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Giving Everyone in the World an Address

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Re: Giving Everyone in the World an Address

#31

Post by enobrev »

grecy wrote: post #26

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 the…

After visiting a friend in Costa Rica a few years ago, I asked his address as we were leaving so I could send him stuff from the states. It was "800m up from the cemetery in [the town below his house on the mountain]".

Re: Giving Everyone in the World an Address

#32

Post by _kst_ »

enobrev wrote: post #31
grecy wrote: post #26

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 the…

After visiting a friend in Costa Rica a few years ago, I asked his address as we were leaving so I could send him stuff from the states. It was "800m up from the cemetery in [the town below his house on the mountain]".

"... and turn left where the big tree used to be."

Re: Giving Everyone in the World an Address

#33

Post by FroshKiller »

bliti wrote: post #29
grecy wrote: post #26

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 the…

Oh, classic address trap. I feel for you, my friend. It makes you wonder about introducing a new address system that takes into account your actual location in the globe (with GPS). Not a trivial undertaking itself. I assume it has been thought off before. Anyone have more info on this type of setup?

Mapcode was a submission a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8052908

Re: Giving Everyone in the World an Address

#34

Post by yosito »

grecy wrote: post #26

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 the…

I've lived in the Dominican Republic for several years. Addresses in some communities here tend to be like, "Over by Carlos' house where Maria's grandma used to live."

Re: Giving Everyone in the World an Address

#35

Post by Animats »

billpg wrote: post #4
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #2

Usual disclaimer for what3words: neat idea, shame the data/algorithm is closed. In the Rio example, a postal service or courier would have to pay w3w to license the words->lat/lon lookup before they could deliver anything.

I imagine, from their point of view, that's the point.

Which is a big problem. They want to own the address of most of the people in the world. They might get away with it, too; their word list can be copyrighted.

Re: Giving Everyone in the World an Address

#37

Post by saraid216 »

coherentpony wrote: post #22

> 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…

That's true for large chunks, but I'd imagine 3 meters is small enough to remain useful well past the 85 degrees latitude mark. Straight Dope informs me that the circumference up there is approximately 24k miles, which becomes 38,624,256 meters which means approximately 1 million divisions.

As long as the system works, what's the big deal?

Re: Giving Everyone in the World an Address

#38

Post by anamexis »

saraid216 wrote: post #37
coherentpony wrote: post #22

> 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…

That's true for large chunks, but I'd imagine 3 meters is small enough to remain useful well past the 85 degrees latitude mark. Straight Dope informs me that the circumference up there is approximately 24k miles, which becomes 38,624,256 meters which means approximately 1 million divisions. As long as the system works, what's the big deal?

24k miles is Earth's circumference at the equator, not 85 degrees latitude.

Re: Giving Everyone in the World an Address

#39

Post by maemre »

abstractbeliefs wrote: post #21
mauvehaus wrote: post #10

I may be missing something here, but it seems like this solves only half of the problem. Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique names, but in order to actually deliver something you need to be able to navigate to it. The advantage of a (building number, street name, locality) address is that it identifies some point on the edge of a graph, and that the edges and vertices are well-known. I'll g…

Those squares can be mapped back to regular lat/long and navigated by regular GPS/SatNav. I guess the main thing here is that we can now express "GPS coordinates" in easy to remember and human-friendly phrases.

That is partially done with Geohash (http://geohash.org/) and other variants. The actual step here is usage of dictionary words as digits for encoding instead of a bunch of random characters.

Alternatively, such a system can be done by interleaving bitstrings for coordinates then converting the result to base 10000 or something and encoding each digit with a word. By using that you will get a little bit of hierarchy (the coordinates starting with same digits will correspond to sequences starting with same word). In this way we will know which zone starts with e.g. chocolate.kit.photo then it will be easier to navigate. Of course it won't beat a graph-based solution like street and building numbers.

Re: Giving Everyone in the World an Address

#40

Post by saraid216 »

anamexis wrote: post #38
saraid216 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true for large chunks, but I'd imagine 3 meters is small enough to remain useful well past the 85 degrees latitude mark. Straight Dope informs me that the circumference up there is approximately 24k miles, which becomes 38,624,256 meters which means approximately 1 million divisions. As long as the system works, what's the big deal?

24k miles is Earth's circumference at the equator, not 85 degrees latitude.

Dammit. I thought I had been careful enough to get the correct number.

Alright. Picking the simplest formula off Wikipedia, cosine of 85 degrees is ~0.0871557 times a (6378137m) times pi is ~1746383.9m for the circumference. That's still approximately 500k squares at the exact latitude. My point is one of the sheer magnitude still available.

What I should do is calculate how many decimal points down from 90 degrees 3 meters is and get that circumference, since that's the low bound, but I'm not really feeling up to the number-plugging.

I could be incorrect about what a is; I presumed it is the semi-major axis on WGS84, but I might have picked the wrong thing.

...

Ooh. I forgot there's a Wolfram|Alpha. ... And 10 minutes later I haven't convinced the input parsing to give me what I want. Oh well.

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