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Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Court opinion:

  • A person is charged with felony drunk driving. Since he was also convicted of drunk driving within the past five years, his driving license is immediately suspended pending trial, and hardship reinstatement of that license is unavailable.

  • Two months later, the defendant is scheduled to have a hearing. As the judge is walking into the courthouse, he personally observes the defendant drive his car into the courthouse's parking lot, get out, and walk into the courthouse.

  • Accordingly, at the hearing a few minutes later, the judge finds the defendant to be in contempt of court. The defendant's complaint that he has already spent more than a kilodollar on ride-hailing services is unavailing. (The penalty will be deternined later.)


You probably are aware that the typical address in the United States consists of a street and a number on that street, with the numbers ascending as you progress along the street, and with odd numbers on one side of the street and even numbers on the other side. A typical address might be "123 Main Street". In contrast, Japan uses a different system, in which most streets have no names, and municipalities instead are recursively subdivided into smaller areas. Wikipedia's example is "2-7-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku", or in big-endian format "ward Chiyoda area Marunouchi district 2 block 7 address 2". (Compare the programming concept of recursively subdividing an area into ever-smaller pieces as a quadtree.)

Unlike the rest of the US, the US Virgin Islands (a former Danish possession in the Caribbean, inhabited by just 87,000 people as of 2020) uses a simple version of the Japan-style address system! Most streets have no names, and instead the three islands are divided into districts called "estates". A typical address might be "123 Richmond Estate".

Since around 2009, the USVI government has been executing a "Street Addressing Initiative", which will assign names to all the streets and convert the islands to the normal US system of street-based addressing. According to the 2-M$ contract for the "final phase", the project will finally be completed in March 2028.

Compare the programming concept of recursively subdividing an area into ever-smaller pieces as a quadtree.

The original zip code system was designed to simplify mail routing in a similar fashion. It's somewhat duplicative of the rest of the street address, but it was implemented to improve efficiency, despite occasional complaints about its supposed nonsensibility (not aligning with political boundaries, etc). The Irish solution is an interesting take on it with fully computerized sorting available, but there are legitimate questions about the comparative expense of renumbering everything versus the existing systems.

I am waiting for somebody to make a video game in which the player designs a country's mail-distribution system, including the placement of sorting facilities.

For a while I was toying with ideas for a logistics RTS where the player was supposed to juggle pipelines and replacement parts more than controlling units. It was inspired by the carriers in Stellaris, which are just glorified battleships rather than the force projection monsters they should be.

Then I discovered Foxhole and Hearts of Iron in relatively quick succession. Between the two of them, they satisfied most of my demand for allocating equipment to operations.

Allocating the mail, though…

In Ireland they assign a random number to each house which fully identifies it. The big advantage is that houses can be built and torn down without any effect on the numbering of the adjacent houses.