Futility Closet - 218-Lost in the Amazon

Episode Date: September 24, 2018

In 1769, a Peruvian noblewoman set out with 41 companions to join her husband in French Guiana. But a series of terrible misfortunes left her alone in the Amazon jungle. In this week's episode we'll follow Isabel Godin des Odonais on her harrowing adventure in the rain forest. We'll also learn where in the world "prices slippery traps" is and puzzle over an airport's ingenuity. Intro: In 1949 neurophysiologist Grey Walter built electronic "tortoises" with primitive nervous systems. In 1952 G.V. Carey added an index to his manual of indexing. Sources for our feature on Isabel Godin des Odonais: Anthony Smith, The Lost Lady of the Amazon, 2003. Robert Whitaker, The Mapmaker's Wife, 2004. Jean Godin, "Voyage of Madame Godin Along the River of the Amazons, in the Year 1770," in Charlotte-Adélaïde Dard et al., Perils and Captivity, 1827. Larrie D. Ferreiro, Measure of the Earth, 2011. Edward Julius Goodman, The Explorers of South America, 1992. Londa L. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 2009. J. Donald Fernie, "Marginalia: The Shape of the Earth, Part II," American Scientist 79:5 (September/October 1991), 393-395. Donald D. Brand, "A Brief History of Anthropology in Brazil," New Mexico Anthropologist 5:4 (October-December 1941), 99-150. David Taylor, "An Adventure of Historic Measures," Americas 50:6 (November/December 1998), 14-21. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1898. Edwin McDowell, "The Middle of the World," New York Times, Nov. 25, 1990. "First Woman Over Andes," New York Times, Nov. 5, 1922. Henri Froidevaux, "Documents Inédits sur Godin des Odonais et sur Son Séjour a la Guyane," Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris I, 1896. "An Account of the Singular Misfortunes of Madame Godin, in a Voyage Which She Made From the Province of Quito to Cayenne, by the River of the Amazons," New Wonderful Magazine and Marvellous Chronicle 4:37 (July 1794), 309-313. Listener mail: Robert Plummer, "Giving Everyone in the World an Address," BBC News, April 30, 2015. "Ivory Coast Post Office Adopts Three-Word System," BBC News, Dec. 9, 2016. Plus Codes. Wikipedia, "Open Location Code" (accessed Sept. 13, 2018). what3words. Wikipedia, "What3words" (accessed Sept. 13, 2018). Belinda Lanks, "This App Gives Even the Most Remote Spots on the Planet an Address," Magenta, Oct. 11, 2016. Joon Ian Wong, "Mongolia Is Changing All Its Addresses to Three-Word Phrases," Quartz, June 13, 2016. Jacopo Prisco, "Ivory Coast Street Addresses Are Now Made of Three Words," CNN, Sept. 4, 2017. what2numbers. what3emojis. what3goshdarnits. what3ducks. what3[redacted] (warning: many, many expletives). This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Josva Dammann Kvilstad, who sent this corroborating link (warning -- this spoils the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Google Podcasts, on Apple Podcasts, or via the RSS feed at https://futilitycloset.libsyn.com/rss. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- you can choose the amount you want to pledge, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from robot tortoises to an indexer's index. This is episode 218. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1769, a Peruvian noblewoman set out with 41 companions to join her husband in French Guiana, but a series of terrible misfortunes left her alone in the Amazon jungle. In today's show, we'll follow Isabel

Godin de Odonai on her harrowing adventure in the rainforest. We'll also learn where in the world Price's slippery traps is and puzzle over an airport's ingenuity. In the 1730s, an interesting debate arose between French and British scientists regarding the shape of the Earth. The French astronomer Jacques Cassini argued that it bulged at the poles, where Isaac Newton had believed it bulged at the equator. The French Academy of Sciences decided to settle the question by measuring the Earth in two places. They sent one party north to Lapland to measure an arc of latitude near the Arctic Circle, and they sent another party to South America to take a similar measurement at the equator. Comparing those measurements would reveal the true shape of

the Earth and show who is right. As it happened, the Lapland group reported its measurements first, and when those were compared with some readings that had been taken near Paris, they were enough to show that Newton had been right. The Earth is a spheroid that's flattened at the poles. When the South American party broke up, some of its members returned to France, but one of them, a cartographer named Jean-Gaudin de Odenay, stayed on and took up a post as a professor of astronomy and natural science at the College of Quito in 1739. There he met and married Isabel Gramason, a Spanish noblewoman who'd been born in Peru. He was 30 and she was 13, but she was very well educated and spoke Spanish, French, and Quechua, the local Andean language. Three years after their marriage, they moved to Rio Bamba, about 100 miles

south of Quito, where her father was an administrator. They were surrounded by her family, but increasingly buried in debt because Jean's business ventures didn't generate much income. They'd had several opportunities to move to France, but each time Isabel had been pregnant and couldn't travel. In 1749, Jean received word of his father's death back in France. That meant there was property in his name there and family matters to arrange. But by now the couple had two young children, and Isabelle was pregnant with a third. He knew that two of his partners on the expedition had returned to Europe by traveling down the Amazon to the east coast.

They'd had no significant trouble. Riverside missionaries had arranged transport for them and did all they could to help. He wanted to consider that route, but he thought it would be unwise to bring his wife and family on such a journey without testing it first for himself. So in March, he set off to reconnoiter the river, planning to travel downstream to Cayenne in French Guiana, arrange a passage home to France, and then travel upstream again to get his family. After a seven-month journey, he reached Cayenne safely and at first was pleased with his plan, but it turned out that returning upstream to get his family was harder than he'd imagined. The scientific expedition had been granted permission by the king of Spain, but that

expedition was over. Now Jean was just a Frenchman of no particular standing, seeking permission to cross a Portuguese colonial possession and then a Spanish colonial territory for a merely personal reason. The Portuguese authorities refused to give him a passport to go back up the river. He couldn't sail around the continent because no vessels left Cayenne on that route, and he had no way to communicate with Isabel to tell her any of this. So he was stuck in Cayenne, riding to Paris, asking authorities there to help him get a Portuguese passport so he could return to his family. It took 16 years of asking, but finally, in 1765, the king of Portugal ordered a galliot, a small galley with 30 oarsmen, to go up the river to collect Jean's family. He sent messages upriver to inform them of this, but these were lost, so no one there

understood that the transport was finally coming. In the 16 years since Jean had left, all three of his children with Isabel had died of smallpox. Rumor did eventually reach her that a Portuguese boat had arrived from Cayenne and was waiting for her somewhere in the headwaters of the Amazon, but she didn't know where. She decided to dispatch her servant Joaquim, together with half a dozen Indians, to investigate the rumors. Joaquim, who's an unsung hero in all of this, made his way down through the eastern portion of the Andean Mountains and searched for the Portuguese boat among the many tributaries of the river. After two years of searching, he found it at Lagunas, the same Jesuit mission from which

Sean's friends had set out on their own journey down the Amazon. He learned that the boat had been waiting there for four years. Its commander was not permitted to leave it to go searching for Isabel in Spanish territory, so he had to hope that she would come to him. Joyously, Joaquim traveled back to Rio Bamba and told Isabel the news, as well as the fact that her husband was alive, and she determined to go to him. This was an enormously courageous decision. She was now over 40, older than her husband had been when he'd set out to reconnoiter the river, and she was accustomed to living on her estate, surrounded by her family and their servants. But seeing her resolve, her

father set out with a contingent of Indians to make preparations with the mission stations along the way. The Portuguese boat had managed to get 2,700 miles upstream, but Isabel would still have to travel nearly 500 miles to reach it. Her father made his way down the eastern slopes of the Andes and introduced himself to the missionaries at Canelos and Andoas, who agreed to provide canoes and Indian paddlers to take Isabel downriver toward the waiting boat. When he reached Lagunas, he sent word back to Riobamba, saying that all was ready and that he would wait for her there. He warned Isabel to keep her party small, but in the end it contained 42 people. Isabelle, her two brothers, one with a 10-year-old son, Joachim, the servant, three female servants,

31 Indian carriers, and a French doctor named Rivalz, who had begged to join the party with two servants. Together they all set out on October 1st, 1769, 20 years and six months after Jean had departed. They expected that the most dangerous part of the journey would be the first 350 miles, down the steep eastern slopes of the Andes. That required carrying Isabel 44 miles on a palanquin downhill through a slippery gorge on foot in the rain. They expected it would take 12 days to reach the mission station at Canelos, and another two weeks by canoe to reach Andoas. In fact, they reached Canelos after only nine days, but there they found that something terrible had happened. The mission was deserted, and every dwelling but the church had been burned. On seeing this, Isabel's Indian carriers fled into the trees. The mission had been infected

with smallpox, possibly by her own father's party, since few others came this way. The mission community had broken up, departing in the canoes and setting fire to the buildings in an attempt to purify the air. With the loss of the carriers, Isabel's contingent of 42 had shrunk suddenly to 11, and now they had nowhere to stay and no way to advance down the river. They spent the night in the remains of a building, and Isabel sent the male members of her party to look for some solution. They found two healthy Indians not far away, both former residents of that community, and Isabel offered to pay them in advance if they could help the party along. The Indians showed them a 40-foot canoe that was in need of repair and offered to fix it. It wasn't big enough to hold all the food and household

goods they'd brought, so they'd have to abandon some of those. But now they expected only 12 days of travel to Andos, and the river looked manageable, so the Indians spent two weeks repairing the canoe and they set off downstream. The first two days went well, but on the third morning, they woke to find that the two Indians had abandoned them. The remaining 11 people were healthy, and they still had provisions, but none of them knew how to manage a 40-foot canoe. The French doctor suggested turning back, but Isabel vetoed that, and they set off down the river with Isabel's brothers, the servant Joachim, and the three Frenchmen piloting the canoe. The third day went well, and at its end, Andoas was only nine days away. The next morning, they thought they had a stroke of luck when they came upon a hut in which an

Indian was convalescing from some ailment. He offered to join the party and take the helm. But then another misfortune struck. As they were moving steadily downstream, one of the Frenchmen lost his hat to a breeze, and the Indian, who was sitting and steering in the rear, leaned over to reach for it, overbalanced, and fell into the river. He wasn't strong enough to climb back aboard the canoe, and to their horror they saw him drown. In the commotion, the vessel filled with water, so they steered it to a sandbank nearby and built a small shelter there. Everything seemed to be going wrong. The French doctor, Rival, suggested that he and one of his countrymen travel downstream to Andos. He argued

that the canoe would be easier to manage with only two men and practically no provisions aboard. They could return with food and more canoes. Isabel agreed and sent Joaquim with them. With luck, they could travel to the Andos mission and back in 15 days. The rest sat down to wait, endlessly watching the river below them for some sign of the returning canoe. After 14 days, they were dangerously low on food, they were plagued by biting insects, and their wounds were becoming infected. After 25 days, it looked as though the 10-year-old boy might die if they couldn't get medical help for him. Isabel ordered that a raft be constructed from logs and lianas. They loaded it with most of their surviving stores, and the three men pushed them into the current with poles.

But even this effort ended in disaster. The raft hung up on a submerged tree, the current tipped it, and it broke apart. Everyone and everything was flung into the river. They made their way to shore and crawled back to the hut. They had lost all their food and possessions, and when the boy died that night, no one had the strength to bury him. They tried to make their way downstream on foot along the riverbank, but following its windings was too difficult for them, and when they tried to cut through the forest, they quickly became lost and finally fell to the ground, starving, thirsty, and exhausted. They lay for some unknown time on the forest floor, passing in and out of consciousness.

At length Heloise, the maid, rose and walked off into the jungle. She was never seen again. Rosa, the oldest servant, died in her sleep. The remaining survivors couldn't have known it, but in fact the canoe carrying Joachim and the two Frenchmen had successfully reached Andoas downstream. But now that they'd reached safety, the Frenchmen refused to return up the river, and it took time for Joachim to persuade the mission fathers that there was a party that needed help on the riverbank nearly 200 miles above the mission.

Eventually he set out in a single canoe with two Indian paddlers and some food. They told him it would take eight days to get back to the camp, and already he had been gone nearly a month. In the forest, only five people were still alive. Isabelle, her two brothers, the surviving maidservant, Elvia, and the remaining Frenchman. And even these began to pass away. Isabelle's older brother, Antoine, died while telling his beads. Then the Frenchman died, then Elvia. Isabelle passed into a reverie,

and when she came to, she was alone among the bodies, which were beginning to decompose in the humid jungle air. The stench drove her to her feet, and with a knife she cut the soles from her brother's shoes and made them into sandals for herself. She found a machete among the remaining supplies, got a stick for support, and made her way into the jungle. When Joachim and the paddlers reached the camp, it was empty. It's not known with any certainty by how much he had missed them. Possibly it was very close, but there's no telling. He would have seen one body, the boys, and that would have been in terrible condition. He and the Indians soon traced the rest of the party into the woods and found the remaining bodies. Either Joachim didn't count them or they were in no condition to be counted,

but he didn't realize that Isabel and one of the three maidservants were missing. They returned to the canoe and passed back downstream to Andos, where they gave the news to the mission, which would have passed word on to Isabel's father waiting at Lagunas and to the Galli at Boatman, who had been waiting for four years and now knew their vigil was over. From there, the news would have passed to Cayenne in French Guiana and reach Jean, Isabel's husband, who had been hoping for 21 years to rejoin her. In the forest, Isabel would have become lost almost immediately. Only one hundredth of the light above the canopy reached the ground,

and the only people who lived in the area were Indians, who might not be friendly. She was delirious and starving by this time, so we don't know in any detail how she drove herself forward. Altogether, she was alone for nine days, lost the whole time, and soon naked, torn by thorns, and plagued by insects. As she wandered, she found enough time, and soon naked, torn by thorns, and plagued by insects. As she wandered, she found enough water to keep herself alive, and she foraged for roots, palm cabbage, berries, and partridge eggs, but this wasn't nearly enough. On the ninth day, she heard a voice and saw two men launching a canoe, Shimigai Indians. There were two women with them. At first, she thought it was a hallucination, but she stepped out of the undergrowth and appealed to them in Quechua

to take her downriver. She told them that she needed to reach Andoas, and it turned out they were former residents of Canelos, the ghost mission that she had visited earlier. They had fled when the smallpox arrived, and as it happened, they were headed to Andoas themselves. They took her to the mission there, and she tried to reward them with two gold chains, but the new priest there prevented her from doing this, and this so outraged her that she departed on the same day, weak though she was. Some Indian women gave her a cotton petticoat, and she set off downriver in a canoe with two paddlers. When she reached Lagunas, her father and the Portuguese galliot were still there. There's no record of her father's reaction to seeing her. The daughter he'd been told was dead.

Altogether, she spent six weeks in Lagunas with him, recovering from her ordeal. After all this struggle, she had come only a fraction of the 3,000 miles that separated her from her husband. The Mission Superior suggested she turn around and go back to Riobamba, but she said this would be thwarting providence and would make meaningless all the help she'd received so far. So she climbed at last aboard the galley sent by a foreign king and passed down the length of the Amazon toward a husband she hadn't seen in two decades. Along the way, as word spread of her adventure, she was showered with gifts by the people who lived along the river. Jean had heard only that she had disappeared and was presumed dead. When he learned that she'd survived

and was coming to meet him, he took a boat of his own, and they met at last at the mouth of the Amazon. He wrote, thus it was that after 20 years of absence, of alarms, of crossings, and mutual misfortunes, that I joined a darling wife I had never thought of seeing again. She was 41 and he was 58. They sailed for France and reached Jean's ancestral home in Saint-Amand-Mont-Tron in 1773. Ever after, Isabelle was said to have a nervous tick that grew worse when she was asked about her adventure. Her skin was blotchy, perhaps due to her insect bites, and her smile was said to be melancholy. In his book about Isabelle's life, Anthony Smith writes, Jean got a royal pension for his work in South America, and the two settled into a peaceful life without children but surrounded by his family.

They died within six months of each other in 1792. To commemorate this story, the towns of Santa Montron, France, and Riobamba, Ecuador, are twin cities today. We often tell you that Futility Closet would not still be here if it weren't for the support of our listeners, and that really is the case. We appreciate all the different ways that many of our listeners help the show, but the backbone of our support really is our Patreon campaign, which gives us an ongoing source of support so that we can commit to the amount of time that the podcast takes to make. Patreon also gives us a

good way to share some extras with our show's supporters, like outtakes, extra puzzles, peeks behind the scenes, and extra discussions on some of the topics we cover. So for example, last week we posted some posthumous drama in The Bone Wars, and this week we'll be comparing Isabel's ordeal with Juliana Kupka's adventure in the Peruvian rainforest from episode 161. You can learn more about our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the Support Us section of our website for the link. And thanks again to everyone who is a part of Futility Closet. And thanks again to everyone who is a part of Futility Closet. Last week, I covered some updates on the topic of names and computer programs from episode 212,

and this week I'm going to focus on some updates on the issues with addresses that were also raised in that episode. David Malky wrote to say that he regularly ships packages all around the world as part of his job, and many web forms and programs are built expecting U.S. and Canadian addresses. So if you're shipping to other countries, you can hit various problems. He said, sometimes the fields will be wrong. For example, it'll ask a European customer to enter their state, and while that person might quite helpfully enter their county or province, that usually isn't actually required on the label. So sometimes it means you see an address come in reading something like Bristol, Bristol, where Bristol is both the city and the county. Really, you just need Bristol for

the city, but the form didn't let them leave the state field blank. And when data has to travel between multiple programs, often non-US standard characters can get dropped out. If a customer using their own native keyboard enters their address in Cyrillic or Japanese, or even just Latin characters with dots or diacritics, when that data is downloaded and turned into plain text to be fed into the postage software, it's often quite mangled. I'm sure I've made postal workers in Skloflitsa, Slovenia roll their eyes at packages showing up from some dumb American who doesn't seem to know the difference between S with a diacritic mark and S, which are, of course,

entirely different letters. It would be like sending a package addressed to Mew, York. That must happen every single day, you know, and then the poor delivery person has to figure out what it's really meant. That's true. And he was thinking about it in terms of it reflecting on him. But yeah, the poor postal worker who's got to interpret it. And has nothing else to go on, yeah. Jessica Aves wrote, So far your anecdotes have talked about Western databases dealing with international variations,

so I thought I would tell you a factoid about things the other way around. And Jessica explained that while there is some variation in the address systems used in Japan, in general the order of elements in the address systems used in Japan, in general, the order of elements in an address is essentially reversed from Western addresses. And also, since many streets don't have names, that isn't generally an element that's used in an address. She says, for addresses in, let's say, Tokyo, it goes like this. Postal code, prefecture, ward, district, block number, building number, or also unit number, and then name of the business. And I guess you don't tend to think about things that you're used to, so I'd never

thought before about how addresses in the U.S. start with the most specific elements and move down to the more general ones. So you start with, say, a company name and then move to the street address and then the city, state, and zip code. But to deliver the mail, you have to start with the more general elements, so the ordering in Japan system might actually make more sense. I'd never thought about that. Why would you start with one main street if you're not saying which state it's in?

Right, yeah, you need to start with that first. Jessica goes on to explain that Japanese websites are not generally set up to allow for international shipping. She says, you can't place an order for shipping if you don't have a Japanese address that matches the number of boxes. You also must select a prefecture from a drop-down list. Since only Japanese people have Japanese addresses, you can't order abroad unless the webmaster creates special spaces to do so. In the early 2000s, there was a rise of interest in culture from Japan, such as music, anime, and video games, and there was huge frustration from Westerners

who couldn't buy things they wanted online from Japan. So services like Rinkia popped up to act as a middleman. Fans working or studying abroad in Japan often operated their own basic shipping services to purchase things for other fans who could not get them. Even in this day and age, the middlemen are still needed, although most large online stores have accommodations for international customers, or they partner with major middlemen to help their customers. However, most niche businesses and small businesses are still off-limits to non-Japanese addresses, even for wholesale. Julia Williams wrote on the topic of fitting addresses into online forms that in Costa Rica, mail is not delivered by means of

street names. Instead, one will use a common landmark, e.g. a big supermarket, and add the direction and number of blocks in meters. 50 meters equals a block. I used to live something like 100 meters east of Walmart. And I saw this kind of thing a fair amount while researching this topic, how in many places people use as an address something like across from the tailor and next door to the lady who sells tea. So try fitting that into any kind of form. But there are some new potential answers to this kind of problem. Cliff Hansen wrote, Dear Sharon, Greg, and Sasha, I'm here with my own podcat, Loki, who says hello to Sasha. You were talking about some of the confusion over addresses with regard to computer systems. There are two experimental address systems I have heard of to replace our current messy system. Google has created an open source system called plus codes. These are numbers which

divide the world into a grid which is continually subdivided until you end up with an address that is specific to a three by three meter area. A little more fun is a similar project called What3Words. It takes a similar approach and divides the world into 3x3 meter grids, but unlike the Google project, it uses three easy-to-remember words instead of numbers. For example, the Eiffel Tower is at Price's Slippery Traps. Both of these projects are very useful because they can specify a specific location that doesn't need a traditional address or postal box. The Plus Codes version is actually in use in the African country of Cabo Verde, where

I did my Peace Corps service. Although the What3Words version is a little more fun, I think that the Plus Codes system makes a little more sense in reality because of the way it specifies a larger area first than a smaller area, and the more numbers it has, the more precise it gets still. This way you can specify a general area or a really specific one. The what three words version seems to me to be a bit random. About 4 billion people worldwide don't have what most forms, computer or otherwise, would consider to be any kind of recognizable address, and that includes much of Africa, Asia, and South

America. So this can make it very challenging for these people to get mail or emergency services or even register to vote. So PLUS codes and what3words are both geocoding systems that aim to give every spot on earth a unique identifier, similar to using latitude and longitude coordinates to identify locations, but intended to be shorter and simpler to use. Plus codes, also called open location codes, were developed at Google's Zurich Engineering Office and released in 2014. The codes use a combination of numbers and letters, and a full plus code is 10 characters long with a plus sign before the last two characters, which is what identifies it as being a plus code. But the string can be shortened to four or six characters if a location is specified,

such as in or near a town. The first four characters of a plus code are the area code, which defines a region of about 100 by 100 kilometers. The last six characters are the local code, which defines an area of roughly 14 by 14 meters or about the size of one half of a basketball court. An additional character can be added that increases the specificity to approximately 3 by 3 meters or about the size of a small car. Google Maps supports plus codes and can give you the code for any location, as can a website that describes how the codes work. So to see an example, I put in 10 Downing Street, London, and was given the code GV3C plus 8X. Because I was able to specify London, the code only needed to be six characters instead of the full 10. The plus codes use a subset of the standard set of English letters

and digits, voiding both characters that would look too similar to each other, and also vowels, so that the codes won't inadvertently spell words. So you can use that system to refer to any location on the Earth's surface? Yes. A location as small as the size of a car? Yes. Because I thought, when you said three meters square, that's smaller than this room. Yeah, it's pretty small and it's over the water. It's any location on the Earth's surface.

That's amazing. Unlike plus codes, What3Words deliberately uses words. And this system gives each of the Earth's approximately 57 trillion 3 by 3 meter squares a unique three-word combination to be its address. One of the founders of What3Words worked as a concert organizer and was very frustrated with equipment and bands sometimes ending up at wrong locations because of problems with traditional address systems. He tried using GPS coordinates to be more accurate, but then for a gig in Italy, the equipment arrived an hour north of Rome instead of an hour south because the driver

had mixed up a 4 and a 5 in the coordinates. And this was the impetus for developing a simpler, less easy to mix up system, and this British company was formed and the idea patented in 2013. What3Words addresses are available in a number of languages, and the words used are chosen based on criteria such as distinctiveness, memorability, frequency of use, and ease of spelling and pronunciation, with homophones and offensive words filtered out. A list of 40,000 words would give you 64 trillion combinations, which is more than enough to cover the 57 trillion squares. More common words like chair are used in more densely populated areas, while more obscure words such as dodecahedron are used in more remote locations like Antarctica. Because they'd be used less often there? Yeah, fewer people have to remember dodecahedron, or spell it. So rather than using a string of characters for either GPS coordinates or plus codes, you can tell people to meet you, for example, at Slurs This Shark,

if you want to meet at 10 Downing Street, or at Planet Inches Most, if you want to meet at the Statue of Liberty. But if you want to meet at the torch of the Statue of Liberty, then that's at toned melt ship, as the addresses are intentionally unrelated to ones near each other. And that's to help avoid confusion, so that if a three-word combination is slightly misheard or misremembered, then the result would be so far away from what you've intended that it should be obvious that there was an error. However, some see this as a disadvantage to the system. The addresses near each other are entirely dissimilar to each other. So for example, some adjacent squares in London are Crass Liver Atomic, Legs Bliss Smart, and Books Teeth Exams. Like Cliff says, it does seem kind of random compared to some other systems,

and there doesn't seem to be a way to specify a larger area. But the other advantage, though, is that those are all really memorable. I mean, once you're told one of those, you can come up with some visual image or something that you'll just remember that forever. Yeah, so it's probably a little easier to memorize right off the bat than like a plus code. Some people criticize the What3Words system for being controlled by a private business with the software copyrighted and not freely usable, though people can get their addresses for free. Plus codes, by contrast, are entirely open source, meaning that anyone can freely develop their own applications for using it. However, I couldn't find many examples of groups that are actually using plus codes yet,

other than references to Cabo Verde's post office supporting PLUS codes. What3Words, though, has been adopted, for example, by Mercedes-Benz for their in-car voice navigation system and by Land Rover for off-road driving, by the Red Cross to aid in disaster relief, and the United Nations in a disaster and humanitarian reporting app. It's also been adopted in some areas that are really lacking in address systems, such as parts of Brazil and whole countries such as Mongolia and Ivory Coast, which is a big change for these places, where many people don't have conventional addresses

and so previously couldn't receive mail at their homes. They had to use post office boxes or some other centralized delivery point that might be too expensive or too far away to be a real option for many people. that might be too expensive or too far away to be a real option for many people. For example, the Director General of Ivory Coast Post Office told the BBC in 2016, we have 150,000 P.O. boxes for a population of nearly 24 million. That means a postal address is a luxury in Ivory Coast. That's a huge change for those people. Sure.

One other big difference that I saw between the two systems was the number of parity sites developed for each. I didn't find any for plus codes, but there are several for what three words, at least in part in reaction to the systems not being freely available. These parodies include what two numbers, which gives you the GPS coordinates for any spot instead of the three words. What three emojis, a radical new way to address any location in the world using humanity's only common unambiguous language. And what three ducks, which was designed to be very similar to another site that has a rather similar name that I can't say on a family-friendly show. But What Three Ducks says duck closed source and is licensed under a do-what-the-duck-you-want public license and says give a duck today or better give three ducks. Also as a spoof of the parody site that I can't

say there is What Three Gosh Darn It's which seems determined to find as many creative euphemisms as it can to replace all these sounds like duck-duck words of the other site, such as skedaddle off, rap scallions, ne'er-do-well, and phooey on you. Besides solving the problem of giving addresses to people who don't otherwise have one, it seems to me that a real advantage of both of these geocode systems

is that they shorten and simplify addresses considerably, as instead of the several lines of words and numbers needed now for addresses, you would use a short string of characters or three words, which should take care of the problems with forms. So maybe we need to start a system like one of these for names. Everyone will just be assigned some combination of syllables or characters, and we'll just all have to agree on how many of them we'll each get. Thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. We really appreciate how much we learn from our listeners. If you have anything that you'd like to add, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd-sounding situation,

and I have to see if I can work out what is going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Josfa Daman-Kvilstad. Some years ago, the Houston airport was getting complaints about the long waits at its baggage claim area. The airport added some baggage handlers and got the average wait time down to eight minutes, but the complaints persisted. So the airport found a new solution that reduced complaints to near zero without changing their baggage handling routines or adding any more staff. What did they do? Made it very hard to leave a complaint.

staff, what did they do? Made it very hard to leave a complaint. Totally valid answer. Anybody who leaves a complaint will be hit with a baseball bat, or you have to go through like 16 steps to be able to leave a complaint. Apparently that's not it. That would work. You know, that happens. Like they set that metric and someone just finds a real easy solution. Right. No, that's not it. I'm sorry to say that's not it. They handed out free ice cream for everybody while they were waiting for their baggage. Or in some other way, made it more pleasant to wait for your baggage. You should be in charge. No, that's not it.

Like you put up, I don't know, TV screens. That's something very interesting on for people to watch. So that's not it. Okay. So can I assume that people were waiting just as long for their baggage? The answer to that question is no. Oh, so the baggage was showing up faster. Or people were for their baggage? The answer to that question is no. Oh, so the baggage was showing up faster, or people were getting their baggage faster. The answer to that is also

no. The answer to that is also no. They made it that nobody could check baggage. There is no check baggage anymore on this airline. Therefore, no complaints. I like your answers better than the truth. Okay, so people were waiting the exact amount of same amount of time for their baggage. No. So they weren't waiting less time, they weren't waiting more time, and they weren't waiting the same amount of time. Well, yeah, sorry, I take that back. They were waiting less. They were waiting less time.

Okay, so they were getting their baggage faster? No. But they were getting their baggage faster? No. But they were waiting. Oh, oh, they made them take longer to get off the plane, or they made it further to get to the baggage handling. I don't know how you do that to them. Yeah, that's it. They increased the distance that passengers had to walk by assigning incoming flights to remote arrival gates

and sending their bags to the outermost carousel. Before they could walk from the gate to baggage claim in one minute, then spent seven minutes waiting. Now they had to walk six times the distance, but they spent less time standing around. And people didn't complain about that. Right. Richard Larson, an operations researcher at MIT,

told the New York Times, often the psychology of queuing is more important than the statistics of the wait itself. Time that's occupied feels shorter than time that's not. As a result, people overestimate how long they've waited in a line by about 36%. So thanks, Jospeh, for sending that. That is very interesting. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our awesome listeners.

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with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was all written and performed by my phenomenal brother-in-law, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.