Swedish Campground (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Swedish Campground (2004)

folklore.org

119 pointsCharlesW38 comments

This road sign sign means castle or other point of historic interest in Sweden.

Campgrounds have a normal descriptive “tent” symbol road sign in Sweden https://korkortonline.se/en/theory/road-signs/direction-sign...

FTA: “Finally she came across a floral symbol that was used in Sweden to indicate an interesting feature or attraction in a campground”

⇒ the article likely is wrong by adding “in a campground”, but it doesn’t say it means campground; it’s ‘only’ its title that does so.

It doesn't have to be historic interest actually, it just means national heritage or place of interest (sign H22).

More like, a place "worth seeing".

The sign is also used in Estonia.

Officially defined in https://www.riigiteataja.ee/akt/126112024009?leiaKehtiv -> https://www.riigiteataja.ee/aktilisa/1261/1202/4009/MKM_2901... -> sign no 718.

Google translate of the official sign definition: "sign 718 "Sight" refers to the location of tourist objects (sights of interest to tourists, heritage conservation, nature conservation or other objects);"

I've definitely seem them in Norway as well.

I'm so surprised the button comes from that.

Also known as the looped square (commonly used as the place of interest sign):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looped_square

Saw one in Sweden a few months back. Had to snap a photo: https://imgur.com/a/RAseomC

"Brunnsmiljö" refers to "area with baths" (i.e. the old fashioned spa kind). The symbols under refer to restaurant, hotel, and camping cottages.

Ah, the Saint Hannes cross, or sankthanskors in Sweden, or hannunvaakuna in Finland. It's not so much related to campgrounds, but to mark sightseeing spots in general.

No, it's used for "ancient monument", fornminne. It might be a early modern ruin or something that isn't ancient in some scientific sense but still is a place of historical or archaeological interest, while properly old remains, at least pre-reformatory ones, i.e. older than early 1500s, are often marked with a futhark 'r'/'ᚱ'.

Reading this I assumed the symbol referred to a castle with a turret in each corner

It's older than castles and occurs in some of the oldest scandinavian stone carvings. In the middle ages it was associated with John the baptist in Scandinavian christianity.

The use discussed here is established from the 1950s onwards, first suggested by a local history society in Finland.

It's used throughout much of Northern Europe as a more general sign for places of interest.

E.g. in Norway the sign is specifically described in regulations as referring to a "severdighet", literally something like "a seeworthy thing" but generally translated to "attraction". It's specifically regulated to mean that [1], rather than fornminne/ancient monument.

In Norway, you can for example find it used for the Holmenkollen ski jump, which is hardly an ancient monument [2].

[1] https://lovdata.no/dokument/SF/forskrift/2005-10-07-1219/KAP...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@59.9612567,10.6669888,3a,75y,10...

Right, so I wrote some more too, "something that isn't ancient in some scientific sense but still is a place of historical or archaeological interest".

An athletic facility that's been going since the late 1800s and has a dedicated museum and is of distinct local cultural importance kind of fits the "historical interest" part pretty neatly.

As your lovdata-link shows, there are six different signs for severdigheter, not just one, and in the local parlance severdighet typically refers to things like historiske steder, monument and so on. Unless something has a bit of history it's unlikely to get one of those signs put up.

By this interpretation pretty much any attraction that isn't brand new is covered, which would entirely dilute your main claim of describing it as referring to ancient monuments or "fornminne". "Fornminne" has a specific meaning and certainly would not generally be applied to a relatively modern place of "historical" interest in Norwegian, nor would it e.g. refer to natural formations.

The other 5 are for narrower, more specific use, and demonstrate quite clearly that the word "severdighet" in Norwegian has nothing specifically to do with historical interest. When you then try to insist that the general, catch-all sign does it feels intentionally obtuse.

To make this clear, here's an example of a sign to INSPIRIA Science Center[1], built in 2011.

https://g.acdn.no/obscura/API/dynamic/r1/ece5/tr_1200_1200_s...

Okay, I'll bite. Who is Hannu ?

Does anyone what the "international symbol dictionary" Susan Kare used was?

I don't know, and I'd love to.

If I had to guess, I'd guess Henry Dreyfuss's Symbol Sourcebook. It was published in 1972, and it seems plausibly the sort of book someone like Susan Kate might have had to hand in the early '80s. https://www.societyofsigns.com/projects/symbol-sourcebook

Symbol Sourcebook would’ve been my first guess, too, but I just glanced through my copy (7th printing, 1977) and didn’t see the ⌘ symbol. The closest thing in the Graphic Form Section is a symbol for “Atomic d orbital,” but it’s clearly not the same one that inspired Susan Kare.

Around 15:30 in this video she talks about it, and there’s a slide showing other symbols that may or may not be from the same book.

https://vimeo.com/151277875

Interesting. The left side of the slide at 15:43 in the video is definitely from page 27 of Symbol Sourcebook, but the detail of the ⌘ symbol doesn’t seem to be: not only could I not find the symbol, but also its caption (“FEATURE”) is set in Helvetica rather than Univers as used in the book.

I have a suspicion that she may no longer possess or even remember the book in question. Heaven knows I wouldn’t were I her, but my memory is atrocious.

Does anybody know of a modern day equivalent in the form of a searchable symbol database maybe even with a "freehand drawn" image search?

Unicode does not quite cover it because it lacks context and meaning of combined codepoints.

It's not for everything (it doesn't even have the symbol in the article), but https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html is useful for a lot of math stuff

(This isn't the title)

Previously:

2013 (111 points, 49 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5988557

2011 (177 points, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2643611

The same sign is used in Finland. I was puzzled why Apple computers used it but I thought it was just a coincidence...!

Norway too.

Seems Sweden has us beat by using it in a stone carving 400-600 CE: https://symbology.wiki/symbol/looped-square/

Kare really is a genius isn't she?

Would not call this a genius. It's just rushed solution to a problem which just stuck. I would even call this graphical appropriation :)

99% of genius is intelligent “borrowing” - the other 99% is hard work and inspiration!

"Seværdigheds knappen" (The attraction button) as a former co-workers calls it.

The "control" button is slightly weirder. Why is that a ^ on some of Apples keyboards, while only having the text "ctrl" on others. The "control" vs. ctrl isn't related to space, the laptop keyboard have "control", but my full size wired Apple keyboard just have "ctrl" despite the button being physically bigger.

Always thought it was weird that Apple chose that symbol. Makes a lot of sense that it was a thoughtless act.

Well, it was very thoughtful - just with complete disregard for the actual meaning (I daresay if the symbol they liked had meant something entirely negative like nuclear waste dump they may have chosen another).

This was long before the Internet when things like International Signal Directories were worth their weight in gold.

Never used MacDraw, but I remember installing and using ClarisWorks in middle/high school, I never did actual programming at that age, but I loved playing around with the Mac's word processing, drawing, painting programs, making little art layouts, outlines for class notes, stuff that that.

Sadly, programming wasn't really feasible on the Mac per se due to Bill Gates' manipulations:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

Eventually we got HyperCard:

https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html

Wow, somehow I had never heard the sad story of MacBasic. It's such a perfect example of why people don't trust Microsoft.

As someone who wasted a lot of time trying to get a graphical project to work in Microsoft's Basic for Macintosh, I'm still angry about it, and wonder how the trajectory of my life might have changed had MacBasic been available for me to purchase instead (unfortunately, things were set/quite different when HyperCard came out, though I did greatly enjoy _The Manhole_).

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