What Three Words always seemed like a stupid idea to me. Not much thinking beyond: Locations need bits, English words have bits, Let's use one for the other. Addresses already work. Cellphones have GPS. It seems like an idea for a problem that doesnt exist. What next, mapping words to phone numbers?
Why Bother with What Three Words?
141–150 of 336 posts
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more than occasionally broken, there's billions of people living in spots where it doesn't work.
Billions? You've found navigation by street number to be unreliable in 20+ % of locations? Either way, it does work for several billion other people.
I haven't personally found it to be the case, but I do know that people in much of the developing world simply don't have/use street addresses like are common in the "West".
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that ringleader.kilt.comedians and since.duplicated.backswing have no relation at all to each other, and don't communicate to the user their spatial relationship. On the other hand, you could infer that 1234 W Something Rd is nearby 1238 W Something Rd. EDIT: Also, given a set of lat/long coordinates, regardless of the precision, you could infer their spatial relationship as well.
Yea, in LL, 1 second of arc at the equator is about 101 feet or 31 meters which means it's pretty easy to figure out relative coordinates, particularly N/S. Even UTM/MGRS is better in this respect.
That UTM/MGRS even exits seems to be lost on most pitching W3W.
For great circles the metric ratio is close to 40000km/360. A simple trick would be converting to 400gon first¹, but even using 111 Km per degree is a useful approximation.
So 0.01 decimal degree difference in latitude is always 1.11km or roughly 1km. All you need to remember is your length of 1 degree longitude at given latitude which is the following basic trigonmetric relation:
0.01deg = cos(lat) * 1.11km
Cheap linear approximation will do well here too. In South to North order: So usually factor down to 0.8 to 0.7 (38 to 48 Miles) if you live anywhere in the continental US. For Europe it's 84km in Rome, 72km in Paris, 69 in London, 67 in Berlin and 56km in Stockholm
And for approximating local distances it's simply those metric deltas with pythagoras, no need for Haversine or even non-spherical earth models here.
The most important relation for anyone who is into earth and the metric system, is that it's 10M meters or 10,000 km from pole to equator per original definition. You dont even need to remember the earth radius, since that's also defined by 4x10,000km/2π historically.
¹It's a shame that the metric revolution stopped short of Gradians, when it comes to full metric convenience here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#Histor...
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure how you got that from what I typed. The fact is the 4 coordinates (two numeric, two with the stupid "N/S/E/W" corresponding with traditional), decimal points, and reverse order from an X,Y coordinate system, are hardly easy to memorize. They're next to impossible to memorize. What part of pencil and paper didn't come across?
Perhaps an example would have helped. With numeric coordinates relative orientation is fairly intuitive. It's simple arithmetic. How does your proposed system replicate that?
He's selling snake oil. For being "open" he has no examples. No previous talk of this in his profile.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#145I once thought about W3W like a DNS. Registered companies and businesses could purchase a "number plate" e.g. "jakes.superior.plumbing" and then keep that number plate on a subscription basis, much like owning a domain name. If the business moved address, the geographic coordinates could be updated in the back-end so that "jakes.superior.plumbing" always resolved to the correct location. This, I thought, would be a great monetization strategy and beneficial to many businesses. Even for folks who live in e.g. Dubai or rural areas where there there has been no proper addressing strategy from the municipal side, to be able to purchase a "name" of 3 words or whatever, in order to be found easily - would be hugely beneficial. Furthermore, instead of the 3 words being hard-coded to a specific cell on a world-grid, you take the name with you. If you move house, or move business, just change the coordinates and keep the name. I did mention this to W3W management when I spoke with them in past dealings; they brushed the idea off as useless because they didn't have the means or capacity to maintain a changing directory of names/coordinates. Or perhaps they just thought my idea was silly compared to their approach of dividing the world into trillions of cells and giving each cell an identifier.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#146W3W suffers horribly from "call for price". You won't catch Google or Amazon making you call and talk to a human being (on GMT time no less) before figuring out if you can afford their service. I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W: •Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you don't need to tack on e…
What benefit do you have over Plus Codes ( https://plus.codes/ )? I only learned about them from this thread, but they seem to solve the problem quite well, and there's no premium component.
Plus Codes have little application outside building addressing. If I tell you I'm at 4CFM+JW, come get me, you're going to be pretty helpless, because I didn't include the city.
Want to shift a little to the east? 4CFM+JX works, but 4CFM+JY? Whoops. How about north or south? Maybe there's a way to do that, but I haven't found it yet.
How about upping the precision? The size of the square is maybe 4X the W3W grid cell, but not aware of a way for plus codes to achieve a smaller cell.
I'm not out here to bash everybody else's solutions. They're all pretty good, particularly when you limit them to particular applications. Mine just happens to be a slightly improved approach, and slightly less full of drawbacks than everybody else's.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#147The US (as well as other countries) has had a grid mapping system for hundreds of years[0]. It's just way less useful than GPS. The only time I've seen PLSS used over GPS is for legacy reasons.
[0] Public Land Survey System https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/a_plss.html
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure how you got that from what I typed. The fact is the 4 coordinates (two numeric, two with the stupid "N/S/E/W" corresponding with traditional), decimal points, and reverse order from an X,Y coordinate system, are hardly easy to memorize. They're next to impossible to memorize. What part of pencil and paper didn't come across?
Because, from what you've described, it sounds like your system will look like base64-encoded coordinates. Ie 39.022874, 21.913384 will be IJASDO, which isn't as easy to memorize as W3W.
Not base64, but similar.
I think "IJASDO" would be way easier to memorize than person.guards.gangs (I will definitely give W3W credit for picking unintentioned yet humorous word combos), particularly if English wasn't my first language.
If you disagree with this logic, explain to me why automobiles' license plates should use W3W-style. ("idiot-driver-honk").
Wait, was that first one persons.guards.gangs? persons.guard.gangs? You'd think if you were one off in the dictionary it would still get you where you needed to go, but no.
W3W is a clever product. Mine is also clever, and this industry will never have one-size-fits-all, and that's ok.
W3W has a not-so-clever marketing approach. I doubt plus.codes would have ever seen the light of day if W3W had a more FAANG-style approach to marketing.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#149Lost me at "The world is a sphere"
1) It has link to "Oblate spheroid".
2) On Google Maps and almost all other popular maps on the web, Earth is a sphere, see EPSG:3857
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#150Why don't you just make an open alternative is this is so disconcerting to you?
Sure downvote me for asking you to be accountable for your dispositions.
> .@what3words is bad technical idea
> ethically terrible too.
I don't understand how someone would hold this tweet up as anything but an echo of their own opinion. There's nothing technically or ethically wrong with the product, despite a few pages of rambling about what they think is right or wrong, morally.