In Venice they name sestiere (multiple city blocks) - house numbers within a sestiere are seemingly random (more likely having to do with the age of the house and when it was originally assigned a number)
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It’s the blocks*.
*Brought to you by an algorithm which decided you are a fan of late 80s boy groups.
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I’ve always said, it would be best for everyone if the world only had one time zone. Think of how many fewer bugs our programs would have.
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Some streets in Japan have names but most don’t.
Bad road design must be an overall TEXAS thing. I’ve only been to Houston, but I remember how the lanes would suddenly cut off without warning. I refer to them as Suicide Lanes.
I don’t know how people aren’t constantly crashing into each other (or maybe they are?). Guess it’s only a shock to the uninitiated.
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When I opened this thread, I was wondering to myself how long it would take for someone to imply that Google are somehow jerks because tricky, archaic mapping standards exist. I was betting on the first 10 posts, so I guess I win.
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If only you’d had more faith in our snark, you could have been even more precise. 
Also, 'twas but a joke. I love Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. As someone with epically bad sense of direction, it may be my favorite advent of smart phones.
Then there’s the Chicago address grid. Mostly, it’s based on 800 to the mile, but the first three miles south of Madison St. had their own ideas:
1 mile (Roosevelt Rd.): 1200 S
2 miles (Cermak Rd./22nd St): 2200 S
3 miles (31st St.): 3100 S
Then the 800-to-the-mile thing resumes, and extends far outside the city - except for some suburbs that have their own address grids.
DuPage County, Kane County, and a few of the cities within, use the old Public Land Survey System for addresses, so your house number might be 6N535 or something like that unless your town has its own grid. I ran into that one while working on an early-generation CD-ROM-based navigation application.
Biggest city in Germany
I moved to Boston in 1999 when construction cranes were blossoming everywhere. …And they were how I navigated. I knew my office was near a certain cluster of cranes, so when a navigation error led me into one of the interminable twists and turns of wrong-way streets, the cranes were how I got my bearings and found my way to my destination.
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Wait… is one of the dudes wearing a Bauhaus shirt? WTF?
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I think it’s only fair if the three words are in Welsh:
“AA, please come to Pontrhydfendigaid.Rhosllannerchrugog.Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.”
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Taking me back, that was when 93 still cut the north end off. I used to skate down there and at The old Columbus park alll the time.
The Big Dig was worth every penny.
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and one of the guys from Chicago:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/april2/3592801169
Peter Murphy’s got some explaining to do…
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Probably to confuse visitors enough so they stay a bit longer. The usual reaction when visiting Paderborn is to flee right after having communicated with a local resident for the first time.
Paderborn is shit.
I dunno… do you think that Peter Murphy has any control over who buys baushaus shirts?
Still super-weird. But they are also quite iconic shirts.
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That has actually been a serious suggestion from programmers I’ve talked to (part of the suggestion, anyways - it gets worse). Which seems to me results in one of two outcomes: either you end up like China, where everyone is on Beijing time (I’m sure it’s already great getting up in the middle of the night to go to work if you live in the Western part of the country), or, more likely, the standard time becomes meaningless and you have no idea what anyone’s schedules are like, because everyone has made up a non-official (local) time system by which to live. But the proposed “rational” time system gets more absurd because it also needs to reconcile astronomical, atomic and solar time, etc. That means that the official/non-official time system divergence applies to every aspect of the calendar as well, otherwise a given date has no fixed relation to the seasons, as the Earth will be in a different place in its orbit on a given date as the discrepancies add up, until mid-summer is taking place in September, and so on.
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Do not underestimate his powers:
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Sadly, lately his power seems to be getting arrested for a DUI, tho.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2013/03/bauhaus-singerdui-arrest.html
Here’s what he said about it at the time (or afterwards, I guess)
Still love him!
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I love Tom Scott 
; especially when he explains this sort of exceptions that trip programmers.
I’ve made a playlist: Tom Scott explains things
