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by JulianMorrison 2502 days ago
It's easier to say a string of words than a string of numbers. There's also more intrinsic redundancy against small mistakes, that with a co-ordinate could move the designated area by hundreds of miles.

I don't like the fact it's an opaque monopoly, but as a way to designate locations for human use, it's effective.
1 comments
johnday 2502 days ago
If you're in the UK, moving the area by hundreds of miles would be obviously detectable. If you said to the operator "I don't know where I am, somewhere in the New Forest" and then you gave them a long/lat in Newcastle, they'd know to check again. Given that phone towers connect emergency calls to local dispatchers, even saying roughly where you are isn't necessary.

Long-lat are highly effective precisely because almost anyone can read a number [including dyslexic people], and because the concept of a numeric pair as a GPS location is understood, at least in passing, by almost everybody.

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JulianMorrison 2502 days ago
And if you're in many places globally, particularly the backwoods, you could displace or misread a digit, point out a location well away from your position, and still be pointing at "a forest".

Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble getting all the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes.

Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a glitch and can ask for retransmission. That matters when eg: using a CB radio, or there's a blizzard blowing into a phone's pickup.

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johnday 2502 days ago
> Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble getting all the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes.

You only need 3 decimal places for ~100m accuracy. So really you're talking a 5 digit number and a 4 digit number (in the UK). A sensible presentation of that data would not be hard to read for almost anyone who doesn't have sight problems.

Moreover, a service like the theoretical "999.gov.uk" could log a person's GPS location and give them (say) a three word codephrase to pass to the dispatcher to lookup the record on the backend. No more or less effort, but not proprietary and harder to mess up.

> Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a glitch and can ask for retransmission.

This is true. I don't think there's a good way to fix that with numbers.

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