Cartographers have been hiding illustrations inside Switzerland’s maps (2020) | Hacker News Reader

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

eyeondesign.aiga.org

351 pointsmhb82 comments

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.

This was great - thank you, nicely done.

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

>European regulatory state

*Switzerland

Not EU but still a european state

Of course, but they're fiercely opposed to the notion of being subject to regulation by EU institutions. The Swiss are well capable of regulating themselves to death entirely on their own, thank you very much. ;)

On the other hand, this same thoroughness makes their trains run on time and their products well-respected for quality and precision. Two sides to a coin.

To get back to my nitpick: It's a bit like casually referring to the US when you're actually talking about Canada. Some Canadians might be offended.

And yeah, I'm fun at parties.

> Of course, but they're fiercely opposed to the notion of being subject to regulation by EU institutions.

They're also fiercly opposed to not having an open border, both for people and goods, with their EU neighbours.

One of these days something is going to have to give.

There had already been a few upset people over the issue, but then the war in Ukraine happened and the Swiss said "we're neutral!", and a few more got upset.

Eventually one of the deadlines the EU give them to get their act together will stick. It will presumably coincide with an economic crisis for one side or the other..

> They're also fiercly opposed to not having an open border, both for people and goods, with their EU neighbours.

Switzerland is part of schengen and has open borders. The same goes for a lot of goods but even between EU members there are some tariffs for certain goods.

Your nitpick doesn’t even stick though.

The EU does not have a monopoly on the “European” moniker. There’s a lot of Europe outside the EU that is still “European”.

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.

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.)

almost similiar to the UK - while being very anti-eu, there's a complete technocratic acceptance, and beurocratic minutea has taken it over.

Real sense of legislation above all

A wee bit. Maybe more like Norway. UK obviously left and has no real border (except in Ireland.)

I see your pedantry and I raise you a freshly minted tellurium high pedant coin: it's a bit weird to call the NI border a "real border" given it's completely soft and part of the CTA. Q.E.D :)

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

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...)

> "'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.

> You Can't Win

It's pretty entertaining!

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

Standard Ebooks does a nice job of typesetting and proofreading many of the Project Gutenberg books, including this one.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jack-black/you-cant-win

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.

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!

Feel free to email me when your done and tell me what you thought of it :)

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.

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.

Not none, just very little, like the obscure code corner case. If you are thinking about building something nearby, or specifically looking for interesting terrain to visit, you may be misled. The pig shaped cow spot, on the other hand, adds accurate symbology to the decal, with a wholesome helping of self deprecation.

To allow de minimis excursions from ground truth is a necessary compromise, but purposely introducing them isn't.

Oh please.

Anyone looking to actually do something interesting with a piece of land is going to have to a much higher resolution map of the site, not use the extreme zoom and on a map covering a huge area.

Or they may even go rogue and visit the place! Heavens to Murgatroyd!

Yes, I hate when I'm halfway up the north face of the Eiger and my map just shows a spider.

I don't think the effect would be serious. I have plotted explorations of the wilderness off topo maps--and I always head out perfectly well knowing that the map isn't a sufficiently accurate representation of reality to actually trust it. The flatter the terrain on the map the more likely it will prove passable on the ground but features can be small enough to not show, yet make it impractical to get through.

It’s 2025. Nobody is looking at a hand-drawn map for accuracy.

You may well need to in the Alps. If the satellite map only shows it snow-covered and you need to know what's beneath, hand-drawn it is.

The modern equivalent of these maps is the ‘terrain’ layer, not the ‘satellite’ layer.

You are either trolling, or utterly clueless when it comes to fell walking.

(Perhaps sir would like to search 'Ordnance Survey Maps').

Trap streets and fake towns are far worse than the examples shown here.

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.

Adding fun to an information stream degrades the signal for non-fun payloads. As a rule I prefer maximum signal to noise in reference materials.

I've found this is an amazingly high conflict subject in life. I once had to manage someone that was one of those people that did things like these mappers. It drove me insane. I constantly had to tell them to redo their work. They loved trying to insert Simpsons(TV SHOW) references into everything. I had a serious talk with them about the fact that you cannot do things that are "fun" if it conflicts with the work accuracy/reliability/readability/maintainability. They never listened and I had to manage them out. One of only two employees I had to get rid of in my career, so far.

I really don't understand these types and why they think its "harmless" to do this type of stuff. I don't want to create potentially more work for myself and I definitely don't want people that work for me to do so.

I've also worked with people that did this many times. It seems to be something like 5-10% of the working population that has this weird near neurotic compulsion to do this sort of "funny-sabotage" at work and cannot seem to resist even at the cost of their job.

You say you don't understand these types & that this is a high conflict subject for you. To offer a perspective, I think it has to do with how individuals cope with their existence. In every moment, we could be doing something more worthy of existence; worse, most of our life is sacrificed to working that definitely does not meet such lofty criteria. So take these small, but irrational acts just as minor self-therapy (vs rebellion) that is constructive to the individual -- hopefully it does not do any serious harm (I trust your judgement you made the right call).

I wager this is going to become more and more common as humanity cries against the hyper-specialization and hyper-inferred MEANING on work that may be trivial in scope when juxtaposed that we really only know that ourselves our conscious (or choose your word for whatever illusion we're experiencing). I imagine there exists at least 1 UBER phd gig worker who did not fully take seriously the annotative training work he or she was doing, if you're familiar with that article that made rounds recently.

People also change with age, and perhaps in 20 years you may find yourself doing these same things. Or, maybe now, coping differently in different ways, but that people find equally incomprehensible -- I know I do.

Just mean the above for good, seriously.

What if it didn't conflict with the accuracy/etc? If you need names for an example scenario and Alice and Bob are already used elsewhere, what would be wrong with Bart and Lisa?

what would be wrong with with not doing what you were asked not to do by whoever is paying you?

if I'm forced to agree with you that some bending of the rules will be allowed, why don't we bend them in the other direction, toward wasting your time or defacing your stuff? "sorry, we're going to have to cancel your vacation because I think it's funny to do that. use the time to repaint your car that I spray-painted my intials on. hahahaha can't you take a joke?"

Ah yes, signal, the spice of life.

Applications have had easter eggs for ages.

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

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

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

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.

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...

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.

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

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

With an extra-long bent torso?

There are three segments:

Left: legs.

Middle: male torso.

Right: Female torso.

Just imagine a man whose head, instead of being a head, is a girl's chest. And who has no arms. That's what's drawn on the map.

Is there a way to interpret it as a drawing of a human? No.

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

No, she is lying on her back and you have the sideview of her breasts. The cartographer didn't want to draw an elaborate woman, he just wanted to draw (side) boobs.

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

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)

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

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.

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...

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

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.)

The link is down. This is a snapshot from 2020

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

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.

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"

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.

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!)

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

???

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.

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

* old Toblerone Matterhorn logo unfortunately :( They've had to remove the mountain from branding since the chocolate is no longer produced in Switzerland. Still, I love finding the bear in the older boxes still floating around.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

And if not how might we bring it about?

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

Hic sunt illustrationes :)

These are clearly just hallucinations of their GenAI.

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

This is such an odd idea.

It's a fun idea too!

Visual steganography.

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