I’ve always had an interest in how the mind represents physical space or cognitive maps, and how such representations can at times mislead one. Alfred Korzybski, the scientist/philosopher and founder of the field of general semantics famously observed “the map is not the territory” and Zen cautions, don’t mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon.
I was recently talking to a firefighter about fire and rescue operations in our county and he asked if I’d heard of the app What3Words - I hadn’t. Here’s the problem he could have said. There are situations where someone(s) needs to go to a very specific location that has no street address - think of 3rd world countries where there are many places with no street address, or someone stranded in the wilderness in need of medical help, or a group of friends need directions for where to meetup.
The folks at What3Words had a solution. They mapped the entire planet with 10 foot squares and assigned 3 unique words to each square. That’s 57 trillion squares and 40,000 words randomly assigned! You can think of it as they placed this geo grid of squares over the preexisting GPS grid of latitude and longitude coordinates. The latter isn’t a very user friendly tool for the majority of people and the numeric coordinates are easily forgotten. There must be a simpler way. Here’s an example.
A group of friends are going kayaking in a new place and are in need of directions. While I tell them to go to Little Seneca Lake in Black Hill Regional Park then what? I could give them a lot of written instructions on where to meet or more simply, in the app I could locate the square at the put location and it’s 3 words. To see the visual representation click HERE then satellite view (bottom right). The 3 address words for this square are twists.perspective.opposing. From here they can navigate via Waze, Apple Maps, etc. Bon voyage!
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I was recently talking to a firefighter about fire and rescue operations in our county and he asked if I’d heard of the app What3Words - I hadn’t. Here’s the problem he could have said. There are situations where someone(s) needs to go to a very specific location that has no street address - think of 3rd world countries where there are many places with no street address, or someone stranded in the wilderness in need of medical help, or a group of friends need directions for where to meetup.
The folks at What3Words had a solution. They mapped the entire planet with 10 foot squares and assigned 3 unique words to each square. That’s 57 trillion squares and 40,000 words randomly assigned! You can think of it as they placed this geo grid of squares over the preexisting GPS grid of latitude and longitude coordinates. The latter isn’t a very user friendly tool for the majority of people and the numeric coordinates are easily forgotten. There must be a simpler way. Here’s an example.
A group of friends are going kayaking in a new place and are in need of directions. While I tell them to go to Little Seneca Lake in Black Hill Regional Park then what? I could give them a lot of written instructions on where to meet or more simply, in the app I could locate the square at the put location and it’s 3 words. To see the visual representation click HERE then satellite view (bottom right). The 3 address words for this square are twists.perspective.opposing. From here they can navigate via Waze, Apple Maps, etc. Bon voyage!
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