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The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

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Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#91

Post by raverbashing »

SilverBirch wrote: post #88

This type of thing clearly just doesn't tweak me the way that it tweaks some people. I'm not convinced you could end up with a great way of assigning airport codes today, even if we completely started fresh and we assumed no new airports are ever created. In fact, in a lot of cases the weird corner cases are often situations where you can ask "Would it have been better to stringently apply the rule, or to bend the ru…

Pretty much this.

As much as I like CGP calling it "maddening" is a bit clickbaity and ignoring a lot of history there

This is like jargon, it exists for a reason, and while some choices could definitely have been better, it is what it is

Oh but there is a better choice, the ICAO codes. But the "English please" crowd is never satisfied

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#92

Post by sigmoid10 »

SilverBirch wrote: post #88

This type of thing clearly just doesn't tweak me the way that it tweaks some people. I'm not convinced you could end up with a great way of assigning airport codes today, even if we completely started fresh and we assumed no new airports are ever created. In fact, in a lot of cases the weird corner cases are often situations where you can ask "Would it have been better to stringently apply the rule, or to bend the ru…

This is true for any area that constantly has to come up with new names for things. In physics for example, terms like "recombination," "technicolor" or just "virtual particle" have become profoundly confusing to new students, but naming everything after people or completely new invented words free of misleading context would probably be even worse. Even the term "black hole" was probably not the smartest choice in hindsight, but some people actually pushed back because they considered it obscene back then. This made people like John Wheeler only feel incited and they started publishing papers claiming "black holes have no hair" - which even Feynman thought was a bit too much. And yet today everyone acts like this is perfectly adequate terminology in physics and only people outside the field might get confused.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#93

Post by ThunderSizzle »

lostlogin wrote: post #68
krick wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or better try telephone region codes, which are ambiguous when a phone number is written as a consecutive string of digits, without +/()/-/space.

Or just the date. The dumb game of dd/mm/yy versus mm/dd/yy when you live in a dd/mm/yy country is infuriating.

I started using yyyy-mm-dd for everything, since that is the most text-friendly sortable date. I haven't come across yyyy-dd-mm, but I'm sure someone uses it.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#94

Post by scrlk »

agurk wrote: post #78
Symbiote wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Britain has different length area codes. 020 is London, 0121 is Birmingham, 01234 is Bedford, 015396 is Sedburgh, population 2700. The local part of the number is 8, 7, 6 or 5 digits accordingly. I never found this to be a problem. If you're dialing locally from a land line, you usually know the local code. For national or international dialing it doesn't matter. Occasionally people put the space in the wrong place,…

> Occasionally people put the space in the wrong place, like 0207 77777777 for a London number To expand on this, the codes have changed a lot over time. London used to have separate codes for inner and outer London, which at their last iteration were 0171 and 0181. These were replaced in 2000 with (020)7 and (020)8 respectively. At this point it still made sense, if inaccurately, to group the first four numbers. The…

Wikipedia has a surprisingly detailed article about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_telephone_code_misconceptio...

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#95

Post by Ekaros »

xattt wrote: post #90
lostlogin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just the date. The dumb game of dd/mm/yy versus mm/dd/yy when you live in a dd/mm/yy country is infuriating.

Write the month as a three letter code and your ambiguity is solved.

There must be some language pair that has some collision with that.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#98

Post by raverbashing »

fragmede wrote: post #73
krick wrote: post #48

Maddening mess? Come on, this is silly nitpicking. Airport codes are as clean an logical as it gets with century-old international standards. In fact, most of "maddening mess" in the video can be essentially ignored, which author basically admits by stating closer to the end that these are used by different organizations for different purposes. It is just that story is being told backwards and in a snarky voice for d…

You might (not) enjoy CGP Grey's video about runway numbering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD6bPNZRRbQ then, instead.

Runway numbering in one HN comment: it's the magnetic heading of the runway, minus the last digit. If more than one with the same heading, add L or R (for left/right) accordingly.

If more than one even with L/R markings, add 1 to the heading (or maybe take 1, not sure).

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#99

Post by skitter »

Interestingly, on OpenBSD /usr/share/misc/airport lists IATA codes, but only adds airports where an OpenBSD developer has landed and confirmed it actually exists. Quoting the manpage:

> There are also railway stations with IATA codes. These may not be listed, except if someone landed there by plane and survived to update the file.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#100

Post by manfre »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #93
lostlogin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just the date. The dumb game of dd/mm/yy versus mm/dd/yy when you live in a dd/mm/yy country is infuriating.

I started using yyyy-mm-dd for everything, since that is the most text-friendly sortable date. I haven't come across yyyy-dd-mm, but I'm sure someone uses it.

ISO8601 https://xkcd.com/1179/
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