3 ms·
> Or create a shortener for Lat/long if the long decimal numbers are too unwieldy for humans? Like what? You can't shorten decimals without losing precision, a
by ReverseCold 8y ago
> Or create a shortener for Lat/long if the long decimal numbers are too unwieldy for humans?
Like what? You can't shorten decimals without losing precision, and converting to, say, base64 is just as unusable by humans as plus codes.
How would you shorten lat/long?
- et2o 8y agoI suppose every possible system will be imprecise to some extent. This system thus loses precision too. If you just found lat/long to x decimal places it seems like the same thing. However, I’m guessing plus codes allow you to express the same location more succinctly by expanding the character set from 0-9 to A-Z,0-9 and also structuring it with an area code. You can optionally drop the area code if you’re searching regionally.
- yardstick 8y agoBase 16 is shorter than base 10 but just as memorable. That would be a bit shorter. If you get rid of/consolidate the often confused characters (O/0, I/1/l), you can encode numbers into even smaller strings.
- myself248 8y agoGrid squares? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System On the air, I'm from EN82. That's a few counties. Enough for people to check a box and say they've contacted someone from this area, or spin their antenna to point more accurately towards my approximate location. If I need to give more detail, that becomes EN82KM which gets to city level, or EN82KM10, which gets down to just a few blocks. I could give two more digits and you'd be at my front door....
- tgsovlerkhgsel 8y agoThat's basically what plus codes do, plus some tricks (choosing the alphabet to make them unlikely to spell words to avoid offensive words, different algorithm for the last character, ...)