Style Conversational Week 1182, brought to you from dart.edge.orbit
The Style Invitational Empress ruminates all over the What3Words
contest and a big vat of collective-noun ink. And Loserfest!
"stud.help.nest" is the code assigned to one of the myriad 3-meter
squares that form the footprint of 1301 K St. NW, The Post's
headquarters. The grid of squares appears when you zoom way in. (Screen
shot from what3words.com )
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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June 30, 2016
Hello, everyone. Aren’t you glad that, just in time for the three-day
weekend, I’m giving you something you can waste massive amounts of
holiday time on? Yay for Week 1182 of The Style Invitational
.
I’d heard about the What3Words project on the radio recently (the
tFhree-word addressing system has been adopted by the Mongolian postal
service) and then Longtime Loser Doug Frank wrote to me to suggest a
contest. And while I’m not sure what will come of it — I confess that
both our Artist for Life Bob Staake and the Erstwhile Czar of The Style
Invitational were
highly skeptical — I remain hopeful and even optimistic that we’ll have
a bunch of interesting finds to share, and that Loserly wit and
creativity will come into play.
What3words.com has lots of explanatory
matter, from the simple to the technical, on how the address system was
developed, how it’s already being used, and how its creators hope it
will be used. It’s a .com, not an .org, because it’s being marketed to
businesses for delivery systems as well as a way to get a custom
three-word address (e.g., “best.pizza.here”) that will duplicate the
real one. But the map is free for all to explore, and was designed to be
accessible to just about everyone in the inhabited world; it will work
on a smartphone without an Internet connection, which is what a large
fraction of the global population has these days.
The system is based on latitude and longitude coordinates, but makes
them easily used by humans: As the W3W website puts it: “People’s
ability to immediately remember 3 words is near perfect, whilst [they
use British English] your ability to remember the 16 numbers, decimal
points and N/S/E/W prefixes that are required to define the same
location using lat,long is zero.”
Working from an oversimplified news feature, I’d originally written in
the Invite that the 57 trillion 3-meter squares covering the planet were
assigned three-word codes at random from a list of 25,000 common words.
This was wrong on two counts. First, it turns out, the assignments
weren’t quite random; the longest words are saved for the most remote
areas; “cornbread.prolifically.shimmies” is off the coast of Antarctica.
And the developers even took pains to ensure that similar combinations —
for instance, the same three words but in different order — would land
at great distances from each other, so that someone sending a package or
fire truck could easily see which was the desired address. (Meanwhile,
my own Zip code has a Holly Road and Holly Drive in different
neighborhoods; I’m hoping that no one plays with matches on either street.)
"stud.help.nest" as it appears on the Esri map on What3Words; you don't
see the grid of individual squares, but you might get detailed more
outlines of buildings. (Screen shot from what3words.com)
Second — and this occurred to me past midnight last night — 25,000 words
in every possible combination and order, even if the words are repeated
within a combination, are not enough to make 57 trillion unique
three-word codes. Having no faith in my math skills, I asked (without
explaining why) on the Style Invitational Devotees
Facebook page how many three-word combinations
would come from a 25,000-word-list. Yes, it was 1:07 a.m. By 1:10 a.m. I
had several respondents — Doug Frank (who, having suggested the contest,
knew what was up), Tim Livengood, Alex Jeffrey, Alex Blackwood, Dave
Letizia among them — providing answers, and after I clarified that the
total should include repeated words, the told me the answer was simply
25,000 cubed, or a mere 15.625 trillion. So I did some more research and
found out that the 25,000-word list was the smallest of lists in at
least nine languages being used; the largest (I’m presuming English) is
40,000.
So for 57 million combinations — the number of squares on the planet —
how many words do you really need? At least 38,485, said Alex Jeffrey.
And if you have a list of 40,000, how many possible combinations?
“That’d give 64 trillion.”
And that is why you could conceivably type in 7 trillion word
combinations and not find a single valid one. But it’s okay, because the
search box will provide helpful alternatives.
Not all the areas that are assigned codes are actually mapped in detail,
but a code typed into the search field on the map will tell you the
location. This was true of “empress.banished.forever,”
which is actually (and
appropriately) in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and not so “near
Ribeira Grande, Azores,” and it’s totally fine to use such a code for
this contest.
How precise do you need to be with your discoveries? Well, not very — as
long as the wording of your entry doesn’t imply otherwise. For instance,
The Washington Post is located in the huge office building One Franklin
Square (1301 K St. NW), which takes up almost the whole block on K
between 13th and 14th streets, and is quite deep as well. And while The
Post doesn’t occupy the whole 13-story building, it does actually cover
the whole footprint on the seventh and eighth floors, along with parts
of several others. And so it’s totally precise to say that any square in
that building belongs to The Post.
But: Suppose you found a code in the building that was perfectly fitting
for the sports section. Unless you know where in the building the sports
department is, you can’t announce that the sports section is situated at
wordA.wordB.wordC. But you can say, for example, that the sports section
/ought to /move to that square.
When Bob Staake found hidden.cave.dinner,
the map noted the
Central Park Zoo, but it didn’t say if that spot was actually a bear
cave or just a parking lot. So “at the Central Park Zoo” is fine, while
“the grizzly bear enclosure at the Central Park Zoo” isn’t.
Also, you can be more general, maybe much more general: You could just
say “In New York City,” for example. But my hunch is that that the
cool-coincidence factor will be a lot more interesting in more specific
places.
It’s hard to anticipate all the questions that people will have with
this contest. My main aim, of course, is to provide interesting
discoveries to share — especially ones that are funny and/or reflect
creativity. I expect that I’ll have to make a few rulings on unforeseen
issues in the next few days; the best way to see updates is in the
comment thread on the Invitational that posted at the top of the
Devotees page. If you have a pressing question and absolutely don’t want
tojoin the Devotees (we’re almost at 1,100
members) email me at pat.myers@washpost.com.
*A SOVIET OF COLLECTIVE NOUNS*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1178*
/(a non-inking entry by Chaz Miller of Silver Spring, Md.) /
I couldn’t do a count on the number of individual entries in our Week
1178 contest for collective nouns, or “terms
of venery” (I could do the count very easily if I made you send in your
entries one at a time, rather than all on one form, but I’m guessing you
wouldn’t much want that). Suffice it to say that I received 331
submissions — close to twice what I get in a typical week — and that of
those submissions, a whole lot of them contained 25 entries. So
“thousands” is a conservative way of putting it.
As you can see from this week’s results, most
of the inking entries involve some sort of play on a existing collective
noun (or unit of measure; I wasn’t going to be rigid here when I needed
the funny). So, so many entries didn’t seem even humorously like a group
or even a quantity (“a curiosity of scientists,” “a steep of Tea Party
members”) that I’d often go through 100 or more entries before finding
some good ones. But that’s why The Post pays me dozens of dollars every
single week to show you the 52 best rather than just letting everyone
share on the website.
It’s the fifth win, and 119th ink in all for Dudley Thompson, whose
wife, Susan, also got ink this week (for Ink No. 39). Dudley’s “two
square meeters of Mormon missionaries” made me laugh out loud — a tall
order for this judge this past week. The cuddly dust mite goes to David
Kleinbard for his 15th ink “above the fold” — which is especially great
because David happens to have a cuddly Junior Junior Loser named Eli.
It’s just the ninth blot of ink for Jack McBroom, but his second
runner-up entry; and then there’s Jeff Shirley, who might as well have
carpeting laid on his continual turf in the Losers’ Circle.
*YINZ WANT TO GO TO PITTSBURGH? LOSERFEST, AUG. 25-28*
Speaking of collective nouns, I just learned that “yinz” is a
regionalism for the second-person plural, the Western Pennsylvania
equivalent of the Southern “y’all” and the Mid-Atlantic “youse.” or
“yas.” Which makes a bit of sense of Loserfest Pope Kyle Hendrickson’s
name for the activity-filled (and belly-filling) Yinzburgh: Loserfest
2016. The Royal Consort and I will be heading up to join the Losers on
Friday, Aug. 26 (someone has to put out an Invitational on Thursday),
but will still be able to see an election-themed show by the Second City
troupe at the O’Reilly Theater, visit Fallingwater, and hopefully even
get to roll around in something called Knockerball
if only for the
photo-op. You can take part in whichever items on the “fungenda”
(presumbably a portmanteau of agenda and fungus) appeal to you; you buy
your own tickets. But all the information, including the Loserfest room
rate at the Omni, is at loserfest.org Make sure
you click on the Drivels page to fill out the form so that you’ll be on
the emailing list and will be kept current on the plans.
*YINZ RATHER JUST GO TO FALLS CHURCH? LOSER BRUNCH SUNDAY, JULY 17*
It’s at noon at Grevey’s just outside the Beltway, in a shopping center
at Arlington Boulevard (Route 50) and Gallows Road. Not a buffet, but
you can get either breakfast or lunch food, both tasty. Sports are on
the TVs. I’ll try to go, especially if some new people would like to
meet the Losers. RSVP to Elden Carnahan on the Losers’ website,
NRARS.org (click on “Our Social Engorgements”).
Happy Fourth, all — maybe I’ll see you somewhere around
congratulations.fingernails.desk
.