OP
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Lovacott
Veteran
Ask the average man in South London which longitude he lives on, and he would look at you with a blank stare.
What3Words Going Mainstream?
- Thread starter Lovacott
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newfhouse
Resolutely on topic
Speaking as an average man in South London I confess I would wonder why you were asking. I know the answer to within a tenth of a degree.
I struggle to think of a worse example in the world. The entire basis of longitude is predicated upon how far east or west of Greenwich you are, and I suspect most Londoners know where they are in relation to both Greenwich and the river.
OP
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Lovacott
Veteran
Like I just said, ask a man in the street in South London which longitude he lives on, and he will look back at you with a blank stare.
He'll probably know his postcode though.
Ask them what their what 3 words are and they'll give you 3 words, for sure, but I doubt that they appear in the w3w wordlists.
OP
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Lovacott
Veteran
I've asked quite a few Londoners which longitude they live on and I've never been given an answer. It's one of those things which most people don't think about as they live their daily lives. If you prompt them with the word Greenwich, they do twig it.
They'll know the tube map off by heart though and they'll know that Poplar (where I was born) is E14.
E14 is an abstract way of expressing Latitude/Longitude. E14 0AR is a bit more precise. Food.Holds.Begins is even more precise and takes you right in to the front room of the flat I used to live in back in the 1960's.
Or, you could try to remember 51.508395,-0.013679
swansonj
Legendary Member
The UK postcode system was designed to mix numbers and letters, and for the letters (at least the area code in the incode) to be partly meaningful, on the theory that this obviously made it easier to remember. The US zipcode system was designed to use only numbers. There is research showing that the US system is actually better for remembering. I'd cite it, only I had to give my copy of the standard textbook on postcodes to Oxfam.
DaveReading
Don't suffer fools gladly (must try harder!)
- Location
- Reading, obvs
Why on earth would you want or need to do that ?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but W3W (according to their ads) has a precision of about 3 meters.
A latitude to 6 decimal places is accurate to about 4 inches.
Hardly a realistic comparison.
classic33
Leg End Member
How does W3W handle tower blocks?
From what I've seen it's based on every square being on a 2D projection.
OP
OP
Lovacott
Veteran
Australia uses four digits only which takes it down to suburb level.
The state capital city centres are the start point with Perth being 6000, Sydney 2000 and so on. As you radiate out from the cities, the numbers change and generally speaking, the larger the number, the further away you live from the city. I lived in 6169 which is 40km away from Perth CBD.
The UK postcode system works really well for navigation until you get out into the sticks and the postcodes widen out to cover large areas instead of just a block of half a dozen houses on an urban street.
This is what W3W is trying to get around.
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
Really? Not the flat above or below? I rather suspect the flat number with the postcode would be more useful to the emergency services.
OP
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Lovacott
Veteran
Lat Long references could take you to a spot a micron square. Publicly available GPS can't do that yet though.
It's probably fair to say though, that if you are within three metres of where you want to be, you are where you want to be.
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
You might be able to put their answer into www.FourKingMaps.com (NSFW - and probably only online until w3w's lawyers manage to snatch the domain via WIPO, based on past parodies)
Postcodes are not a representation, abstract or otherwise, of latitude and longitude, they are a system for sorting and delivering mail.
The top of a mountain doesn't have a postcode, but it has a latitude and longitude.
The postal encoding system itself doesn't tell you anything about the actual place, except in London where the letter part of the postcode prefix provides relative cardinal/ordinal directions from the centre, but the numbers are not meaningfully tied to the geography.
If you want to refer to a postcode in terms of coordinate systems, they can be described as an irregular polygon where each vertex has a latitude and a longitude. But, again, that's not very useful, since the postal region KA27 has an area of 432 km².
