Beyond Biohazard: Why Danger Symbols Can’t Last Forever
99percentinvisible.org
99percentinvisible.org
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?
That is a backwards way of looking at the problem. Creating labels such that future generations can identify harmful stuff after a collapse is much easier than guaranteeing a major collapse will not eventually occur. If you are thinking long term, why not just tick it off the list?
> 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?
Suddenly, sharply regressing to nineteenth century industrial-era steam tech would probably be more than enough to make people stop researching the finer points of where the previous civilization buried its forgotten stuff. The interesting part if you're pro-nuclear is that one way to help those people in that future calamity is to use nuclear today and leave the relatively easy-to-use fossil fuels in the earth so those future people, in their dire straights and lessened technological status, can use energy and rebuild without having to figure out how to create and operate a nuclear reactor.
But none of that is an argument against making sure nuclear waste is well labeled and well concealed and so on.
If a hypothetical future society doesn't have the technology and wherewithal to identify a nuclear waste dump then the situation will be so catastrophic that accidentally stumbling into a nuclear waste dump isn't going to register with said hypotheticals.
France produces 10g/citizen/year of waste [1]. This is a tiny volume, I've seen slag heaps from pre-modern lead mines (thinking the 70s) that are bigger than that that will sit there polluting waterways and whatnot. Lead poisoning in lead mining towns is one of the long list of things that is probably worse than Chernobyl. This is not a challenge that would register in the public discourse if nuclear radiation was visible like electromagnetic radiation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Enviro...
Chernobyl's effect on the environment, economy and human health was quite significant after hundreds of billions were spent and dozens of lives were lost containing its effect. This is a very strange comparison you have made.
Are the remaining fossil fuels still easy to find and extract?
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.)
Even that doesn't have to happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
[1] http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/IAEABooks/4738/The-Radiologica...
[2] http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/IAEAbooks/10602/The-Radiologic...
[3] http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/IAEABooks/5968/The-Radiologica...
Living on top of granite at altitude is a fairly good yardstick for radiation exposure comparison / risk evaluation, as far as the layperson's (that's me!) understanding goes.
And yet earlier today a discussion on reddit sent me once again to the Goiânia incident, in which that was precisely what happened: an abandoned medical facility was raided for scrap, which happened to include a cesium radiotherapy source. 4 people dead, hundreds of others exposed, expensive cleanup operation.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/new-symbol-launched-war...
Another assumption is that this person will believe the sign- for instance, Egyptian Pharaohs went to great lengths to ward people off their buried treasures but their tombs were robbed anyway, by grave robbers who simply figured out it was all to keep them away from the goods.
This concern was big in the mind of Gregory Benford and his team who designed the thorn fields etc- that a sign telling you to keep off may just be read as "here be treasure".
Finally, the dearth of knowledge among the majority of the population on nuclear physics should not be underestimated. In the Goiania accident, and other similar cases, people realised that the radioactive sources they had found were important and potentially valuable, because they exhibited uncommon properties, like glowing in the dark or emitting heat (in Lia, Georgia, a 90Sr source with an activity of 1295 TBq was used as a heater by folks gathering wood in the forest). So they kept those sources, putting them in pockets and taking them home, to show their families and then probably looking for a way to cash in on them, until they were taken to hospital with strange illnesses.
These actually seem to be pretty clear patterns of human activity and they don't seem to be deterred by simple signage, which is often present on medical equipment etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident#Hospital...
"On September 11, 1986, the Court of Goiás stated it had knowledge of the abandoned radioactive material in the building. Four months before the theft, on May 4, 1987, Saura Taniguti, then director of Ipasgo, the institute of insurance for civil servants, used police force to prevent one of the owners of IGR, Carlos Figueiredo Bezerril, from removing the objects that were left behind. Figueiredo then warned the president of Ipasgo, Lício Teixeira Borges, that he should take responsibility "for what would happen with the caesium bomb"
Apparently - the court posted a guard at the site, but it wouldn't allow the removal of any of the contents of the facility. The owners even "wrote several letters to the National Nuclear Energy Commission, warning them about the danger of keeping a teletherapy unit at an abandoned site".
Then guess who got screwed - the very owners who tried and tried to warn about this deadly problem! From wikipedia:
"In light of the deaths caused, the three doctors who had owned and run IGR were charged with criminal negligence. Because the accidents occurred before the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of 1988 and because the substance was acquired by the clinic and not by the individual owners, the court could not declare the owners of IGR liable. One of the medical doctors owning IGR and the clinic's physicist were ordered to pay R$100,000 for the derelict condition of the building."
While sure, they weren't found liable - that was probably small consolation.
We do just that, for the good reason that archaeology thrives on the study of garbage. Middens are invaluable resources, but historically there was no danger that would last through the ages. Now future archaeologists will have to worry about radioactive hazard, chemical hazards, and god knows what else. The real horror might be coming across some black site storing or studying NBC agents.
We’re a messy species, and a lucky one so far, but luck never lasts.
Almost all of the supposedly related deaths definitely didn’t come from the tombs.
It is not a given that generations that live through changing times (whether regressing/progressing technologically) will maintain the same priorities and convictions.
For example, imagine there are 100 (some number much bigger than 1) radioactive waste sites scattered around locations with different economic capabilities. Then a discovery is made that, though costly enables complete recycling/cleanup of the nuclear waste. Some locations are able to cleanup and some are not. The emergence of a solution reduces the perceived danger posed by nuclear waste. The longer it takes for all the locations address the issue, the easier it becomes to forget about it.
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.
Radioactive waste stays radioactive for a very long time and its radioactivity is not reduced by the number of people irradiated. That means that for example, a few (different) people a year can keep getting irradiated for a very long time -thousands of years- leading to thousands of deaths in the long run.
Then of course there's the issue of "a small number of people" looting the radioactive materials from their burial sites and bringing it back to their community, where others admire it for its fluorescence, use it as a dye or give it to their kids to play with, therefore irradiating and possibly wiping out entire communities.
Btw, this has happened in the present: see the IAEA report on the irradiation accident in Goiânia [1].
Far from a fringe concern of "the anti-nuclear movement", safety of use and disposal of nuclear material is an acknowledged responsibility of modern nuclear scientists.
_____________
[1] http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub815_web.pdf
Somewhere that subtly poisons over twenty years could blight multiple generations with radiation related illness that a less scientifically sophisticated culture is unable to tie to the materials we hide.
The most likely problem is someone building or farming on top of a low-level radiation site. High-level sites are more deeply buried, and are only a risk to miners that have serious digging equipment but no radiation meters.
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.
At very low speeds, a motorcycle behaves like a bicycle. Turn the handlebar right, go right.*
However, once you get up to normal vehicle speeds, it reverses and countersteering takes over. Turn the handlebar right, go left.*
It's one of the things they spend a lot of time drilling into your head if you take a motorcycle safety class, because a lot of folks get it wrong or incorrectly think that you turn by leaning. It's a UI problem that can very easily get you hurt -- but I'm not sure how you'd make it any more intuitive.
(*: Technically, countersteering is still in play at low speeds, even on a bicycle... but it's very subtle and most folks don't notice it, because you quickly correct the other way to re-balance the bike.)
Which is why most training for practical things is pretty bad. You can't shove physical skills into student's heads. Tell them once or twice, then create a drill where they get to learn it themselves.
In this case, I would have the student do low speed turns from straight. Ideally on a bicycle.
Balance bikes are bikes with no crank or peddles, or just take the peddles off a regular bike.
Should a trackpad scroll the scroll bar, or should it scroll the surface itself? Apple wants everyone to use natural scroll because that lines up with the touch UX convention—there are no scrollbars, you scroll the surfaces directly.
And furthermore even though "left hand moves, right hand looks" is intuitive for me on the PC, I cannot get used to it on consoles because I'm so used to the default configuration in Goldeneye where left hand was "move forward/back & rotate left/right" and right hand was "look up/down & strafe left/right".
What really confuses me are JRPGs which invert the camera horizontally.
Personally, I have a physical consideration: scrolling down in a document is more common than scrolling up, and to me moving the fingers down over the trackpad feel more comfortable than moving the fingers up, so I use normal scrolling instead of inverted scrolling.
Is this really true of ships with steering wheels? I know those with a fixed rudder control do work opposite the desired direction.
Only on boats with a simple rudder/tiller does it reverse.
Of course, that only works for vertical wheels.
Ship's wheels are older than steering wheels in cars. If ships weren't "turn the direction you want to go" cars probably wouldn't be either.
It's only opposite on small craft without a wheel and is just a fact of where the pivot point is compared to the user's hand and the motor/rudder.
People made fun of me because it confuses me every time.
I don't blame them, sometimes equipment is weird. For example, the contacts on an SPDT switch don't always match intuition.
This goes unnoticed on bicycles, but on a heavy motorcycle the it becomes important.
Countersteering works at low speeds too. I don't get where this misinformation comes from, even from people who actually ride 2 wheeled vehicles. Try it, ride at a low speed, don't lean your body toward any side, just give a gentle push on the handle bar on the direction you want to go. It will initiate a lean, and the only difference you will see compared to high speed is that the wheel will self adjust after the lean started, and will automatically move toward the direction of the turn, which makes it appear as if you made a "car like" turn, but that's not what happened. The wheel start turning toward the direction of your turn only after the lean from the countersteering has been initiated.
It is more correct to just say at ANY speed you have to countersteer (or in some way get the center of mass on the 'inside' of the turn relative to the wheels) and not confuse people with the low speed vs high speed bit, even though that's the way it FEELS as a rider.
> This goes unnoticed on bicycles, but on a heavy motorcycle the it becomes important.
I don't have motorcycle riding experience, but I have noticed the same thing on a bicycle at higher speeds (25 to 35 mph going downhill). On a bicycle, you have to shift yourself a little bit to initiate a turn at those speeds. I guess you have to put more effort into the weight shift on a heavier two wheeled vehicle?
No, this is not how you're supposed to turn whether you use a motorcycle or are riding at moderately higher speeds on a bicycle and this wrong habit is how people become unable to avoid obstacles in a timely manner on the road.
Turn-by-leaning doesn't exist, it's an illusion. It works because when you lean, you are pushing a bit on the handle bar. Pushing the handle bar in the direction of your turn makes it go to the opposite direction, which makes the 2 wheeled vehicle lean, and once you stop pushing on the handle bar the momentum will keep you from falling further. You don't need to lean to turn. You only need to push the handle bar. You can in fact put your weight to the side opposite of the lean of the bike ( just be careful and keep the momentum going by pedaling at a fixed rhythm ) so long as you pushed the handlebar the bike will lean toward the direction you pushed, it doesn't matter where you shift your weight.
I am utterly amazed at the general confusion in this thread coming from both motorcycle and bicycle riders. Countersteering is how you turn no matter which speed you're at on a two wheeled vehicle. The thing about low speed is that once you initiated the turn and made the vehicle lean a little the wheel will automatically self-adjust and turn into the direction you're leaning on, while at higher speeds the wheel will stay straight after you started leaning.
Try it. Go somewhere without obstacles, ride at like 5km/h on a straight line, use only one hand, do not lean your body in any way, and with your one hand, give a gentle push on the right side, and then consciously stop putting any force whatsoever on the handlebar. After your push, the bike will lean to the right because the wheel turned to the left, and once the lean has been initiated, since it's low speed, the wheel will automatically turn to the right side without your help.
If one is riding without holding the handlebar, one can make the bicycle go to the left or right depending on which way one leans, which in essence changes the center-of-gravity. The handlebar will turn in the expected direction as well.
> Pushing the handle bar in the direction of your turn makes it go to the opposite direction
This appears to be counterintuitive. When turning right, for example, I would have to push the left side of the handlebar away from myself, and, at the same time, pull the right side of the handlebar towards myself. The front wheel will then point in the intended direction of travel, and the bike will lean toward the side I'm turning.
> I am utterly amazed at the general confusion in this thread coming from both motorcycle and bicycle riders.
It's probably because most people, myself included, have not had formal training in bicycle/motorcycle handling skills. And they learn through experience (which probably leads to the problems in obstable avoidance that you describe).
Edit: s/handle/handling/
Yes, with the very low weight of a bicycle that can be done at low speed. But I maintain turn by leaning is mostly an illusion because that's not how you actually turn when you're riding on the road and not doing "look ma no hands". Just the fact that your hands are on the handle bar, and that when you lean a little you will also naturally put pressure on the side of your lean, pushing away the handlebar in the direction you're leaning on, which initiate the process of countersteering. It's what people naturally do on 2 wheeled vehicles whether they were taught to or not.
> When turning right, for example, I would have to push the left side of the handlebar away from myself, and, at the same time, pull the right side of the handlebar towards myself.
The only way this could work is that the lean was already initiated by countersteering. You just haven't realized you push the handle bar and to that instinctively. You should really, really give a conscious try later. Keep your bike as straight as possible, do not lean in any way, do nothing but a gentle push on the handlebar on the side you want to turn, and try very consciously to not put any pressure toward any direction after your gentle push. You will witness your bike leaning, then the wheel wanting to go toward the direction of your lean when you're at low speed, the bike doesn't need you to move the wheel toward the direction of the turn, it does that by itself.
Simply put there's no point at which one should consciously do anything other than pushing to initiate the lean.
> have not had formal training in bicycle/motorcycle handle skill
I can somewhat accept this for people who only very rarely ride their bicycle on a week end or holiday. But if you're going on the road mixed with other vehicles, or worse, if you ride a motorcycle, you should be fully in control of your vehicle. You should be able to make a turn as fast as mechanically possible without falling and at least be conscious that one should keep a steady speed, neither braking nor accelerating, while turning, if one doesn't want to fall and crash. This isn't too noticeable at moderate speeds on a bicycle but it's absolutely necessary to understand that you should keep your speed steady while turning at higher speeds, this is how many, many accidents involving only the rider are caused. The person who doesn't realize the turn is going to be steep before they came too close to the turn and chose to turn while instinctively braking to lower their speed.. braking while turning will make you fall. Loss of speed (unsteady throttle handling) will make you fall. Too much acceleration will make you fall.
Here's a good video showing what one can do with their motorcycle when one fully consciously controls its turning, instead of purely relying on instincts and misunderstood ideas like "shifting weight" (don't do that) :
When you put it that way, it does make more sense. That is, if you don't countersteer, then you'll end up falling because the the vehicle will lean too much. With a bicycle, though, you may not really feel that you're pushing back on the handlebar because of the difference in weight compared to a motorcycle.
> You should be able to make a turn as fast as mechanically possible without falling and at least be conscious that one should keep a steady speed, neither braking nor accelerating,
I actually already do this while riding and driving given what I've read about the concept of the "friction circle" which states that turning while accelerating or braking requires more traction compared to just turning. So for the most part, I will brake and slow down to my desired speed and then coast through the turn.
As for accelerating in a turn, it's a bit more problematic due to the possibility of the pedal hitting the road surface during the lean if it's at the 6 o'clock position. That's why I make sure I keep the pedals in the 9 and 3 o'clock positions when turning.
The more you look into this example, the more complicated and confusing it becomes.
There’s no such thing as a wheel turning to the right. It’s clockwise or counterclockwise.
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-librar...
https://abm-website-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pharmpro.com/s3f...
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.jp...
Minor spoiler alert: this is a side element in the wonderful novel "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson.
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)."
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk
Don't touch Mr. Ouch!
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.
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).
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
you sure? https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2005/05/20/why-i-cant-tinker-m...
Excuse my pedantry.
People make those? Wonder how they sleep at night.
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-1Buri...
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...
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.
Nuclear waste generally isn't this scary. Exposure causes death years, maybe even decades, afterwards. Enough time for cause and effect to get muddied.
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/
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:
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.
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.
Further reading: https://books.google.com/books/about/Semiology.html?id=kZXCQ...
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.
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.