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Why Bother with What Three Words?

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Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#331

Post by kevinventullo »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #326
kevinventullo wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, let me try to be more precise, though maybe it's worth writing down in a more formal setting because comments are awkward. Say we're looking at the Hilbert curve. I claim that for almost all physical positions, a sufficiently small change in position yields a correspondingly small change in coordinate. In the purely mathematical sense, this means something like "continuous except at points with at least one rat…

I took a 256 square hilbert curve and took random points in it (discarding points where the euclidian distance was > 8). Here is the plot: https://gist.github.com/justinvanwinkle/22a15bb33536095b05dc... Notice the Log y axis. I don't you think you could consider this even roughly continuous. This is only even bounded because I only took points within the 256x256 grid, if I let it run over say a 1000x1000 grid the hil…

I'm not sure why that first plot wouldn't be considered continuous. There's a pretty clear positive correlation, which should be more pronounced with a non-log scale y-axis, and more pronounced as you increase the order of the curve.

I'm confused about the second plot; what order is the curve? It seems weird that there are no points between 10^12 and 10^156.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#332

Post by anoncake »

mjevans wrote: post #232
DoreenMichele wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia. I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question. I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very…

Wouldn't it be a lot better to do the following: * Realize that things like 'SSN's are being used as social identifiers and actually just issue them. * Allow legal entities to authenticate and update their preferred physical address In ONE place (so I NEVER have to update billing addresses again!) (maybe even for different kinds of data-packets) * Make it possible to mail to someone's identity (as the address), BUT y…

Number two sounds like DNS for physical locations.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#333

Post by ltbarcly3 »

kevinventullo wrote: post #331
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a 256 square hilbert curve and took random points in it (discarding points where the euclidian distance was > 8). Here is the plot: https://gist.github.com/justinvanwinkle/22a15bb33536095b05dc... Notice the Log y axis. I don't you think you could consider this even roughly continuous. This is only even bounded because I only took points within the 256x256 grid, if I let it run over say a 1000x1000 grid the hil…

I'm not sure why that first plot wouldn't be considered continuous. There's a pretty clear positive correlation, which should be more pronounced with a non-log scale y-axis, and more pronounced as you increase the order of the curve. I'm confused about the second plot; what order is the curve? It seems weird that there are no points between 10^12 and 10^156.

The second graph has a huge jump because the left side of the area I'm taking points from is a boundary between two very distant parts of the curve. In any space filling curve you will be able to find arbitrarily large jumps like this.

The difference would be more pronounced on a non-log scale, except the huge numbers at the top of the range would squish the graph down so you couldn't see what was going on.

The first graph isn't just not continuous, it's not even 1-1. (I'm ignoring the fact that is also discrete so that any formal sense of 'continuity' can't exist. Even if you tried to make it continuous by filling in the gaps it would be impossible.)

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#334

Post by kevinventullo »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #333
kevinventullo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why that first plot wouldn't be considered continuous. There's a pretty clear positive correlation, which should be more pronounced with a non-log scale y-axis, and more pronounced as you increase the order of the curve. I'm confused about the second plot; what order is the curve? It seems weird that there are no points between 10^12 and 10^156.

The second graph has a huge jump because the left side of the area I'm taking points from is a boundary between two very distant parts of the curve. In any space filling curve you will be able to find arbitrarily large jumps like this. The difference would be more pronounced on a non-log scale, except the huge numbers at the top of the range would squish the graph down so you couldn't see what was going on. The first…

Unfortunately I think we're talking past each other and this is not the best format for technical discussion.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#335

Post by interestica »

fundingshovel wrote: post #323
interestica wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the writer's misunderstanding of that use case is explained in the comments. Emergency services don't have sms/mms service. The W3W service would presumably use SMS to get location. (phone sends lat/long coords via sms, gets 3 word response). SMS tends to be more reliable than a data connection in areas with a poor connection (remote, or interference). This is doable right now - having some sort of data-to-emerge…

Why not just build an SMS gateway for emergency services with GPS coordinates and call it a day? It seems like the important bit is the gateway, not the 3 word response

Yes. That would be awesome. But it doesn't exist. And a third-party/private company doesn't have the ability to do that without govt partnership. What they can do is develop a completely separate system with a sustainable business model and basically demonstrate how it can piggy back on existing emergency systems regardless of the capabilities of said system (ie one doesn't need to know if the 911 system is the "upgraded" version or make that determination during an emergency).

Also, in many cases a phone is not able to use (or has limited use) of data during a phone call. An sms would be able to go through concurrently. Imagine being on a 911 call. They ask you to click the W3W button (built in? Next to other on-call buttons?) and read out the response.

Not a w3w shill - but I think there's a use case for the emergency system that uses sms and it is usable right now and doesn't require any system wide upgrades. The only potential upgrade would be at the OS level just to simplify (button addition).

The ideal would be having the DB of W3w words locally so that it doesn't need the SMS gateway. Or having a completely open system...

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