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Why Bother with What Three Words?

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Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#281

Post by ltbarcly3 »

rtkwe wrote: post #279
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #276

There is so much "righteous indignation" in this thread! I get that this Three Words thing might not be perfect, but a lot of the criticisms in the posting are nonsense. The furthest anything moved in the Japan earthquake was around 2.5 meters. Why act like this is some kind of deal breaker? If you had used latitude and longitude it would still be wrong by 2.5 meters if you didn't update it after the quake. Some peop…

2.5 meters is a problem in W3W. The squares are 3mx3m so most things are going to change "location." Combine that with the nonlocality of the W3W encoding and suddenly anything used has a completely different 'address' where with traditional latitude and longitude 2.5 meters doesn't drastically change.

So you just keep using the old address code or words or whatever, I really don't understand why this is a problem. What is going to happen if people come looking for you and you are 2.5 meters to the left of where they show up? Your original geolocation is almost certainly less accurate than 2.5 meters to begin with, no matter how you specify it. Add to that the fact that if it's a physical location with geographical extent, like say a building that is more than 5 feet across, you are arbitrarily picking your location from within all the possible locations that fall inside that building.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#282

Post by Stratoscope »

stuart78 wrote: post #165

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 item…

> The word choices involve tenses and plurals, which makes them seem quite east to get wrong from memory. [emphasis added]

A delightful and no doubt unintentional example of a problem very similar to what you're talking about!

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#283

Post by joshocar »

turc1656 wrote: post #195

The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart. If anything, they shou…

That is a good idea, but after thinking about it for a bit I think it would be a very hard thing to create.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#284

Post by [deleted] »

mchannon wrote: post #62
estomagordo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your solution won't result in "coordinates" easily memorized by humans or easily translated to the very vast majority of map implementations?

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?

[deleted]

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#285

Post by solidasparagus »

mchannon wrote: post #148
StavrosK wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.guar…

> I think "IJASDO" would be way easier to memorize than person.guards.gangs

Completely disagree. No way 6 arbitrary letters is easier to remember than 3 arbitrary words.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#286

Post by thanatropism »

lainga wrote: post #266
thanatropism wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why you have space filling curves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve With that you can have a linear ordering of space at each scale. Rounding errors become rounding errors. I remember seeing an implementation of that on npm or some such thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

Which are great right up until you cross boundaries. IIRC there's a big boundary in Google's S2 that divides Toronto in half.

That’s also a problem when mapping a circle to a straight line. The band Rush sang “you can’t have something for nothing...”

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#287

Post by jccalhoun »

gnicholas wrote: post #120
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…

bitly lets you make custom URLs, even if you're not a paid customer. You can make them anything you want, so long as it hasn't been taken already.

I do that if I plan it ahead. However, sometimes it is more of a on the moment thing. Thanks though.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#288

Post by jccalhoun »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #119
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…

bit.ly generates a random string by default but will let you override it with the wording of your choice (as long as it's available).

I will do that if I plan ahead but often I will generate it on the spot so I don't bother since bit.ly wants you to log in to customize urls.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#289

Post by duskwuff »

rtkwe wrote: post #277
duskwuff wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the complaints in the article is that the different localizations offer uneven quality. And there's no publicly documented way to convert between the localizations. It's not even clear that there's a 1:1 correspondence between the word lists!

It's clear in the article that the lists don't map so you can't even translate between them without going back to W3W and running it through their stuff. > So, if I want to tell a French speaker where ///mile.crazy.shade is, I have to use ///embouchure.adjuger.saladier > Loosely translated back as ///mouth.award.bowl an entirely different location!

It's no great surprise that the words don't translate. But what I'm asking is it's possible to infer a word-to-word mapping along the lines of

    English   French
    -------   ------
       mile = embouchure
      crazy = adjuger
      shade = saladier
or if the mapping is weird enough that even that doesn't work.
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