11 ms·

Beyond Biohazard: Why Danger Symbols Can’t Last Forever

100 points by misnamed 9y ago

gumby 9y ago
> Linguist Thomas Sebeok, for instance, proposed creating an atomic priesthood, where an exclusive political group would use its own rituals and myths to preserve knowledge of radioactive areas, like a church. Minor spoiler alert: this is a side element in the wonderful novel "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Not sure a spoiler alert serves any purpose if I have no idea what work is being spoiled until I read it.
  - gumby 9y ago
    good point!
- korethr 9y ago
  Similar has been a setting element in other fictional works as well. Best example I can think of is ComStar, from the BattleTech universe [1]. Originally the Terran Hegemony's comms department, and later a neutral corporation, it morphed a mystic religious order. For good or for ill, it managed to preserve the interstellar comms network and various pieces of advanced tech, despite some several hundred years of intermittent war. It's not like the idea of a mystic or monastic order taking over education and knowledge preservation duties after the fall of a civilization is a fiction unto itself, either. This is exactly what happened in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment. 1. http://www.sarna.net/wiki/ComStar http://www.sarna.net/wiki/ComStar
- qbrass 9y ago
  It was a plot point in Asimov's Foundation series. http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/EG_Terminus.html http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/EG_Terminus.html "Every nuclear power station refurbished by the Foundation became a Temple of Scientism with a hierarchy of priests dispensing technical and medical assistance disguised as benedictions from the Galactic Spirit. The brightest natives of the Four Kingdoms were brought to Terminus to receive indoctrination into Scientism at the Temple School, then sent back out to the Four Kingdoms to serve as the Church's Lower Hierarchy (the Upper Hierarchy being reserved for native Foundationers who understood the theoretical underpinnings of the Church's miraculous technology). Any priestly novitiates who were intelligent enough to see through the elaborate, meaningless rituals promulgated by the Church remained on Terminus to become research students (and naturalized citizens of Terminus)."
- stordoff 9y ago
  Sounds somewhat similar to the Children of the Atom in Fallout 3/4 as well: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Church_of_the_Children_of_Atom http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Church_of_the_Children_of_Atom
- fyi1183 9y ago
  The best literary treatment of the general idea of attempting to preserve knowledge by creating some sort of priesthood, though not specifically for the purpose of waste warnings, is A Canticle for Leibowitz in my opinion. I highly recommend it.
gumby 9y ago
> Even now, the power the biohazard symbol once had to inspire awe and fear has begun to diminish. Today, it appears on everyday clothing and products, slowly becoming more ordinary than extraordinary. This always annoys me, though it's a form of linguistic change. The worst example of this, IMHO, is the stickers and accessories you can get for guns to make them look like children's toys (e.g. red cap on the end) -- specifically subverting something designed to make children safe. I do think people who do this have a first amendment legal right to do so, but just because you're allowed to do something doesn't mean it's a good idea (there's no law to prevent me from drinking bleach if I want to, but that doesn't make it a good idea).
- sigstoat 9y ago
  > there's no law to prevent me from drinking bleach if I want to, but that doesn't make it a good idea you sure? https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2005/05/20/why-i-cant-tinker-my-household-cleaner/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2005/05/20/why-i-cant-tinker-m...
  - gumby 9y ago
    I know :-) but I choose bleach because I don't think it has an "inconsistent with its labeling" label.
- jetrink 9y ago
  Disguising a real gun as a toy sounds very similar to the famous example of unprotected speech of falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater. First, it is a type of falsehood. Second, it is likely to cause real harm. I would be surprised if disguising guns would be viewed as constitutionally protected speech.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Popehat wants you to stop saying "fire in a crowded theater". https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/ https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
rdiddly 9y ago
This whole time I thought the biohazard symbol was supposed to be abstractly evocative of a microscope with three lenses, seen as if you were looking up from the slide/stage. Indicating, I supposed, something dangerous that you need a microscope to see. I thought "Hey that's a cool way to convey that idea graphically." Well, come to find out they were trying to have it not refer to anything. So it becomes just another example of how we (well, I) love to find meaning where there is none. Examples, none of which is from the right angle: http://www.scienceprofonline.com/images/science-image-library/microbiology/equipment/microscope-40x-objective-SIL.jpg http://www.scienceprofonline.com/images/science-image-librar... https://abm-website-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pharmpro.com/s3fs-public/featured_image/2016/04/Lens-of-microscope.jpg https://abm-website-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pharmpro.com/s3f... https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/232/512560597_fa29e4d5a4.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/232/512560597_fa29e4d5a4.jpg This one's closer to the angle but has four lenses: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/detail-microscope-3429613.jpg https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/detail-microscope-3429613.jp...
- scrumper 9y ago
  I always thought it was deliberately designed to invoke beetle pincers, or bug jaws.
  - abecedarius 9y ago
    Yeah, spiky evokes sharp and maybe poisonous.
tetha 9y ago
This reminds me of a striking example during our UI design class, which eventually led me to conclude that there is no intuitive design of anything, unless you can make specific assumptions about the users. You have a steering wheel, and turn it to the right. What direction do you turn? It's such a simple question. And if you're used to a car, or a bike, it's so easy to answer. Turn right, go right. Well except every captain with his boat will tell you they will go left. And there are so many examples of this if you look at them. Our monitoring has a lot of graphs, but why would a rising or a falling graph be good? If it's latency, you want it low but not 0, because 0 would be weird. If it's available capacity, you want it high, but too high is right out as well, since it's a waste. In some cases, we need ports open because we kinda need to answer productive HTTP requests, in other cases, it would be rather silly to expose elasticsearch to the internet. Intuition and intuitive meaning is such a hard thing.
- paulryanrogers 9y ago
  "Turn right, go right. Well except every captain with his boat will tell you they will go left." Is this really true of ships with steering wheels? I know those with a fixed rudder control do work opposite the desired direction.
  - tetha 9y ago
    And that, and your peer comment, are the beautiful part of this example. If you start looking into it, it's even more bloody complicated. Cars and ships both have changed the way their steering wheels work. Some ships don't have steering wheels and instead have straight rudders or computer controls. And motor boats can rotate the ship through motor and rotor control without using the rudder.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    I have sailed a small sailboat and a piloted a bunch of ski/bass/pontoon boats. All had the steering set up such that it matched a car. Only on boats with a simple rudder/tiller does it reverse.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
diabeetusman 9y ago
That's partially why I like the idea (if not the implementation, apparently) of Mr. Yuck and his friend that I just learned about, Mr. Ouch [0]. To me, it looks like he gets the point across pretty well-- come near here and die. There's no need for left-to-right reading and the cause and effect are in one clear image. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ouch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ouch]
- fermienrico 9y ago
  The semiology of such a graphic, Mr. Ouch symbol, may be adequate, but its utility and practicality is severely lacking. Imagine if you were to put instructions together to be able to reproduce Mr. Ouch; or, imagine if you were a construction worker trying to follow instructions to mark this logo on a hazardous surface -- Simplicity and reproducibility are the hallmarks of an optimal graphic symbol. Mr. Ouch fails at this. Furthermore, rather subjectively, Mr. Ouch does not convey sophistication nor a professional aesthetic -- it looks like someone made this up using Clipart, and it does not convey a sense of seriousness and an authoritative tone.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    > Simplicity and reproducibility are the hallmarks of an optimal graphic symbol. The primary goal is to communicate something. Simplicity and reproducibility are always secondary to this - and it's difficult to have something simple and reproducible that clearly communicates danger.
    - fermienrico 9y ago
      There are lots of options to communicate clearly. To be able to communicate clear and have simplicity/reproducibility is what makes a good graphic symbol. Further reading: https://books.google.com/books/about/Semiology.html?id=kZXCQgAACAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Semiology.html?id=kZXCQ...
- abecedarius 9y ago
  Waste dumps are a bigger semantic problem because you won't die or even feel anything soon. Even Chernobyl seems like a wildlife preserve already. The warning had better be clear it's about a long-term dread to have any chance of being heeded.
hateful 9y ago
Too bad that symbol has recently come to mean "contains a multitude of fidget spinners"
throwaway7312 9y ago
It would seem like the likeliest scenario for a future dark age is neighboring towns (or tribes, I suppose) tell tales about how everyone who goes into area X eventually dies not long after. Every few generations some brave, ballsy kid shrugs off these old wives tales, goes and camps out in area X, and gets ill and dies not long after. The legends endure... at some cost. Of course, it depends how strong the radioactivity/toxicity is. If it leads to cancer 30 years down the road, and no immediate signs, then it gets a lot messier.
- korethr 9y ago
  And so rises the legend about how the ghosts of the priests from the Before Times placed a curse on area X, and haunt the lines of those who violate their sacred grounds to this day.
- rbritton 9y ago
  This is kind of the plot of The Chrysalids [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chrysalids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chrysalids
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > how everyone who goes into area X eventually dies not long after Nuclear waste generally isn't this scary. Exposure causes death years, maybe even decades, afterwards. Enough time for cause and effect to get muddied.
- askvictor 9y ago
  Iirc Australian Aboriginals have mythology about regions high in uranium, and tend to stay away from them. Unfortunately I don't have a source for this.
- andrewflnr 9y ago
  People are actually pretty good at noticing that sort of correlation, to the extent we find false ones all the time. I feel like your "cancer in 30 years" scenario is pretty stable.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
The article begins by saying the jolly roger has lost it's original meaning. I doubt the author would be very successful getting people to interact with an unknown substance of unknown origin if it's in an old unfamiliar container with a skull and some text in an unknown language on it.
- alphaalpha101 9y ago
  I saw this video on Vox today before I saw this article on HackerNews, and I totally agree with this point. If I saw a bottle, new perhaps but old definitely, that had that symbol on the side, I would not even consider opening it.
Kelbit 9y ago
I've always thought the concern of future generations finding a radioactive waste disposal site is overblown and is one of the weaker arguments advanced by the anti-nuclear movement. If civilization remains on an upward trajectory of technological development, or even stays flat, we will continue to understand the risks of radioactive waste. We won't go poking through waste disposal sites for no good reason. Barring a major collapse, we are unlikely to forget about them, either - we will either reprocess the waste down the road when breeder tech catches up, or we'll continue to make risk-appropriate investments in maintaining the perimeter fence and keeping the sites secure. Now, one could argue that 10 millennia of site maintenance is an expensive endeavor to foist upon our descendants, but that's a different discussion. The only scenario where we forget about these sites and the dangers of them is some hypothetical future collapse of civilization, where records are gone and the survivors have regressed to a pre-industrial understanding of the world. If you're an optimist, you don't expect that scenario to happen. But suppose it could - doesn't it make more sense to invest in carbon-neutral power technology like nuclear and maybe help stave off a potential collapse, rather than worry about a small number of the survivors dying of radiation sickness?
- racer-v 9y ago
  > doesn't it make more sense to invest in carbon-neutral power technology like nuclear and maybe help stave off a potential collapse Very big maybe. Given the extensive track record of human civilizations collapsing (Angkor Wat, Maya, etc) I'd suggest that investing in carbon-neutral tech is no guarantee there won't be more.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > We won't go poking through waste disposal sites for no good reason We don't need a global collapse to make disposal sites problematic. Imagine the total dissolution--think post-Ghadaffi Libya or Iraq and Syria at the height of ISIL's power--of a state containing nuclear waste. Keeping nearby civilians, who could have forgotten or never known of the hazard, from harm seems like a good enough reason to give this some thought. (I agree with your general sentiment, however.)
  - 9y ago
Godel_unicode 9y ago
I think their Jolly Rodger example is a poor one. It didn't mean "danger", it meant "pirates". It still means that, it's merely our belief about whether pirates are dangerous which has changed. I suspect if you are in the water off e.g. Somalia you'd feel very different about a ship flying the Jolly Rodger than if you're on a Disney cruise...
- rexaliquid 9y ago
  I was skeptical. But there is also a difference between coming across people flying the flag and a desolate place marked with the symbol. In both cases, the symbol means pirates, but in the first case pirates mean danger and in the second case pirates mean abandoned treasure.
mattigames 9y ago
Thinking 2D for lasting symbology its not smart; the best symbol for danger will always be realistic corpses sculptures (at least for as long humans exist); If you see a corpse down your path, then later on see 2, then see 3, a few neurons is enough to realize you may become the next one if you keep walking that path.
- misnamed 9y ago
  I don't know. Egyptian pyramids are a source of endless fascination for modern scientists and laypeople alike. Corpses add to the intrigue, don't they?
  - mattigames 9y ago
    Maybe, but the fanciness of the pyramids has something to do with it; I was thinking about corpses on the floor with body posture and facial features denoting pain and anguish from the last moments of their lives.
- mattigames 9y ago
  Of course, physical deterrents are much better than psychological deterrents, so if you gonna make an underground deposit of radioactive materials you better surround it with (non-lethal) spikes, so at least whoever opens it has to be really smart to be able to do so.
  - dharmab 9y ago
    A physical deterrent often means "Valuables within."
    - mattigames 9y ago
      If they are motivated enough to bypass it they are probably motivated enough to ignore any symbol even if they understand 100% what it means ("oh they put a radiation symbol here? I don't believe it, its just scaremongering, this cave must be hiding a treasure")
bootlooped 9y ago
There is a 2010 documentary called "Into Eternity" about building an underground nuclear storage facility in Finland. It also covers the problem of how to warn people very far into the future.
- askvictor 9y ago
  Is it not sufficient to blow up the access tunnels, such that any civilisation capable of digging it up will can be presumed to have the technology to detect radioactivity? This presumes a stable geology and no asteroid impacts.
  - bootlooped 9y ago
    If I remember right, the plan was to fill the tunnels with concrete when the facility is full. I think drilling is a lot simpler than detecting radioactivity though. The most plausible scenario is that a future civilization tries to drill in the area and brings a bunch of waste up to the surface inadvertently.
    - askvictor 9y ago
      If wonder if when our civilisation digs (deep holes), do we test for radioactivity?
DonHopkins 9y ago
Don't lick Mr. Yuk! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk Don't touch Mr. Ouch! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ouch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ouch
- IntronExon 9y ago
  From the link At least two peer-reviewed medical studies (Fergusson 1982, Vernberg 1984) have suggested that Mr. Yuk stickers do not effectively keep children away from potential poisons and may even attract children.
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    You're just not putting enough stickers on your children. It takes several layers to safely seal their mouths from poison and fully insulate them from shock.
TipVFL 9y ago
At my last job they were constantly asking me to create symbols to represent abstract concepts. They wanted them to be instantly, universally recognizable at 24 pixels by 24 pixels with no text. This is sometimes easy, often impossible. I ended up finding a simple rule of thumb to cut through that work quickly, if I couldn't think of one clear symbol for the concept in 10 seconds then I would never find one that fit all the requirements. I passed that rule on to my project manager and he got a lot better at not making impossible symbol requests.
Animats 9y ago
The article references someone worrying about the problem of marking future radioactive waste dumps, but doesn't mention how real ones are marked. Here's a real one.[1] That's the marker at the SL-1 reactor burial site in Idaho, from 1962. It's a stone slab, etched with a "no pedestrians" road sign symbol, a radiation trefoil, and a bottle with a skull and crossbones. Already it looks dated. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/SL-1Burial.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/SL-1Buri...
- avocad 9y ago
  I think the skull and bones will be a good symbol for millions of years, unless evolution takes a really weird turn.
cbr 9y ago
I wonder why we didn't go for stronger legal protection for these symbols? Water bottles with the biohazard logo on them and other gratuitous uses reduce how much caution it induces and diminish its value as a symbol.
__s 9y ago
The comic that's suppose to demonstrate the meaning of the radioactive symbol.. I viewed it as a story about how symbols lose their meaning: guy finds box with weird symbol on it, makes a t-shirt with the symbol on it, walks off to lay around in the grass taking a nap, the symbol now some random thing sold on t-shirts. Like the three-armed-spiral icon that represents some part of a turn table my father has a shirt of. Most don't know what the is shirt of
mannykannot 9y ago
I thought the article too quickly dismissed the skull-and-crossbones. Sure, it has been trivialized, but if you came across a door with a skull-based symbol on it, I would guess you would give that more thought than an abstract shape that you did not recognize, and words in a language you do not know. My guess is that skulls and skeletons will hold up better as warnings than abstract shapes, in which case the desire for a meaningless and abstract shape was counter-productive. Similarly, the symmetry criterion strikes me as unnecessary, as people are good at recognizing shapes regardless of orientation, especially when the shapes are figurative. On the other hand (literally), the corrosive substance symbols (not shown in this article - [1]) are figurative, asymmetric and, IMHO, pretty clear. The one other figurative symbol in this collection is the postal one with a snake, but it could be mistaken for a caduceus as long as that symbol is known. There is also the possibility that we might drive snakes to extinction. There is a need for distinct symbols for different types of danger, but perhaps they should all include a skulls-or-skeleton generic danger motif. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosive_substance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosive_substance
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
Radiological accidents caused by people picking up radioactive sources, because they had no idea what they were, are a bit of a hobby of mine (and in general radiological accidents). The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is normally called to help local authorities deal with such accidents and of course the first thing they do afterwards is compile a report. Unfortunately they don't have those reports in one place- you have to trawl through their site and their yearly publications to find it. So I've taken the liberty to put all the reports I could find on my server, here: http://www.goblinopera.com/iaea_reports/ http://www.goblinopera.com/iaea_reports/ These include the most well-publicised cases, like Goiânia, but also more obscure ones, including my favourite ones, the three accidents in irradiation facilities in San Salvador (El Salvador), Nesvizh (Belarus) and near Soreq (Isral). Apologies that these are just on my (rented) server- I understand people might consider it a non-trusted source. I'll try uploading the lot on github if enough people are interested. Btw, the IAEA copyright gives premission for copies to be made and distributed over web pages: http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/rights-and-permissions http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/rights-and-permissions

100 points by misnamed 9y ago

> Linguist Thomas Sebeok, for instance, proposed creating an atomic priesthood, where an exclusive political group would use its own rituals and myths to preserve knowledge of radioactive areas, like a church. Minor spoiler alert: this is a side element in the wonderful novel "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson.

emodendroket 9y ago
Not sure a spoiler alert serves any purpose if I have no idea what work is being spoiled until I read it.
- gumby 9y ago
  good point!
korethr 9y ago
Similar has been a setting element in other fictional works as well. Best example I can think of is ComStar, from the BattleTech universe [1]. Originally the Terran Hegemony's comms department, and later a neutral corporation, it morphed a mystic religious order. For good or for ill, it managed to preserve the interstellar comms network and various pieces of advanced tech, despite some several hundred years of intermittent war. It's not like the idea of a mystic or monastic order taking over education and knowledge preservation duties after the fall of a civilization is a fiction unto itself, either. This is exactly what happened in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment. 1. http://www.sarna.net/wiki/ComStar http://www.sarna.net/wiki/ComStar
qbrass 9y ago
It was a plot point in Asimov's Foundation series. http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/EG_Terminus.html http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/EG_Terminus.html "Every nuclear power station refurbished by the Foundation became a Temple of Scientism with a hierarchy of priests dispensing technical and medical assistance disguised as benedictions from the Galactic Spirit. The brightest natives of the Four Kingdoms were brought to Terminus to receive indoctrination into Scientism at the Temple School, then sent back out to the Four Kingdoms to serve as the Church's Lower Hierarchy (the Upper Hierarchy being reserved for native Foundationers who understood the theoretical underpinnings of the Church's miraculous technology). Any priestly novitiates who were intelligent enough to see through the elaborate, meaningless rituals promulgated by the Church remained on Terminus to become research students (and naturalized citizens of Terminus)."
stordoff 9y ago
Sounds somewhat similar to the Children of the Atom in Fallout 3/4 as well: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Church_of_the_Children_of_Atom http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Church_of_the_Children_of_Atom
fyi1183 9y ago
The best literary treatment of the general idea of attempting to preserve knowledge by creating some sort of priesthood, though not specifically for the purpose of waste warnings, is A Canticle for Leibowitz in my opinion. I highly recommend it.

gumby 9y ago

> Even now, the power the biohazard symbol once had to inspire awe and fear has begun to diminish. Today, it appears on everyday clothing and products, slowly becoming more ordinary than extraordinary. This always annoys me, though it's a form of linguistic change. The worst example of this, IMHO, is the stickers and accessories you can get for guns to make them look like children's toys (e.g. red cap on the end) -- specifically subverting something designed to make children safe. I do think people who do this have a first amendment legal right to do so, but just because you're allowed to do something doesn't mean it's a good idea (there's no law to prevent me from drinking bleach if I want to, but that doesn't make it a good idea).

sigstoat 9y ago
> there's no law to prevent me from drinking bleach if I want to, but that doesn't make it a good idea you sure? https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2005/05/20/why-i-cant-tinker-my-household-cleaner/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2005/05/20/why-i-cant-tinker-m...
- gumby 9y ago
  I know :-) but I choose bleach because I don't think it has an "inconsistent with its labeling" label.
jetrink 9y ago
Disguising a real gun as a toy sounds very similar to the famous example of unprotected speech of falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater. First, it is a type of falsehood. Second, it is likely to cause real harm. I would be surprised if disguising guns would be viewed as constitutionally protected speech.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Popehat wants you to stop saying "fire in a crowded theater". https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/ https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...

rdiddly 9y ago

This whole time I thought the biohazard symbol was supposed to be abstractly evocative of a microscope with three lenses, seen as if you were looking up from the slide/stage. Indicating, I supposed, something dangerous that you need a microscope to see. I thought "Hey that's a cool way to convey that idea graphically." Well, come to find out they were trying to have it not refer to anything. So it becomes just another example of how we (well, I) love to find meaning where there is none. Examples, none of which is from the right angle: http://www.scienceprofonline.com/images/science-image-library/microbiology/equipment/microscope-40x-objective-SIL.jpg http://www.scienceprofonline.com/images/science-image-librar... https://abm-website-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pharmpro.com/s3fs-public/featured_image/2016/04/Lens-of-microscope.jpg https://abm-website-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pharmpro.com/s3f... https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/232/512560597_fa29e4d5a4.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/232/512560597_fa29e4d5a4.jpg This one's closer to the angle but has four lenses: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/detail-microscope-3429613.jpg https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/detail-microscope-3429613.jp...

scrumper 9y ago
I always thought it was deliberately designed to invoke beetle pincers, or bug jaws.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  Yeah, spiky evokes sharp and maybe poisonous.

tetha 9y ago

This reminds me of a striking example during our UI design class, which eventually led me to conclude that there is no intuitive design of anything, unless you can make specific assumptions about the users. You have a steering wheel, and turn it to the right. What direction do you turn? It's such a simple question. And if you're used to a car, or a bike, it's so easy to answer. Turn right, go right. Well except every captain with his boat will tell you they will go left. And there are so many examples of this if you look at them. Our monitoring has a lot of graphs, but why would a rising or a falling graph be good? If it's latency, you want it low but not 0, because 0 would be weird. If it's available capacity, you want it high, but too high is right out as well, since it's a waste. In some cases, we need ports open because we kinda need to answer productive HTTP requests, in other cases, it would be rather silly to expose elasticsearch to the internet. Intuition and intuitive meaning is such a hard thing.

paulryanrogers 9y ago
"Turn right, go right. Well except every captain with his boat will tell you they will go left." Is this really true of ships with steering wheels? I know those with a fixed rudder control do work opposite the desired direction.
- tetha 9y ago
  And that, and your peer comment, are the beautiful part of this example. If you start looking into it, it's even more bloody complicated. Cars and ships both have changed the way their steering wheels work. Some ships don't have steering wheels and instead have straight rudders or computer controls. And motor boats can rotate the ship through motor and rotor control without using the rudder.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  I have sailed a small sailboat and a piloted a bunch of ski/bass/pontoon boats. All had the steering set up such that it matched a car. Only on boats with a simple rudder/tiller does it reverse.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

diabeetusman 9y ago

That's partially why I like the idea (if not the implementation, apparently) of Mr. Yuck and his friend that I just learned about, Mr. Ouch [0]. To me, it looks like he gets the point across pretty well-- come near here and die. There's no need for left-to-right reading and the cause and effect are in one clear image. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ouch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ouch]

fermienrico 9y ago
The semiology of such a graphic, Mr. Ouch symbol, may be adequate, but its utility and practicality is severely lacking. Imagine if you were to put instructions together to be able to reproduce Mr. Ouch; or, imagine if you were a construction worker trying to follow instructions to mark this logo on a hazardous surface -- Simplicity and reproducibility are the hallmarks of an optimal graphic symbol. Mr. Ouch fails at this. Furthermore, rather subjectively, Mr. Ouch does not convey sophistication nor a professional aesthetic -- it looks like someone made this up using Clipart, and it does not convey a sense of seriousness and an authoritative tone.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > Simplicity and reproducibility are the hallmarks of an optimal graphic symbol. The primary goal is to communicate something. Simplicity and reproducibility are always secondary to this - and it's difficult to have something simple and reproducible that clearly communicates danger.
  - fermienrico 9y ago
    There are lots of options to communicate clearly. To be able to communicate clear and have simplicity/reproducibility is what makes a good graphic symbol. Further reading: https://books.google.com/books/about/Semiology.html?id=kZXCQgAACAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Semiology.html?id=kZXCQ...
abecedarius 9y ago
Waste dumps are a bigger semantic problem because you won't die or even feel anything soon. Even Chernobyl seems like a wildlife preserve already. The warning had better be clear it's about a long-term dread to have any chance of being heeded.

hateful 9y ago

Too bad that symbol has recently come to mean "contains a multitude of fidget spinners"

throwaway7312 9y ago

It would seem like the likeliest scenario for a future dark age is neighboring towns (or tribes, I suppose) tell tales about how everyone who goes into area X eventually dies not long after. Every few generations some brave, ballsy kid shrugs off these old wives tales, goes and camps out in area X, and gets ill and dies not long after. The legends endure... at some cost. Of course, it depends how strong the radioactivity/toxicity is. If it leads to cancer 30 years down the road, and no immediate signs, then it gets a lot messier.

korethr 9y ago
And so rises the legend about how the ghosts of the priests from the Before Times placed a curse on area X, and haunt the lines of those who violate their sacred grounds to this day.
rbritton 9y ago
This is kind of the plot of The Chrysalids [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chrysalids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chrysalids
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> how everyone who goes into area X eventually dies not long after Nuclear waste generally isn't this scary. Exposure causes death years, maybe even decades, afterwards. Enough time for cause and effect to get muddied.
askvictor 9y ago
Iirc Australian Aboriginals have mythology about regions high in uranium, and tend to stay away from them. Unfortunately I don't have a source for this.
andrewflnr 9y ago
People are actually pretty good at noticing that sort of correlation, to the extent we find false ones all the time. I feel like your "cancer in 30 years" scenario is pretty stable.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

The article begins by saying the jolly roger has lost it's original meaning. I doubt the author would be very successful getting people to interact with an unknown substance of unknown origin if it's in an old unfamiliar container with a skull and some text in an unknown language on it.

alphaalpha101 9y ago
I saw this video on Vox today before I saw this article on HackerNews, and I totally agree with this point. If I saw a bottle, new perhaps but old definitely, that had that symbol on the side, I would not even consider opening it.

Kelbit 9y ago

I've always thought the concern of future generations finding a radioactive waste disposal site is overblown and is one of the weaker arguments advanced by the anti-nuclear movement. If civilization remains on an upward trajectory of technological development, or even stays flat, we will continue to understand the risks of radioactive waste. We won't go poking through waste disposal sites for no good reason. Barring a major collapse, we are unlikely to forget about them, either - we will either reprocess the waste down the road when breeder tech catches up, or we'll continue to make risk-appropriate investments in maintaining the perimeter fence and keeping the sites secure. Now, one could argue that 10 millennia of site maintenance is an expensive endeavor to foist upon our descendants, but that's a different discussion. The only scenario where we forget about these sites and the dangers of them is some hypothetical future collapse of civilization, where records are gone and the survivors have regressed to a pre-industrial understanding of the world. If you're an optimist, you don't expect that scenario to happen. But suppose it could - doesn't it make more sense to invest in carbon-neutral power technology like nuclear and maybe help stave off a potential collapse, rather than worry about a small number of the survivors dying of radiation sickness?

racer-v 9y ago
> doesn't it make more sense to invest in carbon-neutral power technology like nuclear and maybe help stave off a potential collapse Very big maybe. Given the extensive track record of human civilizations collapsing (Angkor Wat, Maya, etc) I'd suggest that investing in carbon-neutral tech is no guarantee there won't be more.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> We won't go poking through waste disposal sites for no good reason We don't need a global collapse to make disposal sites problematic. Imagine the total dissolution--think post-Ghadaffi Libya or Iraq and Syria at the height of ISIL's power--of a state containing nuclear waste. Keeping nearby civilians, who could have forgotten or never known of the hazard, from harm seems like a good enough reason to give this some thought. (I agree with your general sentiment, however.)
- 9y ago

Godel_unicode 9y ago

I think their Jolly Rodger example is a poor one. It didn't mean "danger", it meant "pirates". It still means that, it's merely our belief about whether pirates are dangerous which has changed. I suspect if you are in the water off e.g. Somalia you'd feel very different about a ship flying the Jolly Rodger than if you're on a Disney cruise...

rexaliquid 9y ago
I was skeptical. But there is also a difference between coming across people flying the flag and a desolate place marked with the symbol. In both cases, the symbol means pirates, but in the first case pirates mean danger and in the second case pirates mean abandoned treasure.

mattigames 9y ago

Thinking 2D for lasting symbology its not smart; the best symbol for danger will always be realistic corpses sculptures (at least for as long humans exist); If you see a corpse down your path, then later on see 2, then see 3, a few neurons is enough to realize you may become the next one if you keep walking that path.

misnamed 9y ago
I don't know. Egyptian pyramids are a source of endless fascination for modern scientists and laypeople alike. Corpses add to the intrigue, don't they?
- mattigames 9y ago
  Maybe, but the fanciness of the pyramids has something to do with it; I was thinking about corpses on the floor with body posture and facial features denoting pain and anguish from the last moments of their lives.
mattigames 9y ago
Of course, physical deterrents are much better than psychological deterrents, so if you gonna make an underground deposit of radioactive materials you better surround it with (non-lethal) spikes, so at least whoever opens it has to be really smart to be able to do so.
- dharmab 9y ago
  A physical deterrent often means "Valuables within."
  - mattigames 9y ago
    If they are motivated enough to bypass it they are probably motivated enough to ignore any symbol even if they understand 100% what it means ("oh they put a radiation symbol here? I don't believe it, its just scaremongering, this cave must be hiding a treasure")

bootlooped 9y ago

There is a 2010 documentary called "Into Eternity" about building an underground nuclear storage facility in Finland. It also covers the problem of how to warn people very far into the future.

askvictor 9y ago
Is it not sufficient to blow up the access tunnels, such that any civilisation capable of digging it up will can be presumed to have the technology to detect radioactivity? This presumes a stable geology and no asteroid impacts.
- bootlooped 9y ago
  If I remember right, the plan was to fill the tunnels with concrete when the facility is full. I think drilling is a lot simpler than detecting radioactivity though. The most plausible scenario is that a future civilization tries to drill in the area and brings a bunch of waste up to the surface inadvertently.
  - askvictor 9y ago
    If wonder if when our civilisation digs (deep holes), do we test for radioactivity?

DonHopkins 9y ago

Don't lick Mr. Yuk! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk Don't touch Mr. Ouch! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ouch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ouch

IntronExon 9y ago
From the link At least two peer-reviewed medical studies (Fergusson 1982, Vernberg 1984) have suggested that Mr. Yuk stickers do not effectively keep children away from potential poisons and may even attract children.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  You're just not putting enough stickers on your children. It takes several layers to safely seal their mouths from poison and fully insulate them from shock.

TipVFL 9y ago

At my last job they were constantly asking me to create symbols to represent abstract concepts. They wanted them to be instantly, universally recognizable at 24 pixels by 24 pixels with no text. This is sometimes easy, often impossible. I ended up finding a simple rule of thumb to cut through that work quickly, if I couldn't think of one clear symbol for the concept in 10 seconds then I would never find one that fit all the requirements. I passed that rule on to my project manager and he got a lot better at not making impossible symbol requests.

Animats 9y ago

The article references someone worrying about the problem of marking future radioactive waste dumps, but doesn't mention how real ones are marked. Here's a real one.[1] That's the marker at the SL-1 reactor burial site in Idaho, from 1962. It's a stone slab, etched with a "no pedestrians" road sign symbol, a radiation trefoil, and a bottle with a skull and crossbones. Already it looks dated. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/SL-1Burial.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/SL-1Buri...

avocad 9y ago
I think the skull and bones will be a good symbol for millions of years, unless evolution takes a really weird turn.

cbr 9y ago

I wonder why we didn't go for stronger legal protection for these symbols? Water bottles with the biohazard logo on them and other gratuitous uses reduce how much caution it induces and diminish its value as a symbol.

__s 9y ago

The comic that's suppose to demonstrate the meaning of the radioactive symbol.. I viewed it as a story about how symbols lose their meaning: guy finds box with weird symbol on it, makes a t-shirt with the symbol on it, walks off to lay around in the grass taking a nap, the symbol now some random thing sold on t-shirts. Like the three-armed-spiral icon that represents some part of a turn table my father has a shirt of. Most don't know what the is shirt of

mannykannot 9y ago

I thought the article too quickly dismissed the skull-and-crossbones. Sure, it has been trivialized, but if you came across a door with a skull-based symbol on it, I would guess you would give that more thought than an abstract shape that you did not recognize, and words in a language you do not know. My guess is that skulls and skeletons will hold up better as warnings than abstract shapes, in which case the desire for a meaningless and abstract shape was counter-productive. Similarly, the symmetry criterion strikes me as unnecessary, as people are good at recognizing shapes regardless of orientation, especially when the shapes are figurative. On the other hand (literally), the corrosive substance symbols (not shown in this article - [1]) are figurative, asymmetric and, IMHO, pretty clear. The one other figurative symbol in this collection is the postal one with a snake, but it could be mistaken for a caduceus as long as that symbol is known. There is also the possibility that we might drive snakes to extinction. There is a need for distinct symbols for different types of danger, but perhaps they should all include a skulls-or-skeleton generic danger motif. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosive_substance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosive_substance

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

Radiological accidents caused by people picking up radioactive sources, because they had no idea what they were, are a bit of a hobby of mine (and in general radiological accidents). The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is normally called to help local authorities deal with such accidents and of course the first thing they do afterwards is compile a report. Unfortunately they don't have those reports in one place- you have to trawl through their site and their yearly publications to find it. So I've taken the liberty to put all the reports I could find on my server, here: http://www.goblinopera.com/iaea_reports/ http://www.goblinopera.com/iaea_reports/ These include the most well-publicised cases, like Goiânia, but also more obscure ones, including my favourite ones, the three accidents in irradiation facilities in San Salvador (El Salvador), Nesvizh (Belarus) and near Soreq (Isral). Apologies that these are just on my (rented) server- I understand people might consider it a non-trusted source. I'll try uploading the lot on github if enough people are interested. Btw, the IAEA copyright gives premission for copies to be made and distributed over web pages: http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/rights-and-permissions http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/rights-and-permissions