GPS Lite?? What3words

You know, it just dawned on me that this would make a pretty good password generator. Pick a random spot on the earth and the 3 words are your new password.
 
I'm sitting in "minority.remaining.bathtub" right now. They do have an API.
 
My current location is famed.pretend.jets

I actually think this is somewhat neat/clever.
 
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Salty said:
I know a few people who’s addresses are not gps friendly. This would be useful for them. I think there is value in having an easy to remember method to address a specific location. Imagine if I could have told them to drop the pallets in my driveway at horses.spaghetti.alamo and not have to be at home to make sure they don’t put 6000 pounds of rocks in the middle of my driveway.

I just made up horses.spaghetti.alamo, wonder where it is.
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Good call Salty. Looking across the street at a big pile of rocks that the hardscapers mistakenly put in my neighbors driveway.
 
I have been playing around with this. Quite a granular grid. Sounds like something the mossad would come up with to have someone call in drone-strikes.
 
Salty said:
That brings up a new problem with this system. Type ///smokers.exhaling.islander by accident and you're literally on the wrong side of the planet.
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Except that version doesn't exist. I think they carefully chose their word list so as to avoid such confusion.

I can't believe you are all posting the locations of your homes on the Internet. What is this, 1995?
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Except that version doesn't exist. I think they carefully chose their word list so as to avoid such confusion.

I can't believe you are all posting the locations of your homes on the Internet. What is this, 1995?
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It does exist. It’s in Australia. I wasn’t making it up.

E10DFA44-6C1E-4984-9975-F3677BE84E26.jpeg
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Except that version doesn't exist. I think they carefully chose their word list so as to avoid such confusion.

I can't believe you are all posting the locations of your homes on the Internet. What is this, 1995?
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To be fair, I just posted the location of a random hotel I was staying at.

If you know someone’s name and general location it’s typically pretty easy to find their address, especially if they are a homeowner.
 
Just read the link. Interesting.

There’s a downside to lat/long - the disparity in the myriad ways of expressing it:

  • 1/ Degrees, minutes, and seconds (DMS) ...
  • 41°24'12.2″N 2°10'26.5″E. ...
  • 2/ Degrees and decimal minutes (DMM) ...
  • 41 24.2028, 2 10.4418. ...
  • 3/ Decimal degrees (DD) ...
  • 41.40338, 2.17403. ...
  • 40° 41′ 21.4” N 74° 02′ 40.2” W (DMS) ...
  • 40.689263 -74.044505 (DD)........
And so on. I still think What3Words is an elegant scheme to easily pinpoint locations.
 
weilke said:
Bohoo, it's not an open standard.....
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That's only one of several objections, but I think proposing to use a proprietary, closed standard from a young VC-backed company in a safety-critical application is problematic.

The company makes statements about what would happen to its system in the event the company fails, but the algorithm is a corporate asset. I'm not a bankruptcy lawyer, but I'm not convinced the current management can make absolute promises about how an administrator might dispose of its assets. Or even if they are successful, how do you feel if the company that owns the API and algorithm used for geolocation by emergency services is bought 'undesirable' investors?

The advantage, as @FastEddieB implies, is that untrained humans can share a location in natural language with lower probability of misinterpretation, error or ambiguity. If you have the opportunity to transmit between systems the rationale becomes very flimsy.
 
Well, untrained humans can use it, if they can pronounce the words. Some of the ones I've seen, while I know them, are not going to be pronounced correctly by, oh I'd say 1/4 of the US, which means about 100% of the people who will get lost.
 
Cold, dark, afraid. Three words beats the heck out of GPS co-ords. Good idea that has its place.
 
Rgbeard said:
I guess I get the purpose... I guess. Looking for thoughtful commentary. Or, barring that, mocking or other banter.
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Because of the changing makeup of the population of the British Isles, the IQ is catastrophically declining across the board, so the government is acting, usually in partnership with the industry. Another example of this trend is the proposal to color-code the nutritional value of groceries. The U.S.-style nutrition label, used to be lauded as the clearest and easiest to comprehend label in the world, is too hard to figure out for modern Britons.
 
tiger said:
That's only one of several objections, but I think proposing to use a proprietary, closed standard from a young VC-backed company in a safety-critical application is problematic.

The company makes statements about what would happen to its system in the event the company fails, but the algorithm is a corporate asset. I'm not a bankruptcy lawyer, but I'm not convinced the current management can make absolute promises about how an administrator might dispose of its assets. Or even if they are successful, how do you feel if the company that owns the API and algorithm used for geolocation by emergency services is bought 'undesirable' investors?

The advantage, as @FastEddieB implies, is that untrained humans can share a location in natural language with lower probability of misinterpretation, error or ambiguity. If you have the opportunity to transmit between systems the rationale becomes very flimsy.
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Google is not an open standard yet the use of their services has become near universal.
One of the oddball things I do is to drive firetrucks and ambulances for our local department. Sure, I can try to find a location by using the 'keymap' system provided by the county but half the time the connection to the server is down or the map is slow to load. Or I click on 'route' on the alerting app and use the Google map api they have integrated. If google goes out of business tomorrow, the developer of he app will switch to bing maps or another competing product.
In our first-due area we have a Ripley Rd a Ripley Park Rd and a Ripley Way, a Greer Place and a Greer Farm Rd, a Harry Warren Rd and a Harry Warren Pl. All of them are reasonably close together. Transmitting destinations using road addresses with that type of ambiguity over radio is fraught with error.
And GPS coordinates have their own challenges. If you have ever tried to make out a location rattled off by the coast guard watchstander over VHF and try to make sense whether this is a DM or DD coordinate to enter in the boats GPS.... So we use buoys. Oh wait, you mean there is more than one 'red buoy #26' in the upper Potomac ?
W3W has a certain elegance for what it intends to accomplish. If it continues to be useful, it will see wider adoption. Eventually Google will buy it for a billion dollars and that's all the VCs behind it are pinning for. You can be upset about the idea that folks in tech want to make money with their invention or recognize that the desire to become fabulously rich at 30 and buy a jet is what drives the industry forward.
 
weilke said:
You can be upset about the idea that folks in tech want to make money with their invention or recognize that the desire to become fabulously rich at 30 and buy a jet is what drives the industry forward.
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I'm not upset about this (I am a folk making my money via my tech company) and anyway, plenty of fortunes are made using open standards and open source software.

Google's survival for the next decade is considerably more likely than W3W's.

As I said, I can see some value in scenarios where natural and especially spoken language must be used to transmit locations, at least between people fluent in the same language (one disadvantage of this approach is a requirement for familiarity with a large general vocabulary rather than a small domain-specific one such as in aviation comms). But W3W appears to be marketing and encouraging its use in situations that don't fit that model.
 
I think it would be fairly easy to develop something similar that is open source. I’d say the barrier to entry is fairly low.
 
Somedudeintn said:
I think it would be fairly easy to develop something similar that is open source. I’d say the barrier to entry is fairly low.
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Except for their patent.
 
weilke said:
Google is not an open standard yet the use of their services has become near universal.
One of the oddball things I do is to drive firetrucks and ambulances for our local department. Sure, I can try to find a location by using the 'keymap' system provided by the county but half the time the connection to the server is down or the map is slow to load. Or I click on 'route' on the alerting app and use the Google map api they have integrated. If google goes out of business tomorrow, the developer of he app will switch to bing maps or another competing product.
In our first-due area we have a Ripley Rd a Ripley Park Rd and a Ripley Way, a Greer Place and a Greer Farm Rd, a Harry Warren Rd and a Harry Warren Pl. All of them are reasonably close together. Transmitting destinations using road addresses with that type of ambiguity over radio is fraught with error.
And GPS coordinates have their own challenges. If you have ever tried to make out a location rattled off by the coast guard watchstander over VHF and try to make sense whether this is a DM or DD coordinate to enter in the boats GPS.... So we use buoys. Oh wait, you mean there is more than one 'red buoy #26' in the upper Potomac ?
W3W has a certain elegance for what it intends to accomplish. If it continues to be useful, it will see wider adoption. Eventually Google will buy it for a billion dollars and that's all the VCs behind it are pinning for. You can be upset about the idea that folks in tech want to make money with their invention or recognize that the desire to become fabulously rich at 30 and buy a jet is what drives the industry forward.
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The county where I worked had over two dozen streets and roads named Redwood. Back in the pre-cell era, I got dispatched to a burglary in progress at an address on Circle Drive off River Road. Lights and siren, responded, 10-12 minutes up a mountain highway to River Rd. Got onto Circle and the address didn’t exist.

Dispatch confirmed the address. After querying them as to the caller’s phone prefix, it turned out that it was on Circle Dr. off River Rd., 10 miles south. That part of the county only had three prefixes, each one for a distinctly different town and everyone knew which was which. The dispatcher was on autopilot.

Fortunately no one got hurt, and unfortunately the crime went unsolved. Obviously it still bugs me 25 years later.
 
Salty said:
It does exist. It’s in Australia. I wasn’t making it up.
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Weird... When I typed it in yesterday, it said "Not found" - I must have mistyped it, perfectly making your point! :rofl:

alfadog said:
Cold, dark, afraid. Three words beats the heck out of GPS co-ords. Good idea that has its place.
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cold.dark.afraid is in Thaba Nchu, South Africa. ;)
 
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