Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Just realized this evening that beyond the fact that he was a classic Love and Rockets character, the band Speedy Ortiz probably chose the name because it sounds very similar to Sadie Dupuis.

The past three posts seem to me to be not very shocking, no matter at what age one learned these things. I wouldn't even be shocked if someone never learned them at all.

nb: I'm not speaking of "no holds barred". I thought everyone knew that phrase referred to wrestling.

tbh it’s got a pretty wide reach for a culture that has an inherent degredarion of wrestling as a spectator activity

no holds barred has me shook tbh

um this is reaaaaaaaally dumb but

i didnt realize that it the first digit of the room number at a large hotel = the floor

like
“you’re in room 415”
fourth floor, room 15

not the 415th room

i said it out loud & mr veg was like dude wut

That is shocking

I didnt realize that it the first digit of the room number at a large hotel = the floor

this is also the case in apartment buildings

nb: I'm not speaking of "no holds barred". I thought everyone knew that phrase referred to wrestling.

What next, "Pulling your punches is from boxing? Woah!"

you might consider what the title of the thread is here.

zing

picturing Veg’s vacations becoming insanely easier now that she can look at the room number to determine floor instead of making a note what floor room 415 is on :)

it’s true!!

I had that same problem with house and blocks numbers when I lived in the US briefly. Like, "I live at number 2436, but there clearly aren't 2435 other houses on this street, what's going on????"

it came about watching tv: a character was looking for a guest in a tiny hotel & the manager said “hes in room 215” and I said “YEAH RIGHT. As if theres two hundred and thirty seven rooms in that teensy hotel” and Mr Veg said “Second floor. Room 15.” and i was like O_O

I've had epiphanies like that followed by a mental flashback montage, like on a tv show, of every time things would have made more sense if I had that information. It's jarring!

many years ago i was with the lovely emma b and she stopped to buy a memory card for her digital camera. i was like "what happened to the old one?" and she looked at me a second too long and said "it got filled up"

well, that's ONE approach...

lol <3

I had that same problem with house and blocks numbers when I lived in the US briefly. Like, "I live at number 2436, but there clearly aren't 2435 other houses on this street, what's going on????"

yeah when i was a kid (in england) i was amazed that the letters in the back of american comic books seemed to imply that people lived on streets with thousands of houses on them.

OK wait. They don't? Can someone explain the numbering system to me?

as an american the last few posts have made me think of 10 Downing street, 13 Privet Drive, and 221B Baker street in an entirely new light. Like damn, baker street must be long.

it's street number + house number. so if you live on or off, say, 53rd st., yr address might be 5312, or 5345, whatever. tbh can't say for sure what the second set of numbers denotes, assuming it's the house number but again those numbers often seem way too high for the neighborhood. damn im dumb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_numbering#North_America

Some areas are to do with how many miles they are from something, or the first number is specific to its block or plot (I'm sure my brother lives at 2345 whatever road he's on, and there's like 50 houses on it)

that's wrong in many cities

in mine, if you're on a north/south street, it's a numbered street and your house number is based on how many blocks north/south you are from a "union" street. So I'm on west 40th, eight blocks north of the "union" street, so my house number is 836 (these are fake numbers, you stalkers)

the houses on an east/west street north of me have numbers like 4012, meaning it's the sixth house down from 40th on the even side of the street (the sides are even/odd)

sorry, that was a xp to flappy

it's street number + house number. so if you live on or off, say, 53rd st., yr address might be 5312, or 5345, whatever.

― flappy bird, Friday, January 19, 2018 10:42 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what the hell? where is this the case?

There's no standard US numbering system - my last three addresses have been numbered 626, 920, and 755 and there is no discernible pattern to any of them. None of these streets would possibly have this many houses, there are no cross streets with numbers as a marker, the neighboring houses might not be numbered in the exact sequence, etc.

In some places there are patterns. Portland Oregon - the city where I have the most experience with this - has sequentially numbered north-south streets starting at a river and moving east. So 3345 Belmont Street would be most likely be between 33rd street and 34th street.

in canadian cities I've been in as far as i can tell the system used is that addresses are ordered in blocks. so for instance the start of a street (or the bit of the street that separates East Xth Street from West Xth Street) is the 000 block. So all the buildings on that block of the street have numbers from 1 to 99. The 100 block is all the houses from 100 to 199 and so forth. most of the numbers are not used: e.g. i moved from one building to the building next door and the address went from 175 to 125.

Uh I dind't realize house numbers meant anything at all until just now. I guess I just thought they were arbitrary.

Bizarre. This is all new to me.

canadian street numbering explained: http://spacing.ca/national/2013/03/11/ever-wonder-how-a-house-gets-an-address-number/

The idea is not to denote the number of houses, but to give a relative sense of where you are on a street. But it's by no means standardized even inside a jurisdiction. Many neighborhoods change / expand quite a lot after initial planning, and generous numbering schemes give developers and planners room to grow.

There is often numerical space left in case someone puts a house or dwelling in between. Let's say my house might be 4724 Main Street; my neighbor is 4728 Main Street. That means if he puts a guest house in back, or I put in a mother-in-law apartment with a separate entrance, then it can have its own address (4726). But we're all on the "4700 block." At the next corner, the numbers will start "48" because that's the "4800 block." And so on.

Or let's say that in 1925, they built three big mansions on the first block ("unit block") of Oak Street. If they are numbered 1 Oak Street, 2 Oak Street, 3 Oak Street, etc., then what happens when 2 Oak Street is replaced by two townhouses? More sensible to name them 100, 104, 108, to allow room.

If you're on a winding street in freeform suburbia, generally, developers came up with street names and address numbers. They're subject to approval by their jurisdictions, but most towns and counties don't much care how big or small the numbers are. Some rural addresses are just ridic, but it doesn't harm me any so I don't care. At the same time, road in the US can easily be hundreds of miles long with thousands of buildings on it. Numbering them sequentially would be unworkable.

Me, I live in a jurisdiction with a complex grid system - east/west streets are numbered and north/south streets have names (but the names are ordered alphabetically, in three sequences of different numbers of syllables). So. If someone tells me their address is 1326 Adams Street, I know about where that is without ever having been there and without looking at a map. It's about 13 blocks west of the river, near where the one-syllable names leave off and the two-syllable names begin. One gets the hang of it.

OK wait. They don't? Can someone explain the numbering system to me?

very generally, addresses are based on distance from a center point in the city.

I still feel lost when going to a midwestern town that has the NE, NW, SE, SW system.

Portland has all of those plus a single N section, so I would probably just stay in Vancouver.

I live on a fairly short street and my house number is 11106. I have no idea why we need numbers in the 10 thousands in our smallish neighborhood.

you're 111 blocks from the city center

Weird.

Chicago is pretty great at this, inasmuch as much of the numbering radiates outward from a point downtown (like, for example, you start at 1 State St. and the numbers go up incrementally on both North State Street and South State Street depending on your direction of travel) and many of the city blocks conform to 1/4 mile X 1/4 mile square. Many places in the US, though, don't seem to have a consistent layout that makes any sense to me.

Oh sorry, I gave completely faulty info on the block size:

In Chicago, Illinois and Minneapolis, Minnesota, a typical city block is 660 by 330 feet (200 m × 100 m) (w × h),[3][4] meaning that 16 east-west blocks or 8 north-south blocks measure one mile.

When I look at my neighborhood on google maps, with its planned east/west and north/south streets, interrupted only by the freeway they put in the middle during the middle of the last century, I feel at peace. Then I slowly zoom out, and as houses and streets developed as the suburbs took hold appear on screen I feel irrationally angry as the grid is subsumed by curves, cul-de-sacs, blocks that abruptly stop when they meet another housing subdivision. Navigating from one of those areas to one only a few blocks over means going all the way back to a main road, driving a quarter mile, and then re-entering a different maze.

*shakes fist*

Sacramento downtown & immediate surrounds is on a grid

east-west streets are numbered
north-south streets are letters

so if you see an address that’s like 802 14th st, you can easily work out that it’s roughly at H and 14th streers (since alphabetically H is the 8th number of the alphabet)

it’s kinda neat & v easy

I love Seattle:

http://www.clerk.seattle.gov/~public/img/Directional_post1962_100.jpg

Moodles, as noted, you may find that address numbers on parallel streets - about the same distance from whatever starting point your jurisdiction chose - are similar. Regardless of how long or short the streets are.

Streets in my town sometimes start and stop - like, 35th street will end, and start up again later, to accommodate a stream or a park or a highway. When it starts up again, the numbering is consistent with what it _would_ have been if the street were continuous. And of course this can change - the county may decide to reunite the bits at some point. At which time it would be a pain to renumber.

Mostly, though, the reason is as noted: when I read an address in a town I know well, I can visualize in my head where that is, regardless of how many buildings are on the street. I find that information more useful than an imaginary economy of addresses, limited to how many numbers someone thinks a street "needs."

Wouldn't that make it easier to number? existing houses don't change, new infill houses get unused numbers.

Some communities far outside of the city in the LA area continue to use the LA center as their base, so you have addresses in the 40, 50, or 60,000s.

Conversely my partner grew up in a tiny farm town in Ontario, and her address is just "5" and then the name of the town

my parents lived on a highway away from any town, and it eventually changed from "636 99th Avenue" to "6300 R61 Hwy"

Wouldn't that make it easier to number? existing houses don't change, new infill houses get unused numbers.

Huh? Like 1 Main St., 1450 Main St., 1452 Main St., 2 Main St.?

The idea is that the numbers are sequential, there's no need for them to be adjacent numbers or even close.

If I'm driving down the street looking for #4824, and the numbers are in the 4200s, 4300s, 4400s, I know I'm going in the right direction and I have little a ways to go. And if I see a 4900 I know I've gone too far.

Uh I dind't realize house numbers meant anything at all until just now. I guess I just thought they were arbitrary.

The main thing I'm getting from this thread is that it is more or less arbitrary. I honestly had no idea it was so complicated.