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Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, that could backfire. I've run into several people who point out that if they lacked context on it, it could be mistaken an angel smithing something else someone is running from, possibly leading some uninformed faithful person to see it as some sort of weapon for self defense.

I was rather amazed by the creative thinking required, but it did ram home the difficulty of getting an unequivocal, in ambiguous message across.

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You might find "How to Send a Message 1,000 Years to the Future"[1] and "Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant"[2] pretty interesting.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t...

[2] https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/

That was in fact the exact thing we were talking about at the time during a Philosophy of Art course with regards to art as a medium of communication. Btw, in my original post smithing should have been smiting; but autocorrect.

I recall many guffaw from people at the time thatsucha project was even a subject of research, but every time I look back at code I haven't touched in 6 months or more, I tend to end up thinking about it again.

Id argue that the more obvious sign would be one in which all three drawings are present, but stacked vertically, with the radiation sign on top, followed by the death's head, but with an = sign between those two and no wavy arrow rays. Then below those two and their = sign, the person running with arrow. This would make it obvious that the radiation in the object means death and that running is extremely recommended. The triangle of graphics, with the radiation rays hitting both below almost seems to imply that X time is so deadly that you have no hope of escape even if you run.

I personally find equal style explanatory signs confusing. This might sound like a bad pun, but they literally don’t provide directions and I’d have to consider both expressions and it’s applicability w.r.t. situations and circumstances.

One example that comes off top of my head is Ubuntu installer disc’s “man = keyboard” sign.

I believe it is supposed to read “for universal access = hit any key on keyboard”, after seeing it for years, but for long I thought it could be “A keyboard is to hands and legs for a civilized person” or “use keyboard to see logs” or something.

Most likely, that person isn't merely faithful but also in the midst of an acute psychotic break. And, yeah, they're going to be able to come up with some quite creative interpretations. The ideas you'll hear from these folks are wild, but to them, they're internally very logically consistent.

Imagine someone in that state, and they see a tattoo on their body of a "+" sign. Maybe that person normally just really likes math, and got a tattoo of the most unambiguous symbol to represent that that they could. It could take on a lot of different meanings in a psychotic episode, something like thinking there's a math and Christianity conspiracy/link, and maybe they think they had a bad childhood experience with the religion, so now anyone who supports math is part of that conspiracy, and obviously evil.

Something that basic and seemingly innocuous still has the potential send their mind spinning.

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