my gun safes.
Bring your wife and kids, it's beautiful there - that's why the house is there. The neighbors are cool and quiet - there aren't many. They may call me to see if I know you're there but they won't be too shocked.
This sort of mentality has served me well. I've had less stolen and damaged since I adopted this sort of attitude. And, well, if something happens then that's what insurance is for. So far, so good.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Hash the latitude & longitude, and use the results to select from three lookup tables.
I didn't read the article but I opened the home page up in a separate tab. It's a grid added to the map. GPS gets you "close enough" and then the grid is available to refine it. It's pretty easy and looks like it'd be serviceable.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Yeah, I've only been to Japan twice and, on both trips, they had maps posted in weather protected thingies on the side of the sidewalk. At least I'm assuming that they were maps. I read nae one single word of Japanese nor understand one single character of their writing, for I am an ignorant lout. I do, on the other hand, speak a few words - enough to get some nookie and drunk. So, there's that. I am also not poor so I can hire a cute girl to translate but that didn't work out well on my last trip. Well, let's just say that it didn't work as planned. Somehow there were mixed signals and it ended up with a strangely emotional translator.
I suppose there's some risk of there being personal information that can be construed so I'll spare you the details.
At any rate, yeah, they had maps all over the place. Some were behind Plexiglas on the sides of buildings. I seem to recall there being a map in a cab or two? I wouldn't swear to it but it might have been Japan where I saw a map on the side of a bus. While surely useful, the bus was going down the road and I'm not exactly sure what the goal of the map was? That might have been China. I dunno... As I said, I just meandered around aimlessly, met interesting people, partied a bunch, and did the typical tourist things. Hiring a guide and/or translator is a nice benefit of having a few dollars. I doubt I'll return but the trips were both mostly nice.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
That won't fix bad addressing.
I have several companies where I order stuff who seem to write the labels off the screen by hand, otherwise it wouldn't be possible that they forget the company name, misspell my last name AND my first name and I won't even mention what they do to my french language street name.
No system will change legasthenic people at the keyboard.
My adress is : correct battery horse staple
aaaaaaa
The phone numbers in Chicago were only 6 digits in the 1920s, according to my dad (including the letters for the exchange prefix) Phone numbers in the 60s included two letters and a number for the exchange prefix plus four numbers, as said above. (my prefix was Lake View 5)
When the address needs to be that specific, three words, that only designate a smallish grid element, will need complementary information as well.
It's a cute and clever system. But, it only works when the user has access to a connected device. Sure, it would be possible to publish offline maps containing all three word combinations in an area, but that's hardly as useful or usable as simply publishing maps with the proper coordinates. Additionally, without a map, delivering mail in those favelas is a PITA. Shacks typically straddle the sides of hills and mountains, so even if you know where you have to be, without a map, you'll have a hard time getting there. And, if you have a map, you have coordinates, too. Meaning that the three word shorthand becomes much less relevant. Then, as the three words superimpose a grid, they don't line up with front doors. In favelas and other density populated areas, this will be inconvenient.
Just pick the square closest to your door - with 10ft resolution you can even pick *which* door you'd prefer someone to go to. It's not easily navigable as-is, which is a loss compared to street addresses - but once translated to GPS coordinates it's easy enough, it just requires you have a cheap GPS device with the translation software. And unlike street addresses there's no inconsistencies to interfere with electronic mapping - my town has *lots* of spots where Google Maps and the like are off by a block or two, and good luck using them for rural addresses where being off by miles is not uncommon.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think the idea is not to use their website, that's just a demo application. The idea is to use their offline database to translate between an easily-memorizable "code phrase" and unambiguous GPS coordinates. Instead of trying to translate directly from your address (which introduces all the inconsistencies inherent in street-address to electronic map translations), find your house on the map. Heck, find your front door. *That* square is now your "address". Give it to anyone using a navigation system implementing this technology and they'll be able to find you without trouble.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I hope you don't have a title in front of your name (other than maybe "head idiot") because otherwise you're gonna need to lose it. Telling us we have to store and send GPS coordinates in human readable format is beyond laughable. It's like needing to call the library and have them fax you a page from a book because there's no better alternative.
I recently had to write software for an Arduino that interacts with a GPS and needs to track many waypoints. Anyone that works with those knows memory is extremely tight, and onboard eeprom is even worse. (most units have 1024 bytes TOTAL eeprom to use for powered-off storage) I also needed to store with good precision, at least as good as the GPS, which is substantially better than a city block. The format I settled on is total number of centiseconds. That fit the longigute and latitude into a pair of 32 bit unsigned longs, and had precision measured in centimeters. (varies on location)
But then I suppose you're trying to store that string data in unicode too, huh? "Dr."? God help us.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You can actually remember the coordinates? And communicate them without accidentally transposing digits? I'm not familiar with UTM, but it sounds like it's something like a distance-normalized version of latitude/longitude. And since the Earth's surface is 510 trillion m^2 (15 digits), any given 10m^2 chunk will require at least 14 digits to identify uniquely.
Plus it sounds like this has a built-in checksum system, so any communication errors will tend to be immediately recognized as such. Does UTM offer such a feature?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
rosy.brand.aardvark, third floor. (or Apartment 305)
What's the problem? Neither street addresses nor latitude/longitude handle vertical position either, yet we somehow manage to muddle through anyway.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The whole effort seems pointless to me. Ever hear of a PO box?
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Sure, but that's a lot more information to communicate and keep track of than three words. As you say, this is essentially a non-colliding coordinate hash - it's only useful with electronic assistance to perform the hashing, and GPS is cheap enough to integrate with your hashing system, which even without a map gives you a "distance and direction" compass to your desired destination.
And these days even dumb-phones often have GPS receivers for emergency response assistance, and typically more than enough memory and processing power to do the hashing. As such it just takes a little extra software to turn them into a 3-word "magic compass".
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
correct.battery.staple is in a swamp in Newfoundland, northeast of Smallwood Reservoir.
stupid.coordinate.system doesn't seem to be in that coordinate system.
So, no, not nearby.
Now all services will be delivered to the person on the first floor below your apartment because nobody will think about the vertical direction not specified by the three words. Not very helpful.
Not quite; as long as I know the people in that apartment I can get my things, without having to play Guess the Shipper whenever I order something simply because one refuses to deliver anything if given my legal address--and I thought I've been very clear that I would be giving both. If they can't work out the obvious--that the door numbers are the last two digits of each apartment's number, and the rest comes from the building (each one with its own unique street address)--then the word triplet would hopefully manage to get it so my downstairs neighbor can either hold my package for me or go "Oh, yeah, upstairs."
Given some of the absurdity involved with getting things from Regularly Lost Pizza Delivery, it'd also mean they managed to get somewhat closer to where the hell I am. I can go downstairs and wait for them. In fact, I already have--one of them once worked out that this strange string of numbers was a 'phone number' and tried calling it. (I wish I was kidding.)
I'm not at all convinced this is going to work as a complete replacement for street addresses: I see it more as a way to do a 'parity bit' for street addresses, and extremely useful when you're in a city where the first question is "But which 321 Foobar St?" as presumably only one would be also matching the location designated as absurdity.eternally.ascendant and is more human-friendly for both memorization and transmission. Numbers are good for this if and only if we're just having machines talk to machines; otherwise, the nine-digit zip codes would be pretty much all that you needed to put on things you're mailing.
More to the point, these "addresses" are designed for human use, and the brain stores words far more readily than number sequences. Same reason we use URLs online despite the fact that IP addresses are far more compact, only 8 characters in hexidecimal
As for numbers - the Earth has 510trillion m^2 of surface area, 51trillion unique 10m^2 locations, so any comprehensive addressing scheme with that resolution will require an absolute minimum of log256 (51,000,000,000,000) = 5.69bytes. Pretty bang on with your own calculations, suggesting their encoding algorithm is quite efficient.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The whole effort seems pointless to me. Ever hear of a PO box?
1. Most people without street addresses don't actually live near a post office.
2. More importantly, FedEx and UPS can't deliver to PO boxes and that means no money in their pocket.
And while 3x3m is lovely, that means that my house has several "addresses", and there doesn't seem to be a shared word between them.
Sure, you may remember your 10 digit GPS coordinate at home for a similar level of detail - but how easy is it to remember the 10 digits your friend just told you over the phone so that you could find them? Or for a taxi driver to remember the coordinates he was just dispatched to long enough to type them into a gps?
Seems to me this is mostly a system to allow the easy communication of arbitrary GPS coordinates between humans.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I bet you some people end up with very embarrassing word combinations.
I can't see why this is better than a 3d coordinate system (polar or rectangular). for most places you can ignore the altitude, but I thought lat/long solved the location problem (fine tuned by gps recently) a long time ago.
Maybe I will have to read the article....
Agreed. From what I see on a very quick browse, the words seem to be chosen randomly.
This could become a game...
Pizza.delivery.store is somewhere in China....
You have a lot to say about UTM for someone that could not be troubled to even look at the Wikipedia page.
The three word system has a checksum in the fact that there are many more word mappings than actual rectangles on earth, so there will be no match in the database... but no real mathematical checksum.
It is a fun approach to the coordinate problem, but it IS NOT giving anyone more of an address than they did with lat/lon coordinates. Besides being easy to communicate (which is a big plus) it does not actually do anything that has not already been done... just with a startup and a licensing fee...
As I described, most communication would require only four words, and those words have far less entropy that the word list used in this scheme. If I'm conversing with someone and giving them a location near me, assumptions can be made about any unspecified information. For example, if we assume that the location is in the same quadrant of the city, I only need to convey two numbers, and because they aren't hashes, even an approximate match will likely result in success.
We must also consider the nature of the numbers themselves, and human cognition. We're pretty good at remembering things, but pretty poor at remembering them accurately. Rather, we remember the connections between our memories. If someone tells me, for instance, that their location is "127, 64", I'll remember that by noting the connection to the powers of two that I already have well-memorized. On the other hand, "brass.apple.chimpanzee" has a good chance of being connected to "metal.fruit.monkey", and I'll end up trying to locate "tin.banana.gorilla". The word lists could be constructed to minimize the risk of such a cognitive hash collision, but with 40,000 words across 10 languages and being run through 4 billion memories, a small risk is still a high number of error.
Compounding that cognitive problem is the convenience of the system. If I'm talking on the phone with someone arranging a meeting, and I'm given a numeric location, I can mentally start working out roughly where that location is. It may not be close enough for navigating, but I can estimate the rough area of my destination. That serves as an error-correcting checksum on my memory that not only indicates that I've misremembered the location, but can be used to validate alternatives (like transposing numbers or coordinates). When I then use a GPS tool or dead-reckoning to navigate, I can be assured of the device's correct functioning as well as the integrity of my location information.
Of course, it's easy for us Slashdotters to assume the presence of cheap electronics... but this word-based system is being touted for use in extremely impoverished areas. These are places where long-term planning is irrelevant if one does not find the money for short-term needs. These are places where "building a home" consists of putting some garbage on the ground before sleeping. In those places, any electronics, even dumb-phones often get stolen and re-sold to wealthier folks (who usually have conventional addresses) for a few meals' worth of money.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
But you had to look them up. You had to go to a website, type both in, look at a fucking map, and determine that they are not right next to each other.
No other global coordinate system requires this, so there has to be a pretty good argument for why it is actually a good thing.
Ignored in our shiny new thing fever... why can't I just give UPS the coordinates to my door?
Thank you :)
Actually I *did* look at the wikipedia page - that's where I got the sense that it was a distance-normalized version of lat/longitude. If you can offer a better summary, can I recommend that you add an intro to that article?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I should also say, I agree it doesn't "do" anything in a technical sense, but then neither do web addresses as compared to raw IPs. The bulk of their functionality is in making things more convenient to our feeble squishy brains.
I agree that trying to license the system seems a little optimistic - conceptually they did nothing terribly innovative, but the benefit of a common standard might be enough to justify uptake by the big players.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I had an office in Costa Rica for a while. IIRC, its address was: "Banco Costa Rica, Tropicana sur, 100 metres esta, la casa esquinera con el porton negro" or "From the Banco Costa Rica Tropicana Sur branch, go 100 meters to the east. It's the house on the corner with the black gate." You don't dare repaint the gate... Many addresses downtown are specified relative to "La Coca Cola" - the old Coca Cola bottling plant, which has been closed for years, and is now a bus terminal! They actually have street names, but virtually never use them. This has been several years, so things may have changed.
With a DNS address you are providing a mapping that is continually updated by the DNS system. This would be more analogous to having a three word coordinate assigned to you 'my . personal . address' that you can update with different lat/lon values as you see fit. This has a real technical value (besides being handy to humans) in that you can move a service to a different address without the maintenance of sending a new IP to all end users manually.
This is more like providing a static mapping of names to every ipv4 address that exists, so 192.168.0.1 would always be 'ground meat sausage banana'.
Maybe I am missing something, but what is the advantage of the words being randomly assigned? In UTM, we know that zones 10U - 20R are vaguely covering the USA, and that zones starting with 10 are west of those starting with 11. Is that a design shortcoming somehow?
Since the globe will never get larger or smaller, and the only really challenging part is deciding how to cover the glove with regular sized squares, how is it impossible to make an open source mapping?
I mentioned UTM in another post to you because it is a pretty good system for providing maps that have units in (approximate) meters instead of degrees. It is a well known standard that could easily be augmented with names for square areas. MGRS is an example of this narrowing the globe into 100km(ish) square units.
in the centre of the startup office is a 3x3 metre hole called investors.money.dump
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
so where is bum,fuck,egypt ?
Nullius in verba
So my address is "stays.moment.loving". (I don't care if you know where I live, don't freak out.) Which is unfortunately very different than "stay.moment.loving", or "stays.moment.love", or other variations. That's unfortunate. Did they need the extra address space that these conjugations permit? Seems more useful to be able to just translate the root words "stay", "moment", "love" to some other language and have it still work. Conjugations often don't translate well. What if they decreased the resolution to, say, 5m by 5m, could they just go by root words?
Also, you may still need a number, if you live on the 20th floor or something like that.
--- wad
Anyway, I love one of the blocks that could map to my place: "drones totally toasted" ;)
Not that anyone would go to Iceland anyways, but you just gave your physical location to within 4.2 meters on an internet forum.
Or at least *someone's* physical location.
Simple math:
Earth circumference is about 40075 km associated with 360 degrees of angle (lat,lon). This means at most 111.32 km per degree, i.e., less than 31 m per angular sec. If we use GPS coords and two typical 'float' (32-bit) with epsilon accuracy at least 10e-5 we can have 5-digit decimals or roughly 1.2 m resolution, which is far smaller than the 5-8 m maximum resolution of commercial GPS.
So, with just 8 bytes we can have more than enough location registration anywhere on the Earth with the maximum available technology today. Unless these guys have found a way to pack 3 readable words in just 8 chars with no collisions whatsoever, they deserve the next Turing award - or the "bubble of the year" award in any other case.
"Abashed the Devil stood, and felt how awful goodness is..."
Your second guess was "Fedora Elephant Lolliop"? You have some interesting guesses ;)
That brings up another interesting point. If people do get a wrong guess., 2/3rds of the time it will be out in the ocean. Even on land you'll hit a lot of places where virtually nobody lives, like Antarctica and such. And even where people do live... "Hmm, why do I suspect that what appears to be Yupic natives illegally living in ANWR aren't ordering commemorative NASCAR coins and an electric weed eater"? You know, it just seems that the odds of a misheard shipment resolving into a real, believable location are extremely low.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
After I saw some of the names in the links, I just went with an outlandish guess. My first was, as I recall, "elephant pink pajamas" which didn't get me anything.
I think, and I'm not sure, that this is supposed to be used in conjunction with other things. Namely, you get the address to your square and use it then others use GPS to narrow it down and then can see the overlay and figure it out from there. :/ I don't really know. I can't see it being of *any* value otherwise. It's more like a solution looking for a problem than anything else. I don't think it'll help the people they claim it will as much as they seem to think it will. I could, on the other hand, see it coming in handy for things like refugee camps and the likes but is there much need for that?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
1. Most people without street addresses don't actually live near a post office.
But they live near a bank? What place is this exactly?
More importantly, FedEx and UPS can't deliver to PO boxes
But they can deliver to this new weirdo system which no-one knows of? Unlike a street name, which most people in a town know the names of, how does a UPS/Fedex driver know where each 3 word place is in the universe?
The obvious problem is getting everyone to use it, as they say in their video it would need to be added to services such google maps and integrated into GPS apps. Places like Africa, India, SE Asia, even outback communities here in Oz would benefit greatly.
This system is too stupid to even argue. Physical addresses need to benefit humans as well as machines, but this doesn't seem to address the first requirement in any way.
How much brain space does it take to know where all 57 trillion 3m2 locations are?
The current system may not be perfect, but it works quite well for people without the need for a database lookup.
It also makes it impossible to validate a unique address since the 3 words don't correspond to a legal boundary (ie my property address is legally mine). Stupid idea with so many holes it's not funny.
Your house already has several addresses. Street/st/St., Apt./Ste./Suite/Flat/#/Rm/Room, etc. Do you write the county/district? Do you write the state or omit it? What if you write the county instead of the city? Computers already handle all this when mail is processed. Same with names. You ever notice it's somehow never a problem if you omit your middle name on anything, or if you use your middle initial instead of writing out the full word? This new system is a many-to-one mapping of coordinate->residence. If you need more granularity, you can have it. "Room B, Horse Turbine Draw".
The bigger issue is the vertical dimension, which could be handled by adding extra data, if all buildings were made like in the US. They aren't. My last apartment was on "floor 6.5". And I think slums can be worse--if buildings grow together, a room could be on two different floors, depending on how you count. And the internal location won't necessarily correspond to the entrance of the building. This system seems like it's only for sparse locations.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
No, it's not a vast improvement. It's yet another incompatible system with its own problems.
chew.bump.fantastic and chews.bumps.fantastic are in different states. Can you see the problems yet?
You say this is easy for computers to manipulate. How about determining which addresses refer to the same "postal addresses" when my front door and the mailbox at the end of my driveway have completely different words?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Yes 'leave aura corrugated' is so easy and natural for a person to remember. Be careful though because 'leave aura corrugated' is in Alaska but 'leaves aura corrugated' is in Virgina. Damn where is that package of insulin shots I ordered? It should've been here days ago!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat