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Why Bother with What Three Words?

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Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#81

Post by mirimir »

teach wrote: post #75
mirimir wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Maybe not two short words. But clearly, two numbers can be represented by two words.

Are you talking about existing English words? I'm not sure there are enough longer words for this to be possible, depending on the range of numbers being encoded.

No, I wasn't.

Sorry, I just don't get the point. Implementing a bunch of proprietary location-encoding schemes is just insane. I do see the profit motive, obviously. But I can only hope that people will avoid using stuff like this.

Maybe if it were totally open-source. And if it were implemented by some recognized international entity. Maybe some part of the UN.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#82

Post by alasdair_ »

mchannon wrote: post #73
EGreg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com We are currently using geohash and curious why it’s worse than this.

Geohash is easily the best system currently out there. Worse might be a little harsh, but my system: •Packs slightly more bits into the string (naturally there's a tradeoff with data fidelity) for shorter strings •Follows a completely logical alphanumeric distribution (Geohash will skip letters, some for good reason, like o and l, and some for not-so-much, like a) •Some of the other benefits in the original post are…

>You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have everybody else know exactly where they mean.

89c25855b9b

That's the S2 string for a section of Times Square, NY.

Usefully "89c25855b" is a well-defined, less precise location comprising a larger area. You can go up or down in levels of precision easily and everything can be stored as a single 64-bit integer with lots of extremely useful properties, (e.g. the use of the Hillbert Curve with all of it's benefits, like localization in address space and real space - see http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-...)

If your system adds more benefits than this, I'd love to hear more about it!

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#83

Post by mchannon »

alasdair_ wrote: post #78
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…

> Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is 38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes. The "S2" geometry system ( http://s2geometry.io/ ) is what Google Maps and many other la…

The "Z" dimension is something I've been planning on having as part of the system as well.

Since people appreciate height from street level differently than raw altitude, both will be accommodated in my system.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#84

Post by maxerickson »

mirimir wrote: post #66
NikkiA wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 3 words are because 2 words doesn't give you enough bits of enumerated data. The words aren't to be thought of as X,Y,Z, they're just 3 blobs of bits, where each word represents something like a 0-200,000 range or something.

Huh? Maybe not two short words. But clearly, two numbers can be represented by two words.

How many bits do you think it takes to precisely indicate a location on the surface of the earth?

If you are using 2 angles, I guess the place to start is with the circumference of the earth, which is 40 million meters. So to get within a meter, you then need to encode your angle with enough precision to indicate a single one of the 40 million possibilities.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#85

Post by tzs »

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…

Might it be easier to have a web page that has a chronological or reverse chronological clickable list of links you want to give your students?

Then instead of sending them a shortened link to something, you just put the link on your page and tell them there's a new link for them there.

That would also make it easy for students who want to go back and review older links you sent. Instead of digging through prior announcements to find the right one, they could just go to your links page.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#86

Post by rakoo »

jpatokal wrote: post #4

There are plenty of alternatives to W3W, most notably Open Location Codes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code Alternatively, try a W3W parody: https://what3emojis.com/ http://www.what3fucks.com (NSFW text)

Out of interest here's a list of alternatives and why they're worse than plus codes: https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#87

Post by Scarblac »

Angostura wrote: post #63
adambyrtek wrote: post #45

I inherited a property management system where previous developers used what3words for storing location of homes (since reverse geocoding based on address is not reliable in some countries we support). However, after an internal review we realised that a lot of our UK properties have locations in Asia or the US... It turned out that typos in what3words often result in a valid location on the other side of the world.…

I imagine that a single digit typo in latitude could also result in a valid location on the other side of the world

But bounds checking is a lot simpler.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#88

Post by notahacker »

Angostura wrote: post #63
adambyrtek wrote: post #45

I inherited a property management system where previous developers used what3words for storing location of homes (since reverse geocoding based on address is not reliable in some countries we support). However, after an internal review we realised that a lot of our UK properties have locations in Asia or the US... It turned out that typos in what3words often result in a valid location on the other side of the world.…

I imagine that a single digit typo in latitude could also result in a valid location on the other side of the world

Sure, but none of the numbers are homophones or even particularly easy to confuse (in English, anyway) when giving a location verbally. W3W marketing claims none of their words are either, but the evidence suggests otherwise...

Latitude errors are also much easier to correct if you incorrectly memorise it but know other information (country/city). But if you find out that arbitrary.word.cat gives you an obviously incorrect location, you've got very little chance of realising that actually it must have been arbitrary.world.cats

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#89

Post by HALtheWise »

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…

http://yellkey.com is designed for exactly this use case, and is near-exact clone of the now defunct http://shoutkey.com that was prevalent at our school for this. It provides single-word short URLs that expire after 24 hours, which is fine in practice for any in-person use case.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#90

Post by mirimir »

maxerickson wrote: post #84
mirimir wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Maybe not two short words. But clearly, two numbers can be represented by two words.

How many bits do you think it takes to precisely indicate a location on the surface of the earth? If you are using 2 angles, I guess the place to start is with the circumference of the earth, which is 40 million meters. So to get within a meter, you then need to encode your angle with enough precision to indicate a single one of the 40 million possibilities.

Ummm. That's what latitude and longitude are. Angles. Or equivalently, radians.

And what's magic about one meter? Latitude and longitude can be arbitrarily precise. But whatever. You want 40 million? Well, 360 degrees / 40 million ~ 10^-5. That's easily handled by "43.63872, -116.24135".

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