New Addresses for the Whole World – An Elegant Idea in Three Words
I know of two global positioning systems. One is the GPS your phone uses, but the newer idea is a global.positioning.system. There are other differences. One is circling the globe and the other is in the middle of Utah. The first one is technology with tremendous power and scope which has led to advances on a grand scale; the innovation that the latter represents could affect even more lives.
Egghead Poetry
Innovation is defined as a “a new method, idea, product, etc.” so you could, I suppose, innovate by replacing your trucking fleet with kangaroos on Segways. That’s a new method; but you’re not going to make Innovator of the Year that way. An innovation isn’t just something new. Real innovation means change for the better: doing something with greater quality or efficiency than ever before, and preferably both. And the greatest innovations have elegance: a nature that can be grasped intuitively, a broad utility or universal application, and – essentially – power and simplicity. To an engineer, power and simplicity add up to poetry.
Take the Globally Unique Identifier, the GUID. String together thirty-two hex characters and what have you got? Well, since there are 16 to the power 32 possible combinations, you would have to generate a hundred billion billion GUIDs every second since the big bang to list them all. In other words, there’s no significant likelihood that if you randomly generate a GUID it will have already been used by anyone else, ever. Using just 32 characters, we can generate identifiers that we know are unique without having to check. GUIDs allow us to do something, generate and manage keys, more efficiently than we have done before. They’re a simple idea with power. You’ve heard of the infinite monkeys who will type out the works of Shakespeare given unlimited time. Understanding GUIDs helps me contemplate infinite because there are a lot more than 32 characters in a single sonnet.
Three Word Poems
If your eyes glaze over hearing about the elegance of GUIDs, here’s a new idea with poetry that’s easier to appreciate: if you divide the surface of the earth into 3m by 3m squares, there are enough words in any language to uniquely identify every square using just three colorful words. Someone did that, and started a company called what3words, so now you can identify any place on earth with a precise, concise and readily memorable address.
Americans use a five digit zip code to get their mail delivered to a neighborhood; in Canada and the UK, postal codes use letters too so can get you a little closer. Postal codes are also easy to remember. When I was in high school, “my fourth party: two cases of 50” (50 is a no-longer-popular Canadian beer) meant M4P 2K5. That would get you to the block where I lived, down to the correct side of the street. But when I tell you that I work at fantastic.riding.hats, that’s an unambiguous and unforgettable locator that brings you right to the revolving door of my office.
Strong Words
People who live in highly developed places are increasingly mobile, and need to make connections without waiting for someone to find their mail box. Uber users in Australia can identify their pickup point with these addresses. A company called Pearlshare uses the three words in customized travel guides. Drone deliveries, taxi companies, navigation software, travel services of all kinds, all find ways for the developed world to leverage the what3words scheme.
The concept is even more valuable to the hundreds of millions (the company says billions) of people who don’t have dwellings, lifestyles or societies that can leverage a national system of postal codes. If you go to cheesy.potent.cracker you’ll find yourself inside the royal palace of the small South Pacific island nation of Tonga, which recently opted to join Mongolia, St. Maarten, and Cote d’Ivoire in adopting the three word system. With a dispersed and itinerant population, it wasn’t always practical to arrange home delivery, but depending on recipients to pick up their mail at post offices and P.O. boxes resulted in a lot of mail piling up. With the new addresses, the post office can drop it off and be done with it. The Gateway Health Institute, an South African NGO, is using it to deliver services to people in informal communities where there aren’t other addresses. The Philippines Red Cross is using the system to provide better emergency response. To people in these regions, an addressing system that is accurate, universal and independent of institutions or infrastructure allows them to connect to the rest of the world.
The newest global.positioning.system doesn’t actually look that interesting in reality, it’s on a hillside beside a quarry to the East of Provo. If you’re looking for a landmark, a better idea would be to get a drink at the longest bar in the world, the Beer Barrel Saloon in Put-In-Bay, Ohio. If you feel like joining me there, you better tell me whether to meet you at husky.fateful.sockets or jockey.scorching.cares because the bar is 405 feet long and the place can get busy. We’ll talk about poetry.
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