Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland's Maps
eyeondesign.aiga.org

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183 points

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mhb

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6 hours ago

41 comments

keepamovin ・ 2 hours 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.

mzajc ・ 5 hours 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...)

  • Rendello ・ 4 hours 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.

  • delichon ・ 3 hours 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 ・ 3 hours 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.

      • delichon ・ 3 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        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.

        • Scubabear68 ・ an hour ago

          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!

      • iso1631 ・ 2 hours ago

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

    • myself248 ・ 3 hours 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.

      • delichon ・ 3 hours ago
        ・ 4 more

        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.

        • citizenpaul ・ 3 hours ago
          ・ 3 more

          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.

          • myself248 ・ an hour ago

            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?

          • 0003 ・ an hour ago

            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.

comrade1234 ・ 5 hours 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 ・ 39 minutes 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...

jasonjmcghee ・ 3 hours 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.

sschueller ・ 5 hours 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 ・ 5 hours 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.

pugworthy ・ an hour 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.

725686 ・ 3 hours ago

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

  • maptime ・ 2 hours 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

  • delichon ・ 3 hours ago

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

    • bell-cot ・ 2 hours 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.

jmward01 ・ 4 hours 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!)

The-Bus ・ 3 hours ago

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

  • bell-cot ・ 2 hours 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 ・ 2 hours ago

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

qwertox ・ 3 hours ago

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

TwoFerMaggie ・ 4 hours 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.

philipallstar ・ 4 hours ago

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

This is such an odd idea.

dtgriscom ・ 5 hours ago

Visual steganography.

fat-soyboy ・ an hour ago

Conspiracy theory article

asaws ・ an hour ago

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