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Mongolia is changing all its addresses to three-word phrases
- brechmos 10y agoI didn't see any discussion in the article of having different languages but the what three word website talks about it. One thing that I don't quite understand is two locations very near each other have completely different sets of words. I would have thought there would be some sort of hierarchy of words (sort of like geocoding a lat long where it defines a box and the precision of the geocoding gives you larger or smaller boxes). I wonder too if there are going to be collisions of words and locations that aren't going to make people too happy. Though they must have thought through that too. Either way it is an interesting idea.
- phire 10y agoExperimenting with their map, You get a new set of words every square foot or so. If you don't like the 3 words it gives you, just offset the location by a foot or two until you find a set of 3 words you like.
- zeotroph 10y agoThe idea is brilliant, however > If you don't like the 3 words it gives you After trying some locations, I think they should have purged their dictionary of obviously negative words. Ending up with `glorified.bodily.passage` is just bad luck and can't be avoided, but `snored`, `brainwashed` or `grieved` are just bad in any context. Also, some ground offset in meters (grazed.across.like.7) or the ability to go beyond 3x3 meters like a fractal would allow you to specify individual drawers or even pencils inside them.
- maxerickson 10y agoIt's designed to be dependent on their proprietary implementation. MGRS is (approximately) a dense encoding of UTM coordinates, at similar precision it's a lot less memorable than 3 words: 4QFJ 12345 67890 (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system ) But it does have the property that coordinates are easy to compare to each other. Less precision can be used just by dropping digits: 4QFJ 1234 6789 - the 10 meter zone that the 1 meter zone above falls inside 4QFJ 123 678 - the 100 meter zone
- mikeash 10y agoIf Wikipedia is to be believed, that's intentional as an error-detecting mechanism: "The result is that if you enter athree-word combination slightly incorrectly and the result is still a valid w3w reference, the location will be so far away from the user’s intended area that it will be immediately obvious to both a user and an intelligent error-checking system." I'm skeptical of just how well that'll work, personally. Witness the example of the truck driver who drove to Gibraltar, England instead of the one next to Spain.
- mhurron 10y agoIt did say intelligent error checking. People have proven themselves to be idiots.
- forkandwait 10y agoI looked at the website, and couldn't figure out what makes this a good idea... Especially compared to geohashing.
- tantalor 10y agoGeohashes are not human friendly. It's easy to screw up a geohash when transferring it.
- forkandwait 10y agoI don't think meaningless combinations of three words are particularly human friendly either...
- superuser2 10y agoThey are. Remembering a three-word phrase is not remotely difficult compared to remembering a long pseudorandom string.
- themihai 10y agoAre the words english only? Hoe are they translated?
- danielvf 10y agoThey are translated per language. Horse in English becomes морь in Mongolian.
- danielvf 10y agoApparently I read wrongly somewhere.
- drivers99 10y ago"Thus far, the system has been built in 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swahili, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, and, starting next month [article is from Nov 2015], Arabic" http://qz.com/561727/an-address-for-every-place-in-the-world-using-just-three-words/ http://qz.com/561727/an-address-for-every-place-in-the-world... Also: "Each square has its identity in its own language that is not a translation of another."
- gonvaled 10y agoWhy english?
- krallja 10y agoUsers can look up these three-word locations, which have been translated into Mongolian, for free on the What3Words website or app. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Design_principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Design_principles
- tantalor 10y agoThe words were literally translated? That makes no sense... the meaning of the words is not important.
- gonvaled 10y agoIf meaning of words is not important, I say let's default to Euskera.
- DanBC 10y agoWhat's easier for you to remember - ample.estate.racing or хангалттай.хөрөнгийн.уралдааны
- gonvaled 10y agoThe fact that you are even asking that is prove of the level of arrogance that the anglospeaking part of the world has reached.
- maxerickson 10y agoI think you've misunderstood the point being made by GP. (that is, they are arguing that most people will have an easier time remembering words from their native language)
- 10y ago
- Grue3 10y agoThe article lists Mongolian US embassy address as "constants.stuffy.activism", except the map they link to gives me the address "indoor.sheepish.blues". How can it be an address if it changes with time?
- ovis 10y agoIt changes every three meters, so perhaps it depends on which room in the embassy?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- waterphone 10y agoIt doesn't. It's a grid system with 3 meter squares, each one having its own trio of words. Move the point 3 meters in any direction and you'll get a different one. This allows much more precise and close together addresses, down to the entrances of doors or gates.
- middleq 10y agoedgy.puns.lake
- middleq 10y agoroughest.tickles.bath
- middleq 10y agoPutting aside the potentially bad combinations, i feel as tho a hierarchical schema with the potential for arbitrary accuracy may be more suitable.
- touristtam 10y agoAt the same time it makes the news a bit more entertaining: keychain.limbs.youth
- tlrobinson 10y agoLike longitude and latitude?
- KaiserPro 10y agoso they are going to use english words for their postal system? doesn't sound very Chinese government to me. This has a hefty smell of bollocks to me.
- Pamar 10y agoI have some doubts. a) suppose I am in Apt #312 in Bellevue Mansion, Whatever Street 23, San Jose, California. Apt. #311 is on a wildly different set, so how can I find out we are neighbours? Or how can I explain to someone where Whatever Street #21 is? b) what if I have the same 3-words square, but you are on floor #7 and I am on floor #11?
- qihqi 10y agothe 3-words replaces Number+Street name, not anything else. So you can just append the other information. hellow.world.hola Floor 7 Apt 781 City, Zip, ST, Country
- jessriedel 10y agoNo it replaces city, state, country too. (Yes, you might need to include some of those to be backwards compatible with the current mailing system, but that's not how this system would work.)
- secstate 10y agoI would add to the other comment that there are plenty of ways this doesn't improve your life in San Jose. But the Vox article points out those 70K people who live in a slum of Rio do have the benefit of a working system.
- x1798DE 10y agoI feel like it could definitely be made more user-friendly, though. Like instead of a random assortment of 3-word combinations, is there no way to assign them in an ordered fashion, so that "hill.stevedore.borg" is west of "hall.stevedore.bar". Or use a larger grid with an inset numeric system, like instead of blocking in 3 square meter chunks, use 30 square meter chunks with a 2-digit number next to it, like "hambone.impish.doorframe-3,3". I kinda feel like any arbitrarily-ordered locational identifier will always feel clunky compared to an ordered grid system.
- jessriedel 10y ago
- dmuth 10y agoSo it's like DNS for GPS coordinates. Neat!
- krallja 10y agoYes, except unlike DNS, it's centralized into a single database and you may have to pay a license fee to read from it.
- themihai 10y agoYou pay for domains so it's not all that different.
- LittlePeter 10y agoyou do not pay for dns queries
- themihai 10y agoYou still pay for writes(i.e. domain registration). You can argue that DNS and domain registration are different things but in reallity they are inter-dependent so there is still a cost and the system is "owned" by several entities(i.e. ICANN)
- pif 10y agoNo! You pay only to register, but reading is free.
- themihai 10y agowhat's the difference? On DNS you pay for the "writes" so DNS is not free either.
- PeCaN 10y agoWhat3Words is free for writes (presumably it's generated from an algorithm and there aren't really "writes") and you pay for reads. Kind of a big difference. With DNS you only have to pay if you want a domain. I can freely do a DNS query to resolve "flamingmongoosefarts.com", but with What3Words I (might not) be able to freely determine where flaming.mongoose.farts is.
- rakoo 10y agoI really don't think it's a smart move to have a national entity totally depend on a private company that has no plans to make its database freely accessible for its operations; the worst being that said private company is foreign, meaning that Mongolia has 0 leverage on how the database will evolve, it is going to be completely at the mercy of What3Words' changes of policy and access rights. Unless What3Words' database is going to be fully accessible with no restrictions for everyone, this really looks like a bad idea.
- maxerickson 10y agoThey can just appropriate the information. I guess they might have to break some treaties or something to do that, but a country isn't going to be beholden to a small foreign company for much of anything.
- themihai 10y agoTPP could change that
- oh_sigh 10y agoFairly certain neither Mongolia nor Britain are involved in the TPP
- criley2 10y agoBritain is party to TTIP, very similar. Mongolia has expressed limited sentiments towards joining TPP but they try to remain neutral between the various regional and global factions, and being a member of TPP could irritate their Russian and Chinese partners.
- oh_sigh 10y agoTTIP is similar, but you might as well just say TTIP if you mean TTIP and not TTP. Also, even if the UK is partner, Mongolia certainly can't be, at least to this particular partnership.
- chasing 10y agoGreat idea, until your address is something like "persistent.ugly.pancake" "white.power.manatee..."
- bryanlarsen 10y agoUnless your yard is less than 3 square meters, you'll have more than one phrase for your address. Enumerate all the possible phrases, and choose the coolest one...
- visarga 10y agoThat means everyone has a pretty high probability to have a stupid address in their "bag-of-addresses".
- kibwen 10y agoThe idea is quite interesting, but the implementation only makes sense for sparsely-populated regions. An apartment in the city with two side-by-side doors to different units will easily fit within a three-meter square, meaning that you'll still require "Apt. #1, Apt. #2" designations to disambiguate. Similarly, the fact that this system accounts only for geographical surface coordinates means that any building with distinct addresses stacked vertically, like an apartment building, won't be able to be served by this system alone.
- hx87 10y agoApartment units addresses will probably be based on the 3x3 square the most closely matches its outline, so door location will be irrelevant. Vertical stacks can be simply dealt with by assuming a standard 3 or 4 meter story, so unless you live in an industrial loft or something it won't be a problem.
- dalke 10y agoDoor location is how you can tell if a house is in the Netherlands or in Belgium, for Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog. Move the door and you move countries. Outline is not time invariant. If I turn a duplex into a single family, or build out, then the shape changes. If I live in Coober Pedy and build out underground, then do I use the surface outline or the underground outline? If I relocate the house a few meters away, the address definitely changes. Really, this is best for the billions of people who have no address. Most likely it will boot-strap, so in 100 years the name "X.Y.Z" will refer to the ghost of the place that once was, but everybody local knows what it now means, as will the databases. With a layer of apt. #1, #2, etc. on top of that.
- dalke 10y agoIt doesn't depend on sparsely population regions, which is why it is also being used for Ulaanbataar. It depends on being better than the current system (which is description based), and better than the alternatives (like putting up street signs everywhere).
- HoopleHead 10y agoNot this moronic shit again! Just let it die, fer Gawd's sake! https://stiobhart.net/2016-01-15-stupidest-idea-ever https://stiobhart.net/2016-01-15-stupidest-idea-ever
- Sone7 10y agoIf you think :that's: dumb, check out the "Eircode" address System that Ireland's government spent an 8 figure sum on: http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/analysis/lost-and-found-addressing-the-myriad-problems-with-eircode-312711.html http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/analysis/lost-and-fo...
- HoopleHead 10y agoWow! —the insanity is contagious.
- rmc 10y agoEircodes were created that way so that people wouldn't have to change their address at all. Which could be a politically difficult thing. Politicians choose the thing that made their life easier and stopped complaints.
- Aaron1011 10y agoOne problem I see is that one particular address may end up with several 3-word addresses. Since physical distance doesn't affect the similarity of the combinations, how is one to determine the 'correct' combination for a particular location? This seems to compound the inherent problem of all 3-word combinations sharing the same namespace - I have no idea if two addresses are actually the same building, or on opposite sides of the planet.
- maxerickson 10y agoFor most things the adjacent addresses would be equivalent. It doesn't matter which part of the house a package is delivered to. In many cases someone picking an address won't really be able to get within 3 meters anyway. I guess people looking at several addresses won't be looking at the words, they will have to have a resolver and look at them that way.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoBut it might matter if you're delivering five packages, and your system lists five addresses, even though they're all going to the same building.
- maxerickson 10y agoI mention needing to resolve multiple addresses to consider them together. What further problems would there be?
- 21 10y agoConsider that as the article says, they don't currently have any kind of coherent address system at all. It's a vast improvement of the status quo. Sure, this system doesn't make that much sense in a place like London or SF.
- ygjb 10y agoThis remains a solved problem. The location phrase specifies the coarse location. Additional addressing information is used to introduce granularity. Look at how addresses are conventionally written already, and in a good chunk of the world, the addresses are written top to bottom, most specific to least specific. The largest remaining problem is that the location mapping depends on a proprietary database, but this is a common problem (in Canada the database of postal codes is also proprietary).
- trescube 10y agoThey should just use http://what2numbers.org/ http://what2numbers.org/
- pavel_lishin 10y agoI genuinely can't tell if that's an honest attempt at competition, or a parody.
- Scaevolus 10y ago40,000 words gives 15.29 bits per word, for a 45.86 bit locator. log2(area of earth / 9m^2) is 45.7. Packing bits into phrases is also useful for passwords (https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/ https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/), but in my experience the increased difficulty of correctly remembering phrases from a large wordlist outweighs the additional entropy. 4 words chosen from a 2800-word list would convey the same amount of information, and be less prone to confusion. It looks like they're not attempting to make the triplets have consistent meanings between languages, which makes sense -- 40,000 word correspondences between 10 languages would be exceedingly difficult! logs.broker.remote is sweight.saum.zulässige is lodos.pasado.ninguno, none of which are the same meanings. Another improvement would be a hierarchical system-- you can specify a more coarse location using more common words -- picking from a wordlist of 500 for a 4km^2 specifier, 2000 for for a 16 acre plot, 10000 for a 500m^2 area.
- Bromskloss 10y ago> Packing bits into phrases is also useful for passwords (https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/ https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/), but in my experience the increased difficulty of correctly remembering phrases from a large wordlist outweighs the additional entropy. I saw a paper with a nice method for generating passphrases. Unfortunately, I can't find it. (Can anyone help me?) First, you generate random data with enough entropy for a passphrase. Then, instead of encoding it in a sequence of words that is as short as possible, you encode it in many (say, a million) sequences that are a bit longer. Each sequence thus encode the same data. Now, you feed all these sequences through an algorithm that gives each sequence a score depending on how close it is to being a natural-language phrase. Finally, you present the user with the sequences, ordered by their score, and let the user choose any one of the to use as passphrase.
- Scaevolus 10y agoI don't know that paper, but that's similar to what's going in Abbrase. It shows the best-scored mnemonic using bigram and frequency heuristics, but you could show more alernatives to let users choose their own mnemonic. You can see multiple alternative mnemonics using `abbrase.py -m` -- it hasn't been implemented in the web version yet. It does give better results, from "wave several ominous silence" (default based on heuristic score) to "waves sever ominous silk" or "wavy seven omitted silver" (human-chosen mnemonics).
- orbitingpluto 10y agoHomonyms? Vertical addressing? So do you live at peak.pique.peek, or peak.peek.pique? Or is it... What floor? Oh, you're on the top floor? So you leave on the peak of pique.peak.peek?
- pc2g4d 10y agoI'd imagine that homonyms are avoided by careful selection of the reference word lists.
- d0mine 10y agoMy guess there are 100s miles between anything that is similar (typos, same words but different order) i.e., you'll be able to figure out from the context which address is correct.
- joeyh 10y agoAlso they use both plural and singular nouns, and hash them to different locations.
- kragen 10y agoThis is absolutely hilarious, at least to my inner six-year-old. They seem to have filtered out words with obvious negative connotations like "ugly", words of under four letters, and maybe longer words. But through the magic of language, even very innocent words are subject to reinterpretation. And a lot of What3Words's words are actually not that innocent. glorified.bodily.passage is in some farmland in the Netherlands, near Wijk en Aalburg: https://map.what3words.com/glorified.bodily.passage https://map.what3words.com/glorified.bodily.passage beats.member.daily is in a gated community on Long Island: https://map.what3words.com/beats.member.daily https://map.what3words.com/beats.member.daily tugging.bunny.organ is a farmhouse or suburban house in Hungary: https://map.what3words.com/tugging.bunny.organ https://map.what3words.com/tugging.bunny.organ pigs.pigs.pigs is a vacant lot in Loveland, Colorado: https://map.what3words.com/pigs.pigs.pigs https://map.what3words.com/pigs.pigs.pigs inflamed.flesh.massaged is some farmland near Stoke-on-Trent in England: https://map.what3words.com/inflamed.flesh.massaged https://map.what3words.com/inflamed.flesh.massaged It's a lot worse in Spanish for some reason.
- msoad 10y agoMaybe.Another.Day is a hospital in New York! https://map.what3words.com/maybe.another.day https://map.what3words.com/maybe.another.day
- thesmok 10y agoit's not found now =/
- sixothree 10y agoI guess the good news if your building is bigger than 3x3 meters than you get another chance?
- knieveltech 10y agoWell there goes my afternoon. Ladies and Gentlemen, needy.member.smoked: https://map.what3words.com/needy.member.smoked https://map.what3words.com/needy.member.smoked
- 10y ago
- anc84 10y agoFYI, their patent is probably bogus: http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-invented-and-published-before-this-patent-application-how-do-i-get-it-in http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-inven...
- yegle 10y agoGoogle developed a similar coding system called Plus Code https://plus.codes/ https://plus.codes/
- linkregister 10y agoThis seems way easier to use. Also a postal service wouldn't have to do anything except open the website on the postal carriers' phones.
- franciscop 10y agoThere was a really cool project using syllables such as consonant+vowel, then using two "words" with 3 syllables each such as: "tapiku norami" But the cool thing is that they were basically real gps coordinates just encoded as letters, so returning them to the original was trivial. I think a couple of letters were avoided to avoid confussion. Unfortunately I cannot remember the name and they did a terrible SEO job...
- vinc 10y agoYou could also use Lojban's numbering system[1] for example with GPS coordinates in decimal form to the same effect. [1]: https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban/Numbers https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban/Numbers
- dekobon 10y agoI'm disappointed that they didn't use Mongolian words for the 3 words.
- etjossem 10y agoThey did. > Users can look up these three-word locations, which have been translated into Mongolian, for free on the What3Words website or app.
- rl3 10y ago"alien.crash.landing"[0] is a remote farm field in Montana. Just the kind of place you'd expect. "lower.life.expectancy"[1] is some patch of land in Colorado. I can't help but notice the two man-made pits containing unknown substances a few hundred meters north. [0] http://w3w.co/alien.crash.landing http://w3w.co/alien.crash.landing [1] http://w3w.co/lower.life.expectancy http://w3w.co/lower.life.expectancy
- chrischen 10y agoSo people in Mongolia will use English words for addresses? The whole "easy to remember" is completely lost when it's a foreign language. Imagine if America switched to three Chinese characters for an "easy to remember" address system. In China numbers are often used inside of roman character email addresses, or domains, because roman characters are only convenient for westerners, much less English words. See 1688.com (alibaba.com), or use of QQ numbers for email addresses.
- linkregister 10y agoThankfully now there is the IDN extension to DNS to use punycode to represent other character sets. I agree with your original point that it is strange that the Mongol Post would want to use English words for addressing. Edit: they support other languages; I assume they would add Mongolian to the list.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago> Imagine if America switched to three Chinese characters for an "easy to remember" address system. This sounds pretty unlikely even for China, since it's almost impossible to unambiguously name any particular character. When speaking, you would generally identify a specific character using a four-syllable phrase like 安静的静 (literally "the jìng of ānjìng [quiet]"). Why can't you just say jìng? Well, here are some other characters with the same pronunciation: 竟 境 镜 敬 竞 净 径 靖 劲 痉 胫 婧 獍 靓 There are a few characters with unique pronunciations, like 给 or 谁, but those are very much not the norm. The chinese version of what3words would be overwhelmingly likely to use words, not characters.
- philliphaydon 10y agoSingapore is a tiny island but it's system is Super easy. It uses post codes assigned to physical buildings. From a post code you can get the name of the building, street, and access.
- ilaksh 10y agoI like mapcodes better: see mapcode.com
- zelos 10y agoI thought the same thing. They have the advantage of being public domain and a lot shorter.
- ilaksh 10y agohttps://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/docs/comparison.adoc#open-location-code https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/doc...
- srtjstjsj 10y agohttp://openlocationcode.com/ http://openlocationcode.com/
- bane 10y agoWhy oh why is it so hard for countries to just apply a sensible addressing scheme? This is simply an attempt to simplify using coordinates with something more memorable. But now it's locked into a proprietary service and doesn't solve sub-unit addressing or routing. But whatever, I guess it's better than the current system which is basically a free form description of what somebody hopes the mail carrier can figure out. This is a such a stupidly simple problem that it's become a pet peeve of mine whenever I see a place that hasn't been bothered to figure it out. Here's 2 perfectly workable schemes that are used the world over (this is a free service I put into the public domain for the betterment of all humanity). Scheme 1 1) Divide your country into postal zones, assign each one a number or an alphanumeric or whatever. Call these "zip codes" or "postal codes" or whatever the hell you want. Bonus, when routing mail, you route them only between these zones at the national level, and then let local offices handle the last mile figuring out of where something is supposed to be sent. 2) Name (or for goodness sake at least number) each road -- or do both. If your language or culture is unable to come up with enough interesting names for all of the roads in your country, it's okay, you can reuse names in different postal zones so long as a road doesn't cross between zones in which case you get to only use it once. 3) Number all of the land plots along a road. Final delivery from the postal system is to the land plot number. This works because every nation on the planet has some kind of system to track land ownership, and it's usually some kind of number. 4) Final delivery of mail is handled by people who subdivide that land plot. Addresses may contain some identifier of subunits on that landplot, but the postal delivery organization doesn't have to care. Addresses are now of the form:<zip code>:<road id>:<land plot id>:<sub-unit id (optional)>:<Name to deliver to optional> Some examples: 1543:Genghis Khan Street:16B-321:Unit C AZJ542:5123:1313:Mr. Altangerel District 213:Morinhuur Rd.:2116:Apartment 116:Anun Chinbat The country can figure out if they want to use numbers, names, alphanumerics, whatever. But this isn't rocket science. This is the typical addressing scheme used most places that haven't completely lost their minds, just the fields are usually ordered the other way round. Scheme 2 1) Divide the country into zones. 2) Divide those zones into zones. 3) Keep doing this until zones are guaranteed to be small enough to track the smallest allowable land plot. This is where the mail gets delivered by the formal system. Routing works by going up and down the hierarchy. 4) Final delivery of mail is handled by people who subdivide that land plot. Addresses may contain some identifier of subunits on that landplot, but the postal delivery organization doesn't have to care. Addresses are now of the form:<Major subunit>:<Minor subunit>:<Local subunit>:<sub-unit id (optional)>:<Name to deliver to optional> This system works well where roads aren't guaranteed and/or the country can't be bothered with naming the roads because of reasons. This is also a surprisingly common system in many places, but often gets eventually replaced with the scheme above. AB:612:AJR 14-23:District 9:Khorkhog Place:Apartment 612-F:Mr. Tsedenbal Bayar:Damdin:Bogd:Yurt 5 Again, not rocket science. Easier to remember than coordinates and precise enough for mail delivery. Postal areas can be aligned with existing administrative zones, or whatever. I remember being in Ireland and getting pretty annoyed trying to find anything because all anybody had for addresses outside of the big cities were coordinates. Yet nearly every road had at least a number, and Ireland is already pretty well divided into various administrative districts. So why the hell were we receiving nonsense like coordinates? Asked the locals and the answer was some sort of tie up between the government and the postal system had delayed it forever. This was in 2013. That's correct, a developed country, in the 21st century, couldn't be bothered to figure out a proper addressing system. (Apparently this has since been fixed, but seriously, why the fuck did it take that long?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland#Introduction_of_a_national_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ... Things not to do: - Make your postal codes proprietary or under copyright or some other stupid nonsense. - Use a system with such low precision that it ends up going free-form text for local delivery. I'm aware of parts of England with such nonsense. - Change the scheme over and over again. Pick one, implement it and be done with it. - Use a system that doesn't aid in navigation at the local level. If I'm at local subunit 241, I can expect to find 240, 242, 243 and such nearby, while 893, 1023 and so on should be far away. - Use land plot numbers that don't make any sense. In many places odd numbers will be on one side of a road and even will be on another. In some places, it's a different scheme. These schemes make sense and aid in navigation, random numbers don't. - Don't use this kind of word-based scheme, it'll end up full of dick jokes and racial slurs without anybody knowing it, and it means entire swaths of the Earth will have to be nonsensically renamed over and over again due to regional slang phrases about people's mothers. Again, this is free advice for anybody trying to start a national postal system, because apparently, here in the future of the 21st century, some places haven't bothered to sort themselves out yet.
- aestetix 10y agoWow. I spent a lot of time thinking about names and how they influence us. This has to be one of the stupidest ideas I have ever seen. They are just throwing out hundreds if not thousands of years of nomenclature etymology and replacing it with three randomly chosen english words. Even Vonnegut's idea of reassigning everyone new last names in Slapstick made more sense than this.
- prof_hobart 10y agoHmm. A word with one letter difference from my house (in the English midlands) puts the address in the middle of mountains in western China. It's annoying enough when a parcel gets delivered to an address near me because the delivery driver can't tell where my road ends and another one starts. But I'm not going to China to pick up my next Amazon order when someone miskeys.
- xg15 10y agoI would think (if this is always the case) it's more a feature than a bug: If you're a parcel service and ordered to ship a packet to a location in the US, you'll (hopefully) stop and think if the address appears to be in china. If the address were "just" in the wrong US state, on the other hand, you might have more trouble with it. Of course that implies that the delivery service knows the supposed country of destination and that it cares. So I guess, should this way of addressing places catch on, we should probably make it a four-word phrase and also include the state with it.
- ficklepickle 10y agoCheck out the Mongolia episode of the Canadian show "Don't drive here" if you don't get why this is better for them than the status quo. Spoiler: Every citizen gets a parcel of land in Mongolia where they can put up a yurt. These yurt neighborhoods are nearly impossible to navigate if you don't live there (IIRC)
- pinouchon 10y agohttps://map.what3words.com/pretty.code.running https://map.what3words.com/pretty.code.running => right where my office is located (for real). Couldn't be happier about that.
- dikei 10y agoThis reminds me of the Automated Curse Generator from DailyWtf http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Automated-Curse-Generator http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Automated-Curse-Generato...
- ralf07 10y agoI wonder how units/apartments in multi storey buildings are adressed.