Saturday 4 June 2016

alphanumeric or space-time coordinates

I never quite got the hang of UK postcodes, but I suppose any other system and structure might appear just as baffling to an outsider, and perhaps numerical proximities aren’t the most efficient way of parceling up land.
Though I don’t think that we missed out on seeing anything that we we intended to because of this oversight or lack of faith and confidence in our rather unreliable navigator (for taking the choicer, scenic routes from time to time), but getting a little frustrated that many attractions did not have well-defined street addresses, we tried plugging in the postcode coordinates finally which bore us straight to the location. I didn’t think the SATNAV (Navi) would understand those. It made me think of an ambitious project that I had read about a few weeks prior that aimed to standardise all localities globally by dividing the world map into some fifty trillion three square metre plots, each assigned simple and memorable three word designations, in a multilingual context. This project is headquartered in London, incidentally, and has the geo-locator future.human.foster, which I feel to outsiders is possibly more accessible than W1A 1AA. Explore the map and find out your home address in three words.