How the peace symbol came to be

I am always on the lookout for interesting pieces of historical trivia and how the famous peace symbol came into existence certainly qualifies. It turns out that it was created in 1958 by Gerald Holtom by superimposing the international semaphore alphabet signals for ‘N’ and ‘D’ so that the symbol represents ‘Nuclear Disarmament’.

On Good Friday 1958, thousands gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to protest nuclear weapons. They were responding to a string of test blasts conducted by the United Kingdom, the third nation to join the nuclear club after the US and USSR.

For the next four days, the bravest among them marched to Aldermaston, a small village 50 miles west of London where British nuclear weapons were designed and stockpiled.

On the protesters’ signs and banners, a new symbol was making its first appearance. Gerald Holtom, a designer and a pacifist, had developed it specifically for the march just a few weeks prior. He believed that a symbol would make the message stronger.

He was right: The symbol was adopted soon after by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and went on to become one of the most widely recognized designs in history.

“It’s a minor masterpiece with major evocative power,” said design guru and cultural critic, Stephen Bayley, in an email. “It speaks very clearly of an era and a sensibility.

“It is, simply, a fine period piece: the ordinary thing done extraordinarily well.”

The symbol has a strong similarity to the Mercedes Benz emblem (that has resulted in some satire about how people mistakenly used one for the other) and I wonder if the car company ever considered suing for copyright infringement. Of course, this was in 1958 not long after the Nazis had been defeated in World War II and a German company’s efforts to suppress a peace symbol may not have been viewed as the wisest public relations move.

The new political template based on Mississippi, Florida, and Georgia

To no one’s surprise, Cindy Hyde-Smith won the run-off election for Mississippi’s senate seat over Democrat Mike Espy by 54-46%. So if you are keeping score, it is not enough for a candidate to be a stone-cold racist to lose the backing of Republican voters in a deep-red state. You have to be a stone-cold racist plus a religious nutcase plus a borderline pedophile to even barely lose, as was the case with Roy Moore in Alabama.
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Science, schmience

Earth scientist Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, reveals how she was recently invited to appear on CNN’s Anderson Cooper show to talk about climate change and then her taped segment was omitted altogether to give more time to stupid former senator Rick Santorum to bloviate once again about how it is all a hoax manufactured by greedy scientists. She said that this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened to her. It shows how these so-called news shows, even those that claim to be pro-science, would rather have an ignorant famous person than a knowledgeable expert.
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“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong”

I like to keep the above quote by H. L. Mencken always in mind because it is a useful caution whenever one is weighing in on weighty issues on which one is not an expert. Like pretty much everyone else, I sometimes have a brainwave about some deep or complex problem (usually in a field that I am not that familiar with) in which a simple solution suddenly stares me in the face. I then wonder why no one else has thought of this ‘brilliant’ solution before and the usual answer is that people who do know a lot more about this topic are well aware of this proposed ‘solution’ and also know why it will not work.
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Why do news shows invite non-scientists to talk about science?

Trevor Noah asks the right question but the answer is obvious. These shows are not interested in informing the public but in pleasing their sponsors and getting ratings and they know that stupid people who reinforce ignorant views draw audiences, Donald Trump being the prime example. It is just a human version of David Letterman’s ‘stupid pet tricks’ segment on his former show.

Misleading political color maps

When media color code the map of the US by which party wins a state or congressional district with red being for Republicans and blue for Democrats, they tend to do it by state (for statewide results as in the electoral college) or by district (for congressional seats). The resulting map tends to be largely blue on the east and west coasts with vast swathes of red in the middle, giving the impression that the country is dominated by Republicans. Conservatives like to use such maps to bolster their claim that the US is largely a right-wing conservative country.
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