> Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique names ...
I'm actually not convinced. Squares don't tessellate a sphere; you have singularities at the poles. Sure, there aren't many people living there, but it's important to think about the limitations of this approach.
If you think this is really just an edge case, remember that projecting a square onto a sphere necessitates some distortion. You can choose to distort angles or distances, but you have to choose one. For distances, well, a "3m x 3m" square becomes essentially meaningless. The problem gets worse when you increase latitude. Canada, northern Europe and Russia are especially prone to this problem. The same argument applies to locations in the Southern hemisphere as well.
I'm actually not convinced. Squares don't tessellate a sphere; you have singularities at the poles. Sure, there aren't many people living there, but it's important to think about the limitations of this approach.
If you think this is really just an edge case, remember that projecting a square onto a sphere necessitates some distortion. You can choose to distort angles or distances, but you have to choose one. For distances, well, a "3m x 3m" square becomes essentially meaningless. The problem gets worse when you increase latitude. Canada, northern Europe and Russia are especially prone to this problem. The same argument applies to locations in the Southern hemisphere as well.