Oh man. Manhattan distance breaks my brain, because no matter how small you make those discrete “blocks” that make up the stepped psuedo-diagonal, the distance is still the same as going around the edge of the “map.” Even to the point that the stepped line is visually indistinguishable from a smooth diagonal. I know it makes sense mathematically and I understand why, but it is the exact point where math departs from eye-ballin’-it logic for me. The funniest thing about Taxicab reality, is the diagonal-ish stepped path probably actually takes longer to traverse, because you’re turning more corners.
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The Easterners wouldn’t have lost Ben gazlo if it weren’t for Hillary! She did nothing! Bengazlo!
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medieval erection of parapets
Ooh, best name for a rock band.
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This is a good example of data atomicity gone too far. Will you really ever need to get only customers who live on avenues? Or sort your customers by house number?
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Every left turn costs you two minutes on average in heavy traffic or something like that. I remember reading somewhere that UPS drivers are like Derek Zoolander and are instructed not to be ambiturners.
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It’s also probably a pointless premature optimisation. You might actually imagine scenarios where such information would be useful, but it’s unlikely that the best way to model them are in a precise semantic graph. Machine learning likes messy data, and that’s the future of data processing, not some set of pure functions operating on perfect data.
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This is why the actual shortest Manhattan distance is one that requires the fewest amount of turns.
The sharp turns converging into a diagonal thing breaks my brain as well, but look at it from the point of view of the diagonal. The diagonal-ish infinitesimal Manhattan path is basically a set of oscillations from left to right around a fixed path, and it takes √2 times more power to traverse the path while oscillating than to traverse the path without oscillating at all.
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Apparently, there’s a building with the address:
New House Green Lane Avenue Street Somerset.
Good luck with that one.
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Relatively few streets in the U.S. rose organically (as you would recognize it). Those are mostly in the original colonies, Louisiana, and Texas. Everything else was built-out under the Northwest Ordinance, which specified how land was to be doled out and divided, including the amount of land to be reserved for public use structures like Post offices. So the coasts have a lot of winds and bends, the interior a lot of grids.
After that, I can only comment personally on the Texan case: the Spanish encomienda survey system leads to some really wonky lots, and really wonky roads around them. Then we try to impose a downtown grid on top of that. Then we built highways on top of smaller roads, absorbing them as we expanded them (which is why every large street in Austin has about four interchangeable names). And then we renamed the numbered street after famous people like MLK and Cesar Chavez, just to make sure tourists get lost, and can’t figure out why there’s no 19th street, much less one intersecting something called Mo-Pac Expressway.
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There’s a Street Road in Philly.
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at the political campaign I’m working on, the database is used to generate “walk packets”, used by canvassers who need to visit our targets in an efficient manner. So yeah.
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Frankly, the various old world naming schemes hurt our American brains. We like an address we can put onto an envelope or into a GPS unit.
Just having a city named “Ngaio” sounds easy. When I have to ship something to China at “Cityname, neighborhoodname , corner of XXX street and YYY road, alley ZZZ, lot B, floor N,” it gives me address vertigo. I have no idea how to begin breaking that up to the form the shipping department gives us. When I later visit China give that same address to a taxi driver – who informs me that the address gibberish, but it sounds like it’s within a block of a warehouse he knows – I know it’s going to be a long day.
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Enter City: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
Error! City too long (Max 15 Characters)
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4 is the one that a homonym for die. You’ll find many buildings lacking 4th floors and x4 floors. I have never been in one tall enough to see what they do with 4x floors. I’ve encountered things like floors 12, 12a, 12b, 15.
On the other hand, 8 is a homonym for wealth. They go bonkers for 8s. It’s common for prices, especially promotional prices, to end in .88–that despite the fact that the .01 and .05 coins are no longer actually used in commerce and the total is rounded to the nearest .1. A license plate of pure 8s will likely cost more than the car.
And more on topic: I recently ran into a Chinese airline website whose address validation does not accept a character that routinely shows up in condo addresses in China. (Admittedly something that few tourists would have a problem with as it’s very unlikely to cause a problem with a hotel.)
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As someone who actually writes address standardization software for a living, let me assure you that no, not all of us believe that.
The people who use our stuff in their systems might believe those things, but I don’t.
#NotAllProgrammers
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When financial institutions first started going to security questions, they didn’t actually let you select a question, just answer the ones they gave you. My father got one for, “name of the city where you were born (must be at least 6 characters)”. He was born in Waco.
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My favorite locally is West Street in Berkeley, which, for its brief continuation appearance in Oakland, turns into Occidental.
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I hope you handle APOs better than those programmers too!
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Ok, that is funny and sad.
On top of that those questions are an abomination for security. If your dad had a decent password it wouldn’t matter as it would be a 6 character password from data that can be discovered with a bit of research.
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