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Why Bother with What Three Words?

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#161

Post by Scaevolus »

mchannon wrote: post #146
scott_s wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

8GC2CMXR+X63 is a global plus code with 3x3m precision.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#162

Post by scythe »

Isn't the algorithm for this trivial? Convert the lat-long to a single number by Z-order (Hilbert curve if you like pain), optionally use xor and bit-rotations (which are both bijective) to scramble it, then divide it into chunks and lookup in a dictionary. How do you sell that to an investor who knows how to code?

(It can be made hierarchical, just chunk the lat-long first!) (Just clean the dictionary of any homonyms!) (You can get error correction by XORing the three word indexes together to generate a check word!)

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#163

Post by Shivatron »

mywittyname wrote: post #140
jccalhoun wrote: post #65

Mostly off topic: I would like a URL shortener that uses a similar system so that instead of giving me small.url/b3DmQ it would be small.url/MouseHatDoor because I will sometimes share a link with my students and there is always one student who can't get it to work because they type it wrong or something. I can send them the link through a course announcement but it is more convenient to put a short url on screen and…

The NATO alphabet is worth learning for just these situations.

Probably not. First of all, "bravo tree uppercase delta mike uppercase quebec" isn't as memorable as "mouse hat door". Further, the NATO alphabet works because both the speaker and the listener understand what's coming. If the listener isn't familiar, then the speaker often needs to revert to "s as in sierra, k as in kilo, y as in yankee"—which tends to cause even more confusion as the listener then needs to parse the (intentionally) unusual set of words.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#164

Post by Quanttek »

mchannon wrote: post #146
scott_s wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm no expert but regarding your question on precision: afaik the longer the plus code is, the more precise it gets

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#165

Post by stuart78 »

W3W seems to me like it adds more confusion to finding places than it adds clarity. The word choices involve tenses and plurals, which makes them seem quite east to get wrong from memory. This is exhibited in two of the carousels on their homepage:

* actors.asking.print * manage.mercy.items

Both plural nouns could easily be confused for the singular form, and when I was typing the above, I in fact mixed it up on items.

I think the advantage of lat/long and plus codes is that they are more obscure. They don't make the odd promise of being memorable.

With W3W codes, are we supposed to remember more than one of these? I know the addresses of my parents and a few friends, but rely on mechanical storage for all others. I understand the advantage of having a more universal way of identifying precise locations, but don't see cute password-like names as a helpful solution to that.

Let computers do what computers do well. which is store and quickly serve up inscrutable bits of information.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#166

Post by improbable22 »

xondono wrote: post #154

Maybe it’s because english is not my native language but, how does it do with spelling? Are now-sphere-dew and now-sphere-due two distinct locations? Are they at least close enough?

I think they are likely to be both valid, but are deliberately far apart.

So you don't get a checksum; perhaps if you are typing your own address in and are shown a map you will wonder why it's showing Timbuktu... but if someone else's address is in the middle of Siberia you won't know how to correct it.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#168

Post by LeoPanthera »

I have always wondered why the Maidenhead Locator System did not catch on outside of Amateur Radio.

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

It converts geographic positions into short strings of characters, but notably, a truncated string still points to the same location, just less precisely.

For example, the ferry building in San Francisco is CM87TT20, but CM87TT is a larger square that encompasses Treasure Island as well, and CM87 is most of the bay area.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#169

Post by yorwba »

dragonwriter wrote: post #151
yorwba wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The formula might not be elegant, but if you have an exact description of tectonic drift, you can absolutely have a code that refers to a fixed location on its plate, rather than to a point on some imaginary sphere. GPS coordinates are just one possible solution, there's no reason to consider equivalent encodings of the same values as the only alternatives.

> The formula might not be elegant, but if you have an exact description of tectonic drift, you can absolutely have a code that refers to a fixed location on its plate, rather than to a point on some imaginary sphere. Sure, but (1) is there a good way to get an exact description of tectonic drift?, And (2) does tectonic drift account for all shifts of surface features (intuitively, it would not necessarily for featur…

(1) By measuring the location of a few designated landmarks, it should be possible to extrapolate tectonic-level shifts to all other points on the same plate pretty accurately.

(2) Changes on a smaller scale, e.g. due to a landslide, are probably less surprising when they cause a change in location codes. On the other hand, there might be some houses on a hill somewhere slowly sliding down, where the system doesn't work.

(I also realized that my previous comment can be read as supporting a flat earth theory, especially the part about the sphere being imaginary. I firmly believe that the earth is a bumpy ellipsoid, though.)

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#170

Post by jnaddef »

mchannon wrote: post #53

W3W 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…

It is actually a form of "foot in the door" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique.

If you see a high pricing on their webpage you might go away immediately. But if you make the effort to calling them, you are already committing yourself and you are more likely to accept a higher price than you would have if it was easily accessible.

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