Giving Everyone in the World an Address

> Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique names ...

I'm actually not convinced. Squares don't tessellate a sphere; you have singularities at the poles. Sure, there aren't many people living there, but it's important to think about the limitations of this approach.

If you think this is really just an edge case, remember that projecting a square onto a sphere necessitates some distortion. You can choose to distort angles or distances, but you have to choose one. For distances, well, a "3m x 3m" square becomes essentially meaningless. The problem gets worse when you increase latitude. Canada, northern Europe and Russia are especially prone to this problem. The same argument applies to locations in the Southern hemisphere as well.

I have to think "ugh" when I read about this idea. Random three words to every square seems like chaos to me.

These also take a lot of bytes to store. In the US, every address or "delivery point" can be represented by 11 numerals: zip+4+2. If you read the barcodes on your received US mail, you will see the normally invisible +2. (zip+4 is usually granular to one side of a block or MDU mailbox cluster, and the extra two numerals represent a unique mailbox within the zip+4.)

Amateur radio people have organized the world into grid squares, which are a bit larger as they are minutes of latitude/longitude in either dimension. However they are like postcodes, in that once you are familiar with the system you can glance at one and have a rough idea of whether it is near you or not, and where on the map it is. For instance, the White House in Washington is within grid square FM18lv.

Introduction to the grid square system at [1] and a rudimentary mapping tool at [2].

I'm not sure if there is any reason why the grid squares couldn't be further subdivided. Even then, this wouldn't solve the problem in some places I've been: The barrios around Caracas are not only tightly packed in two dimensions, but they have been building their homes on top of each other, so a 3m x 3m square could very well contain five homes or more.

[1]: http://www.arrl.org/grid-squares [2]: http://www.qrz.com/gridmapper

I recently learned that Northern Canada has this problem.

Most of the communities in the Arctic do not have street names. Canada Post has been forcing them in the last few years to start, so, for example, a community called Aklavik officially has one street, Aklv St. Even though there are physically more streets than that, and streets at right angles, they're all called Aklv St.

I work for the telco that services these communities, and it's hilarious to look at the street addresses in our plant and provisioning systems - addresses are literally "brown bld across from red bld", "House near lake" etc.

Not surprisingly, I'm having trouble writing code to parse street addresses :)

I like how my home/property has ~70 addresses and none are similar. To use this I'll need to pick one and make sure its used exclusively, otherwise I'd not only confuse the postman, I'd confuse anyone I need to give location to. Without organization or structure of the words I don't see how it's helpful. Knowing the destination and my latitude and longitude, at least I'd know I was close, without having to reference this service.

An new address solution should solve multiple issues, utilizing existing knowlege, without making it more difficult.

Logical organization should be included. For example, we typically know where England or Canada is, or know the difference between SanDiego.California or adrar.algeria and subdivide from there. At least at this point, most people would know a general area without having to reference forgot.paved.ruler from an external source. "Hey meet me at forgot.paved.ruler, it's just down the way from mixers.gulls.sing, or was that sings?.." Forgetting that 's' puts you on another continent, but it's close enough?

This is how I would do it. Your base unit is a circle with radius 180cm, which is approximately 10m^2.

Place one circle at the north pole. Your starting angle is 0 degrees longitude. Place a circle at the south pole, and slide it along that line of longitude until your sliding circle touches any other already-placed circle. Then "roll" the circle to the local minimum distance between its center and the north pole; whenever moving it an epsilon east or west would not allow the center to get closer, stop. Add 222.5 degrees (actually (sqrt(5)-1)*180), modulo 360. Slide in another circle. Add 222.5 degrees, modulo 360. Slide in another circle. Repeat until the circle placed at the south pole intersects an already-placed circle.

Move each center point to the nearest grid-based point at a given precision, then name them. If you stand on the named point, you should be able to touch anything using that point as its address, without moving your feet.

A 10m^2 unit cell is a very human-sized measurement, but you are correct that forcing them into an orthographic grid is pointless when the addresses are names and not numbers.

There's no way any living human could memorize the name-location mapping for all addresses, or even just all the land-based addresses. People would need to look them up in an index from a numeric coordinate, and vice versa. As such, there is no need to orient the address points to any existing coordinate system.