10:10 Code

[tiiiim]

Personally, I find all this very interesting. A global postcode system of sorts. See for yourself:

 

http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/1010-code.html

 

Thoughts?

[+julianh]

Personally, I find all this very interesting. A global postcode system of sorts. See for yourself:

 

http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/1010-code.html

 

Thoughts?

Not for me, thanks! I think a human readable location is far more likely to be useful than a non-human readable "postcode".

[+ecanderson]

Personally, I find all this very interesting. A global postcode system of sorts. See for yourself:

 

http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/1010-code.html

 

Thoughts?

"Now those latitude and longitude values are very hard to enter, and, although in the UK post codes are pretty accurate, they are not universal (e.g. in France and the US there's no equivalent). In contrast the 10:10 code is global."

 

That information may be a bit out of date. We are using (5+4) 9 digits here now for metro areas, and can easily locate a block of houses as easily as the UK post code.

[+dakboy]

This guy again?

 

The current coordinate systems all allow for a relatively easy way to estimate distances between 2 points without use of a calculator, and get an easy mental picture of where a single position is.

 

"Encoding" data meant for human consumption is counter-productive - just go all the way and encode the coordinates in a QR Code image if you're doing to do this.

[Suscrofa]

To get rid of feet, furlong miles etc... that nobody uses outside of the US and nobody can use properly in the US, would be more usefull and a major progress !

Edited June 15, 2010 by Suscrofa

[+ecanderson]

To get rid of feet, furlong miles etc... that nobody uses outside of the US and nobody can use properly in the US, would be more usefull and a major progress !

At least we only use furlongs for horse racing, just like they do in the U.K. Think of a furlong as 1/5 of a km and you'll be accurate within 1/10 of a percent. Easy, eh?

 

To put this even remotely on topic to begin with...

 

It's interesting that gc.com and geocaching in general happened to pick the DD mm.mmm format. I would guess that someone setting up the system at gc.com back at the start figured out that the maximum (at the equator) resolution of about 6 feet (OK, call it 2 meters) you get from 0.001 minutes would be more than adequate given the technology we (literally) have in hand.

 

But for you metric-minds out there, are you surprised that they didn't use DD.ddddd instead? Would have brought us down to about 3.7 feet worst case resolution and avoided all of the division by 60 for the curious.

[robertlipe]

Yes, just what we need - yet MORE ways to express the same information. Swatch time worked out well. When he proposed this four years ago, it went nowhere.

 

Replacing two numbers the size of a phone number with an alphanumeric representation that's really only a few characters shorter is a lose on most limited keyboard input devices.

 

I once had the "Why DD mm.mmm" discussion with Jeremy. The argument was pretty compelling, actually. That's what GPSes of that era defaulted to when they were unboxed. Pretty karmic that all the major GPS vendors are now building GPSes with dedicated geocaching features...

[+ecanderson]

I once had the "Why DD mm.mmm" discussion with Jeremy. The argument was pretty compelling, actually. That's what GPSes of that era defaulted to when they were unboxed.

Now that's what I call an easy and straightforward explanation!

Pretty karmic that all the major GPS vendors are now building GPSes with dedicated geocaching features...

Dunno -- while popular, I often wonder how many of us there are out here, and what percentage of the handheld business we really represent. By "us", I mean the number of people who have purchased a handheld GPS with geocaching as one of the objectives for the purchase.

[Grasscatcher]

...and then there are us that ONLY use UTM and wonder why everyone else doesn't also......

[robertlipe]

ecanderson, I was just saying that one of the core element of geocaching was driven by what GPSes of the era did and that now geocaching drives what the GPSes do.

 

Grasscatcher, UTM works really great on any percentage of the planet you can mathematically consider "flat". If you're concerned about an area you can print and put on a piece of paper, UTM is groovy. If you're doing math between any two arbitrary points on the planet, you have to "unflatten" the UTM grids to compensate for the distortion near the edges before you can do anything with them. In all my GPSBabel experience, I can't think of any program or GPS that stores location natively as UTM. The huge majority store internally as degrees or mutations of degrees, like radians.