Bridesmaids. Growing Vegetables. Short Films
Well, that’s right.Bridesmaids. Growing Vegetables. Short Filmsis my position.
It’s not that Shichao is doing some big cheating, but a location coding system called What3Words.
This system cuts the earth into 57 trillion 3m*3m regions, each region is represented by 3 random words.
Like the area where the Shichao workstation is located, it is called “Bridesmaids. Growing Vegetables. Short Films”.
What3Words comes in different languages in different countries.
It currently supports 50 languages, of which English covers the entire planet (all land, sea, ice sheets), and has a total of 40,000 words.
When writing the article, Shichao was curious about these 40,000 words, enough to express 5700000000000 areas?
After calculation, 3 out of 40,000 words were chosen to be arranged and combined, a total of 40,000*39999*39998 ≈ 64,000,000,000,000 ways.
So not only enough, but a lot more.
Find out what this thing is, some poor friends may ask, what is the use of it.
Express precise location? Couldn’t it be GPS coordinates.
Yes, but more complicated.
Shichao’s workstation is described by What3Words as “Bridesmaids. Growing Vegetables. Short Films”，But the coordinates are: (the following are different expressions)
30.288392 , 120.000016
30°17.3035′N, 120°0.0010′E
30°17′18.2112″N, 120°0′0.0576″E
Excuse me, did you remember the bridesmaids, growing vegetables, short films, or that big string of numbers?
In fact, it is precisely because the GPS coordinates are not easy to remember that someone decided to do What3Words.
One of the founders of What3Words, Chris, is a music festival organizer who usually arranges truck drivers to deliver equipment to the venue.
Because the addresses of many venues will be ambiguous, in order not to make mistakes, he usually reports GPS coordinates to the driver.
But once the driver mixed up the “5” and “4” in the coordinates and took the device elsewhere, he decided to find an alternative.
After much research with a mathematician friend, he launched in 2013What3Words。
If the advantage of What3Words is that it is simple and less error-prone, you may think that this is not very useful.
To tell you the truth, Shichao thought so too at first.
But after finding out that What3Words not only saved many lives, but also changed the lives of people in South Africa and Mongolia, the idea changed.
Two years ago, a 67-year-old grandmother in Australia broke her leg while hiking on the edge of the island. Although she was able to contact the rescue team, she did not know how to describe the location to them on the phone.
At one point, he said he was going to climb over a big rock, and at one point he said where he turned.
The ambulance gave hercell phoneI sent a text message with the What3Words link on it. After clicking it, my grandmother sent three words as instructed, and the rescue team quickly found her.
Some people may ask, is it okay to let grandma send GPS coordinates, maybe.
But the latitude and longitude of more than ten digits and 3 words, if I changed it at that time, I would also choose the latter.
What’s more, the other party may be an old man or a child. It is very difficult to make them send a large number of numbers when they are in a panic.
News of What3Words saving lives is not uncommon.
Some tourists were trapped in the snowy mountains, and some children got lost in the forest. The rescue team asked them to report the location of What3Words and found them.
Because of this advantage, many national emergency services have begun to use What3Wrods in recent years.
As of September last year, the What3Words service was used by 85% of the UK’s emergency services, including police and fire brigade.
Australia also has What3Words built into their emergency services app.
Several cities in the United States, Canada, and Germany followed suit.
But this is not the highlight of What3Words,In some countries, it has even changed the lives of locals.
Because of historical issues, millions of people in South Africa do not have a “formal” place to live.
They live in self-built brick shacks with no house numbers, no smooth roads around them, and no signs of any kind.
When someone fell ill and a woman was in labor to call for ambulance, they could only describe a very vague location, and then it was up to the ambulance team to find it.
The pain of a patient being too late to wait for an ambulance became the most common thing there.
In 2016, a town in South Africa was approached by What3words, where they printed addresses and stuck them on every house.
Because of these addresses, local residents have house numbers for the first time, and ambulance personnel can finally find patients in time.
Within a few years, What3words expanded to most emergency centers in South Africa.
As soon as the center gets a call, it sends the caller a text message with a What3Words link for them to click into and read three words.
However, South African traffic is notoriously expensive, and a 100 MB package costs 29 rand, or about 11 yuan. (of course andChina Mobile5 yuan 30M is a little worse than that)
In order to avoid everyone’s concerns, the South African operator Vodacam announced that its 43 million users access What3Words without consuming any data.
Maybe from now on, there will be fewer and fewer people in South Africa waiting for an ambulance.
Except for South Africa, theWhat3Words also changed lives for the Mongolian people.
The population density of Mongolia is only 2 people per square kilometer, and residents generally have to go to the post office several kilometers away to get letters and packages.
In addition, 30% of them are nomads. When a piece of land has almost enough water and grass to eat, it has to be replaced with another piece of land. It is uncertain whether there is a post office there.
It happens from time to time that residents do not receive letters.
Later, Mongolia Post changed to the What3Words system, which is equivalent to each yurt having its own “house number”, which can be changed at any time even if it moves.
Finally, the local people also enjoy the door-to-door service, and they are no longer afraid of not receiving letters from their relatives.
Seeing this, you may think What3Words is easy to use, just because the situation in these two regions is too special.
In fact, back to our daily life, Shichao is also very optimistic about it.
Imagine that you are attending an outdoor electronic music festival, and then your friend is late. In order to meet him, you have to chat with him a lot, and you may not find it in the end.
“Hey, just walk over the steps from the east gate and turn left, then turn right and you’ll see a group of people shaking their heads, and I’m inside.”
But with What3Words, in this case you report three words and you’re done.
Another example is when we usually take a taxi, we generally have to locate the gate, bus stop, intersection and other iconic locations, because other locations are not easy to describe to the driver.
But if the taxi software is connected to the What3Word system, even if you are in the middle of the road and there are no houses on either side, the driver can find you.
We don’t have to argue with them anymore about which side is the left.
In fact, there are systems similar to What3Words internationally, such as the Open Location Code launched by Google in 2014.(hereinafter referred to as OLC)。
The difference is that OLC uses numbers + letters to represent addresses, and there are rules to follow. In close proximity, they are coded similarly.
OLC and What3Words have different opinions online.But I don’t think What3Words can go wrong in an emergency.
If Tianshichao has a sudden illness, and the What3Words word is wrong in the 120 call, two situations will be encountered at this time:
Either there is no matching address, or it will be wrong.
For example, put “Bridesmaids. Growing Vegetables. Short Films” say “Bridesmaids. Planting Grass. Short Films”, the address is shifted from Hangzhou to Mianyang.
In both cases, the rescue team will find the error and confirm with you.
But if I put OLC encoding “7XQX+5X8” said “Hexxxx + Dkskh”, tiny mistakes may not be enough to be detected by rescue teams, eventually leading to deviation distances of tens of meters.
In complex terrain, the distance of tens of meters may affect the rescue time.
Of course, the above is just my personal opinion, everyone can have different opinions in the comment area.
Although What3Words is just a seemingly small idea, all it does is convert GPS coordinates into words and manually remove some discordant words.
But it is such an idea, the changes it brings are huge, and it will definitely be even bigger in the future.
After all, there are many places like South Africa and Mongolia in every corner of the world.
People there face all kinds of inconveniences, a simple and precise way of expressing an address, a system that can add a “number” to their home, may bring about an earth-shaking change in their lives.
You might not be able to imagine it, but it’s real.
And this is exactly what What3Words can do.
Rio de Janeiro favela ▼
