I just learned of what3words today. Soon after I went looking around here… a bit, hoping not to find pig.torture.ridicule or something.
What in the world is this?
It’s an interesting project to map the surface of the earth into 9m[sup]2[/sup] chunks, each one of which is addressable by three random words.
I read about it a few weeks ago. The intriguing thing (to me) has been their effort to pick words that are memorable and differentiable in multiple languages.
I don’t get what the point is. What do you get out of this you can’t get with GPS coordinates?
The place I grew up is “ringing.breeze.websites”, but 200 feet down the road is “added.sprinkler.bypass”. I don’t see how they relate. There’s no connection between adjoining sections.
Maybe I’m just too old and a party pooper, but I don’t get it.
Their mapping application is not intuitive AT ALL.
It’s useless for navigation, because there is no sequencing or relation information. But it’s good for uniquely identifying a single point in a way that’s easy to remember and has built-in error correction.
My front door is in veteran.stale.maverick
But your yard is meals.eradicated.quota. Or mutually.factually.soliciting. Depending on where you’re standing.
If they were at least related, it could be fun. Why can’t all the mutuallys be next to each other?
It’s like making up your porn name. I live at paraphrase.visit.septet. Does that make me cool?
This is neat. For people that don’t get it, the concept is that you have a simple, easy to remember and communicate 3 word address for any place that you want to send stuff or people to. No weird addressing conventions, no ambiguous street names, no long series of digits to mix up. I don’t see this actually catching on because street addresses work in most places, but I can see how it would be useful if it did.
You get an address that a human being can easily remember and communicate - GPS coordinates are just a big jumble of numbers. You might have your house’s GPS coordinates memorized, but most people can’t, and will while remembering ringing.breeze.websites long enough to write it down is easy, remembering 30 or so decimal digits is a rare talent.
They are supposed to not relate. If your house is ringing.breeze.websites and your neighbor’s house is ringing.freeze.websites, then it’s a single typo or mishear the end up at the wrong place. But if ringing.freeze.websites is in Kalamazoo, a person or intelligent checking algorithm can see that it’s looking at the wrong place entirely and know there must be a mistake.
Or they don’t catch the mistake and send your package to Kalamazoo. Whereas if they’d sent it to your neighbor, there’s a chance your neighbor would have figured out it was for you.
I actually do see how this could be useful, but it depends on how it’s used.
Just remember that you are telling the whole board (world ?) your location down to the meter. (okay, 3 meters).
My first mundane thing to share was that what3words is somewhat interesting. My second was that in just clicking through probably 10 grids, I found armed.eternity.blog where it was. I thought the name was pretty apropos, not fabulous, but pretty good for 10 grids. I ask for work in the same general area to find other ironic names.
Perhaps you would have an address like this when drones start delivering stuff. You would have your own little 3 meter x 3 meter drone (heli) pad so you don’t have your package delivered into the deep end of the pool.