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.
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.
Real sense of legislation above all
[1] https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/hidden-images-20161221
*Switzerland
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.
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..
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.
The EU does not have a monopoly on the “European” moniker. There’s a lot of Europe outside the EU that is still “European”.
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.
It's pretty entertaining!
And free to read for anyone interested: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69404
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.
To allow de minimis excursions from ground truth is a necessary compromise, but purposely introducing them isn't.
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!
(Perhaps sir would like to search 'Ordnance Survey Maps').
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.
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?"
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.
https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...
The Swiss topographical institute is a treasure.
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...
But I'm no cartographer so maybe these are more obvious to people that have the skill.
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.
she is lying on her stomach, with her hands in front of her, and above the head. Top right: feet Bottom left, hands
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)
Aside from that, having those little Easter eggs in the maps is nice, at least more so than fake streets.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/04/politics/weather-service-cryp...
https://web.archive.org/web/20200305164547/https://eyeondesi...
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.
I used to try and write my initials.
Quite often it devolves into a game of seeing what you can get past the reviewers
And on OSM we don't have boss fights in the shape of reviewers. That does sound like a fun challenge :P
Vs. if they're not, and Swisstopo can point that out - the internet can enjoy pillizing the perp.
Not sure what would happen if I tried to put one in in his day and age.
And if not how might we bring it about?
This is such an odd idea.