Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In greek "June" and "July" start with the same three letters
The maddening mess of airport codes [video]
101–110 of 159 posts
Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]
#102Wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. If you think of the codes as meaningless IDs, there are no problems. The system is unambiguous which is the most important thing. MEL refers to one specific airport and you can know that for sure. All the problems in the video come from trying to use the letters to guess the areas they refer to. They might be related but they might also not. And that’s fine. Your booking site will…
Relative to the infinite recursion of metric paper, it is abject chaos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI
The problem with metric paper is that A4 sucks for printing text—it’s too wide for a reasonable line length at 10 or 11pt, whence e.g. the sprawling margins of the standard LaTeX classes with the a4paper option; and A5 is definitely on the small side. (A single wide margin beside a long text column, like in the Berkeley physics course, Spivak’s Calculus, or Tufte’s books, is one possible way of taking advantage of wide paper, but it’s not used that often.) A period-2 infinite sequence with alternating 3:2 and 4:3 sheets, which in one form or another has been used for books since forever, would have been better, but apparently the committee(?) did not like it for some reason.
Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]
#103The entire world of airline coding (as in "encoding") is fascinating to me: there are all kinds of ancient semi-human-readable formats like ACARS[1] and IATA Teletype[2] that are still pushing data around. Not the mention standard meal codes[3], like BLML for "bland meal" and CLML for "celebration cake meal." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_teletype_system [3]: http…
Absolutely hellish indeed. I had to write a parser for some kind of custom IATA PAXLST [0] (passenger list) that was coming from an ancient automated email system and I was dumbstruck by the weirdness of it all while reading the documentation.
UNB+UNOA:4+SWAIR+NZCS+080708:0545+000000011'
UNG+PAXLST+SWAIR+ NZCS+080708:0545+11+UN+D:05B'
UNH+SWCA749+PAXLST:D:05B:UN:IATA'
BGM+745'
NAD+MS+++WILLIAMS:JANE '
COM+41 22 797 2025:TE+41 22 788 4689:FX'
TDT+20+SW679'
LOC+125+GVA'
DTM+189:020322'
LOC+87+BOS'
DTM+232:020322’
DTM+189:020322'
LOC+92+ATL'
DTM+232:020322'
DTM+189:020323'
LOC+130+SFO’
DTM+232:020323'
NAD+DDU+++WINDSOR:ELIZABETH:R'
ATT+2++F'
DTM+329:720623'
LOC+178+NCE'
LOC+22+ATL'
LOC+179+MEX'
LOC+174+FRA’
NAT+2+CHE'
RFF+AVF:RXDWWH’
DOC+P+564SBB41'
DTM+36+051215'
LOC+91+FRA'
DOC+V+VV258DD7'
DTM+182+021212'
DTM+36+0421201'
LOC+91+:::MARSEILLES’
CNT+42:1'
UNT+33+SWCA749'
UNE+1+11'
UNZ+1+000000011'
Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]
#104This 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 h…
I mean a lot of naming happened in the 70s - in California.
Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]
#105You think airport codes are bad, try airline codes. The IATA standard is still only two (2) letters, leading to insanity like recycling codes after one airline dies, meaning the meaning of the code is time-dependent, and, even worse, "controlled duplicates" where two airlines are intentionally assigned the same code at the same time , since they fly in different parts of the world and pinky-promise to never overlap.…
Or better try telephone region codes, which are ambiguous when a phone number is written as a consecutive string of digits, without +/()/-/space.
Every now and then I’ll get a spam call and the caller ID has spaces in the wrong place. My iPhone tells me the call is from +33 1 … which is in Paris, instead of area code 331, which is Chicago. I don’t know if the phone system is relying on the caller to properly format their number, but it seems like a mad way to handle things.
Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]
#106“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.”
Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]
#107Earlier 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.
It's mostly "why must Americans be like this?" while leaving in virtually any other country in the world (countries with a MDY date format are a handful).
Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]
#108You think airport codes are bad, try airline codes. The IATA standard is still only two (2) letters, leading to insanity like recycling codes after one airline dies, meaning the meaning of the code is time-dependent, and, even worse, "controlled duplicates" where two airlines are intentionally assigned the same code at the same time , since they fly in different parts of the world and pinky-promise to never overlap.…
> leading to insanity like recycling codes after one airline dies, meaning the meaning of the code is time-dependent
Why is this insanity? Almost everything in real life is time dependent. I think this is just insanity to devs who want to fit the world to their data model rather than the other way around which is how it should be.
Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say this as if it’s a universal thing, like IATA codes, but I assume it’s a quirk of some particular country? My region code definitely does not have this. Sounds pretty nuts to me btw, how does that work when you turn it into standard E.164 format like “+123456789”?
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,…
It kind of makes sense. You can then have a mix of large and small area codes. A small number of large cities and a larger number of small towns. The problem of course appears when an area starts to grow...
Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I wonder if any languages have a different starting letter for each of the 12 months. Bonus if the days of the week are also different.