Cartographers have been hiding illustrations inside Switzerland’s maps (2020)

https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/for-decades-cartographers-have-been-hiding-covert-illustrations-inside-of-switzerlands-official-maps/

by mhb • 8 months ago

351 82 8 months ago

eyeondesign.aiga.org

sschueller• 8 months ago

The digital version over at https://map.geo.admin.ch/ has existed for many years but it is only a few years now that all Cantos have agreed to provide the data for free[1]. There is a lot of interesting data such as "Lärmbelastung" where you can lookup how loud car or rail traffic is at a location.

[1] https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/general-terms-of-use-fsdi

KronisLV• 8 months ago

The speed at which that map loads on a slightly old iPhone is really pleasant!

Aside from that, having those little Easter eggs in the maps is nice, at least more so than fake streets.

dtgriscom• 8 months ago

Visual steganography.

mzajc• 8 months ago

I love this kind of tongue-in-cheek steganography. In a similar vein: Vermont Inmates Hide Image Of Pig On Police Decals (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/02/03/146358114...)

Rendello2• 8 months ago

"'This is not as offensive as it would have been years ago. We can see the humor,' said Public Safety Commissioner Keith Flynn, a former state trooper and state prosecutor who was named commissioner a year ago. 'If the person had used some of that creativeness, he or she would not have ended up inside.'"

I read (and re-read, and re-read) the book You Can't Win on recommendation of a HN user. It's about a thief from the late 1800s-early 1900s, and the crimes he and his thief buddies did were pretty creative. A lot of crime is more brute-force than clever, but people can do some pretty interesting things if they want something and don't care if they lose everything.

benchly• 8 months ago

You Can't Win

It's pretty entertaining!

And free to read for anyone interested: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69404

sandworm101• 8 months ago

A hidden pig? I bet some younger cops covet the cars with this logo.

I was once at a military unit where someone hid a golf club in a crest for the door to the officers mess. It was spotted years later. The officers claimed to "never found out who did it", but they also never took it down.

wodenokoto• 8 months ago

I started reading this because of your comment. Maybe someday I’ll recommend it in a HN thread and some unsuspecting HN reader will come to read it too!

delichon4• 8 months ago

I agree for the decal, but the map steganography is at the expense of accuracy. It's less than professional, like adding a small bug to a corner case of your code for a joke.

andy99• 8 months ago

I only skimmed the pictures in the article but the ones I saw could have no plausible impact on navigation. They are buried within tiny details that are essentially artistic anyway, there is no impact on accuracy possible.

myself2482• 8 months ago

For something like a glacier, whose face is changing constantly anyway, who could even say if it didn't look like a marmot for a while? That whole part of the map could just say "glacier face" and be cross-hatched since it's unknowable at the time of publication, but that's no fun.

estebank• 8 months ago

Applications have had easter eggs for ages.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

wampwampwhat• 8 months ago

I believe jokes inserted into code that dont impact user experience negatively are called easter eggs, not bugs

stavros2• 8 months ago

If these details were harmful, don't you think it would take less than sixty years to discover them?

comrade1234• 8 months ago

If you ever come to Switzerland download the swisstopo app. It is very detailed and useful for hiking but even in the city too, showing the locations of fountains, for example, rural and urban official and unofficial hiking trails, closed trails, slopes too steep to traverse, etc etc etc.

The Swiss topographical institute is a treasure.

kakacik• 8 months ago

This is where screenshots come from, official topo data are free. I use them all the time for hiking, ski touring etc. Good thing they cover also neighboring mountains a bit (to varying detail) so ie France or Italy can be enjoyed just with a single app.

Then you go further and realize how much worse free easy to find things are. There are variations of opentopomap but they lack the finesse of this.

Also available in various other layouts ie biking (veloland), canoeing or various winter sports (sadly no outright ski touring so I aproximate summer hiking paths, the best to use are still physical maps but then you need a hefty stash of various zooms at home, pricey too).

But none is perfect - opentopo map has some obscure artifacts, see ie here what I found by a chance - some hole too deep to be real, near Aletsch glacier or famous Eiger, a mountain slope in Bernese alps [1], while official Swiss topo looks like this without any such illogical artifact [2]

[1] https://opentopomap.org/#map=15/46.55901/8.07171 [2] https://schweizmobil.ch/en/map?season=summer&bgLayer=pk&laye...

fotcorn• 8 months ago

Seems like the hiker at the bottom of the article was introduced in 1997 and removed only in 2017: https://s.geo.admin.ch/be66brq5oby9

philipallstar• 8 months ago

illustrations hidden by the official cartographers at Swisstopo in defiance of their mandate “to reconstitute reality.”

This is such an odd idea.

knotimpressed• 8 months ago

It's a fun idea too!

TwoFerMaggie• 8 months ago

Slightly annoying that the magnified parts are directly over their original location. This blocks the view to see them in their original size and context.

NaOH• 8 months ago

Previously:

Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside Swiss Official Maps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22490017 - Mar 2020 (22 comment)

Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside Swiss Official Maps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22461602 - Mar 2020 (1 comment)

Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside Swiss Official Maps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407413 - Feb 2020 (1 comment)

jmward01• 8 months ago

I recently read 'The Cartographers' by Peng Shepherd. If you like this article and want to read a fun murder mystery about things hidden in maps then that is definitely the book for you. (No relation to the author here, I just liked the book!)

qwertox• 8 months ago

Appending a "for Kids" would turn them into immediate heroes.

725686• 8 months ago

I haven't read the article, but aren't these introduced to detect illegal copies?

delichon4• 8 months ago

I would think that they are too recognizable for that. It would be better to subtly change one insignificant squiggle into another.

bell-cot2• 8 months ago

They're only too recognizable if the someone's paying very close attention.

Vs. if they're not, and Swisstopo can point that out - the internet can enjoy pillizing the perp.

fsflover• 8 months ago

You probably mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

maptime• 8 months ago

Speaking from experience, it's more often bored cartographers trying to inject some fun into mundane activities.

I used to try and write my initials.

Quite often it devolves into a game of seeing what you can get past the reviewers

Aachen• 8 months ago

Interesting perspective. As an OSM contributor, I've never had this thought. You presumably spend up to 8 hours a day mapping, all week long (depending on the week perhaps), which I can totally imagine gets old. I only map when I feel like it and not when I'm bored

And on OSM we don't have boss fights in the shape of reviewers. That does sound like a fun challenge :P

jasonjmcghee2• 8 months ago

The marmot, hiker, and fish- alright. I buy it. The others... Feels a bit like finding shapes in the clouds.

But I'm no cartographer so maybe these are more obvious to people that have the skill.

pinkmuffinere• 8 months ago

Ya, i was shocked at the “reclining woman” entry, I can’t see anything in that pattern.

jasonjmcghee2• 8 months ago

I think it's supposed to be a headless woman... But yeah. Not convinced.

Bobaso• 8 months ago

I think I see it now (not really the best representation of a woman).

she is lying on her stomach, with her hands in front of her, and above the head. Top right: feet Bottom left, hands

a96• 8 months ago

It's clearly a snake. There's even a forked tongue.

CalChris• 8 months ago

Reminds me of a message hidden in a NOAA weather forecast during a government shutdown

https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/04/politics/weather-service-cryp...

The-Bus• 8 months ago

As long as they keep their hidden illustrations away from my precious Swiss chocolate logos!

bell-cot2• 8 months ago

???

Hiding Swiss chocolate logos in their maps could be seen as improper. Unless, of course, the chocolate company was paying Swisstopo above-board for that placement.

tokai• 8 months ago

You have it the wrong way around. Take a good hard look at the Toblerone Matterhorn logo.

NitpickLawyer• 8 months ago

Hic sunt illustrationes :)

keepamovin2• 8 months ago

When I was a cartographer in the 1500s I used to hide dragons, sea serpents and the occasional heretical inscription in the blank bits, because at least back then the Holy Roman Emperor had the decency to pretend he didn’t notice as long as the tax broders were correct.

Now look at us: the Swiss federal cartographers, salaried, pensioned, triple-proofread, still cannot resist smuggling a naked woman and a cheeky marmot into the official topography. And the admisntration? They wait until the perpetrator has safely retired on full index-linked benefits, then solemnly announce the marmot will be "removed in the next revision cycle, pending environmental-impact assessment of the pixel."

This is what passes for rebellion inside the European regulatory state: a rodent drawn at 1:25 000 scale that offends precisely no one and will be erased by a civil servant who wasn’t even born when it was sketched. Truly the revolutionary spirit of our continent has been reduced to a change-request ticket with fourteen mandatory approvers and a carbon-copy to Bern.

I fill in another compliance form and weep for the age when men risked the stake for a badly drawn leviathan.

babycheetahbite• 8 months ago

This was great - thank you, nicely done.

SegfaultSeagull• 8 months ago

In case you didn’t recognize this as an epic comment, you should know this is an epic comment.

shmeeed2• 8 months ago

European regulatory state

*Switzerland

cpt_sobel• 8 months ago

Not EU but still a european state

endymion-light2• 8 months ago

The looming sense of EU technocracy is ever present - I guess the kind of person to take offence at a cheeky marmot is probably going to be a perfect drone beurocrat. Although we do have to ask ourselves as a society, if we live in a world were a cartographer can't sneak in a little drawing, is it a world worth living?

I think what we need to do is fund an exhibition into the swiss alps to reconstute the terrain in the shape of a funny little marmot.

nephihaha3• 8 months ago

To be fair, the Swiss are not in the EU, but they do have a curious relationship with it as a landlocked enclave. (Much like Andorra, San Marino, and the Vatican.)

lwkl2• 8 months ago

Most of them were only in the lower scale maps and one of them is still there. Swisstopo even wrote an article [1] about them and gives some background and names the cartographers that added them. So our bureaucratic machine seems to have a sense of humor.

[1] https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/hidden-images-20161221

pugworthy• 8 months ago

A different kind of map, but 3d level (map) designers seem to enjoy doing Easter eggs and hidden things in levels. There are the famous Half-Life G-man cameos for example, which aren't quite fourth wall as it were, but still something not many know of.

catlikesshrimp• 8 months ago

The link is down. This is a snapshot from 2020

https://web.archive.org/web/20200305164547/https://eyeondesi...

jval432• 8 months ago

I miss all the easter eggs in software. Not just games, but also in business software.

Not sure what would happen if I tried to put one in in his day and age.

steve_gh• 8 months ago

The spider is a particularly subtle joke: The White Spider is the name given to a snowfield high on the N Face of the Eiger, crossed by the original (1938) Heckmair Harrer route up the face. Heinrich Harrer's book about the first ascent is called "The White Spider"

nephihaha3• 8 months ago

I wonder if these are copyright traps. You used to find those in many places including Ordnance Survey maps (UK State mapping service), where they were used to stop plagiarism. (Successfully in some cases.)

amelius• 8 months ago

These are clearly just hallucinations of their GenAI.

ninalanyon• 8 months ago

I wonder if any such thing exists in Open Street Map?

And if not how might we bring it about?

Cartographers have been hiding illustrations inside Switzerland’s maps (2020)

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