Interesting Links for 26-08-2020

[andrewducker]

Debugging Bluetooth butt plugs safely is tricky in a Covid world.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1298096736095711232.html
(tags:sextoys bluetooth technology pandemic )

Have racists made singing along at the Last Night of The Proms racist?

(tags:racism nationalism uk music OhForFucksSake )

Prosopagnosia: The artist in search of her face

(tags:germany faces brain art children )

A Mechanist's Guide to the Coronavirus Genome (overwhelming, but the bits I picked up were fascinating

(tags:virus pandemic visualisation genes )

Humans are weird... in spaaaaaaace

(tags:scifi humans weird ViaDrCross )

Africa declared free of wild polio

(tags:disease Africa GoodNews )

I've discovered that almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person - an American teenager who can't speak Scots

(tags:Scotland Wikipedia language OhForFucksSake )

Joint statement of the United States and the European Union on a tariff agreement

(tags:Europe USA trade )

Why do postal codes in the UK start with letters when compared with the USA zip codes?

(tags:mail location uk viaDanielDWilliam )

Comments

[simont]

Why do postal codes in the UK start with letters when compared with the USA zip codes?

As well as the compactness advantages of using letters from a space of 26 rather than digits from a space of 10, there's another nice thing about a mixed alphanumeric system: it makes it easy to recognise that something is a postcode.

If I see a 5-digit number out of context, it could be anything. But "RG11 5NR", with that pattern of letters-numbers-space-numbers-letters, is so characteristically postcode-shaped that you'd be really surprised to find it meant any other kind of identifier.

The same goes for UK-style vehicle registration numbers – in both old and new schemes – and quite possibly National Insurance numbers too. It's the same theory of ergonomic design that also suggests that plugs for different purposes ought to be different shapes so that you can't mistake them for each other.

[andrewducker]

To the point where selecting that postcode meant that Android suggested I might want to open it in the map application. I assume based on a regex!

(I was momentarily hopeful your "different shaped plugs" sentence was going to be a reference to one of the other links today...)

[simont]

Sadly, I had somehow missed that other link's title, and therefore missed the opportunity to do the joke :-)

[cmcmck]

Cultural appropriation much?

I at least do have Scottish ancestry (admittedly those dodgy border reivers the Scotts as well as the slightly more couthy Cockburns) and am married to a Scot!

[dewline]

Canadian postal codes go like this:

A#A#A#

The first letter usually gives away what part of which province/territory the address is located in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada#/media/File:Canadian_postal_district_map.svg

British postal codes are...mystical to me, so far, because I didn't grow up with them. I imagine that after reading up on the rules, they'll make more sense to me.

[andrewducker]

It's usually "two letter acronym for the area/city", 1-2 digit number, space, number, two letters.

So my old one was EH7 5UF - where EH is Edinburgh, EH7 is North-East-ish, and then the following triplet is down to one part of a street.

There's a couple of maps over here to give you an idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EH_postcode_area

[fanf]

Postcodes are kind of cool in that their structure corresponds to the way the Post Office works. The initial letters are (roughly) an abbreviation for the post town (location of a major sorting office) and the digits are a sector around the post town. The first half is the "outcode", which is used for sorting mail at the post office that collected the mail to determine which delivery office to send it to. The second half is the "incode" which is used by the delivery office to sort the mail into "walks" i.e. delivery rounds. There's typically a postcode per street, or one per side of a street, or per office building, or business.

[naath]

Most people in the UK don't understand the postcode system, one just memorises what one's postcode is. Ours is our street, it's a few dozen houses. Work's is just our site, and I think maybe we paid to get a good one because the Sanger campus got CB10 1SA and somehow I don't think that was entirely chance. (it is surprisingly expensive to get the whole may, but you can search individual postcodes)

On a Definition of "Wokeness"

[dewline]

"Woke means "too strongly opposed to racism", "not racist enough", or, in short "not racist". If someone disapproves of wokeness, that is a pretty good indication that they are racist. (I am sure there are exceptions. Can you think of any exceptions? Then please keep them to yourself.) If you are told that something is woke, that is a pretty good indication that you ought to be doing it. No-one is banning patriotic songs. "

I want to be/remain "woke", then, going by that definition.

I also consider myself continually warned: Nazis steal symbols whenever they think they can get away with it.

Polio in Africa

[dewline]

Definitely an event to be celebrated to whatever degree we can, to know that polio "in the wild" in Africa is over and done.

[calimac]

The postal code answer is wrong. The codes as this person is considering them are not comparable. US five-digit zip codes serve the same function as the sorting areas of the UK postal codes (the "RG11" part of "RG11 5NR"). In both cases, they cover full small towns, chunks of rural areas, or sections of bigger towns or cities. On machine-processed mail in the US, you'll find a nine-digit zip, with a hyphen separating the last four digits. As you can imagine, there's a lot more of them when that's figured in. Those, like the full UK postal codes, cover one large building or a few houses.

[andrewducker]

Aaah - can people write that on their post? Or does it only get used by automated mailings?

[melita66]

Yes, you can write a 9-digit zip code (ZIP + 4) on a hand-addressed envelope.

I had thought that for an area that's mostly houses, the zip + 4 was unique per house, but I see now that might not be true.

[andrewducker]

Thanks!

[ckd]

Even in cases where a ZIP+4 isn't unique, there are two additional digits (for a total of 11) that indicate the delivery point. These are only in the barcode (can't be added by hand), but bulk mailers use them in their generated barcodes to get better pricing.

[calimac]

As noted, you may: but people rarely do. Not that there's much hand-addressed mail any more. Professional mailing lists I'm on (commercial magazines, catalogs) usually have the zip+4, which may be automatically (or manually) looked up; other mailing lists (amateur magazines, etc), even with machine-generated labels, don't usually bother.

Canadian postal codes are like UK ones: two parts, of which the first part is the equivalent of the US zip code and the second part of the US +4.

[andrewducker]

Gotcha - thanks!

[armiphlage]

And Santa's postal code is H0H 0H0.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada#:~:text=In%20response%20to%20attacks%20from,postal%20code%20is%20H0H%200H0.%22

[andrewducker]

I see that you can (comment further down). Interesting - thank you!

I wonder why this wasn't better known (i.e. more people telling me I'm wrong).

[melita66]

I have a vague recollection that the post office was telling people to learn their zip + 4 years ago. That it would speed processing and delivery. I haven't seen that kind of rec for a while.

Way back in the dark ages (mid- to late-80s) when I was working in accounting and had to do things like type envelopes or enter addresses in a computer, a colleague told me that I should always use the 2 letter state abbreviation rather than spell it out or use the older, now non-regulation abbreviations (Neb. rather than NE for Nebraska), don't use any punctuation (so AVE not Ave. or Av.), AND put two spaces between the state abbreviation and the zip code. This was to aid machine processing and was in some document put out by the post office.

I haven't looked to confirm any of this. It's just what's stuck in my head.

[kmusser]

Not your imagination, they definitely did a push to get people to use zip+4 for awhile. I think they just sort of gave up on it because it was not catching on. I think that probably was because from a users point of view using zip+4 didn't seem to make any difference, your mail got delivered in the same amount of time anyway, so why bother.

[nancylebov]

More discussion of Scots wikipedia:

https://www.metafilter.com/188374/The-problem-is-that-this-person-cannot-speak-Scots#7972127

[andrewducker]

It delighted me no end.

[anna_wing]

Different wokes for different folks.

There are people on the local internet who insist on using "brown" and "black" in the western style, and consider it racist not to. Whereas I would consider it hideously insulting (and racist and colonialist) to refer to people according to their skin colour rather than, say, either their nationality or their proper ethnonyms. An Indian Malayalee and an Indonesian Minangkabau may both be approximately brown-coloured, that doesn't mean that they can be conflated.

It's enough to make me clutch my (diversely-coloured) pearls in horror.

[andrewducker]

Seems to vary by country as well. I'm fairly sure that there are different preferred terms all over the place - which the internet then causes to come in to contact with each other!

[mountainkiss]

Postal codes in the UK start with letters whether or not they are being compared with USA zip codes.

[andrewducker]

That they do!