Odd Signs & Symbols

Moonlight Beach in Encinitas CA used to be one of my favorite beaches to go to.  Not that it means much when I only go to beaches about twice a year.  Now, we're told it is most enjoyable if we follow a few simple rules: I'm not sure if 8 or 10 panels of small print counts as "a few" rules.  Oh look, some of the panels pack more than one rule in there -- no alcohol OR glass containers.  It used to be, the beaches were just covered in cigarette butts from people with foul habits who just throw their crap on the ground when finished, and yes, broken glass and barefoot walks don't mix, so I'm glad we have progressed beyond that. I remember some business gatherings on local beaches 10-20 years ago where the "fun police" showed up every time and started pawing through people's bags looking for things to complain about.  The number one reason I don't go to the beaches is parking, but number two is being subjected to the authorities.  I

At the hotel a few weekends ago, we took a break to sit beside the pool for a while.  Outside the gate there were the usual little warning signs -- no pets, swim at your own risk ...   ... but inside there was a whole wall of warnings and alarms. I understand that drowning is an actual, serious hazard.  But look at the lengths that establishments have to go through to limit their accidents and liabilities.  No glassware, no diving, no lifeguard, no alcohol, no diarrhea (not kidding), call 911 if needed.  There was a small section on how to do CPR, then the whole right-hans panel explaining how to do CPR in more detail.   Bathe first.  Try not to get hypothermia or the other conditions listed.  I don't know why humans feel like they should be going in the water anyway.  You can't breathe water, and breathing is more important than recreation.  I almost never get in a pool.  First there's the shock to the heart when the cold water goes up past a certain spot ...

This also came from a gas station.  Right above the pump there was this sign containing a huge list of patents which may or may not apply to machine in front of you.     At the bottom of that sign is an FCC note about handling interference, then some warnings about trying to hack their software.  Okay, about 7 years ago there was a news story about a gas station in Escondido whose pumps weren't pumping as much gas at they claimed to be pumping, so that's apparently a thing. Still, wouldn't it be cheaper to make a smaller sign with just the correct information?   Above the sign full of patents is a sticker for Leperkhanz, which is funny to me because around 2007 (back when I was still married), a band moved into the house on the corner with a big green rock-n-roll tour bus, and they introduced themselves to all the neighbors so fewer neighbors would complain about any parkng issues or noise.  I think they said their tour bus used to be owned by Willie Nelson.  W

This is just a quick gag from a stop at a gas station.  Standing there waiting for the dollars to be sucked up, looking around, it seems like there is always some little detail to find.     No matter how many signs say there is sanitizer here, there really isn't.  So we can only imagine that the button to push for service was installed just to receive complaints about the lack of sanitizer.  If the intercom even works at all ...

I have been enjoying this series of posts about the odd symbols that surround us.  I was at my desk at work, pondering a huge SQL query, and looked over to see the box I unpacked my laptop dock from about six months ago.  I really should throw that in recycling. That's when I saw the whole list of icons and symbols printed on it. The second row gives a great overview of how recycling logos are drawn for different cultures around the world.  To be more accurate, I doubt it's a "cultural" thing.  It's more likely to be different systems of labelling mandated by different industry councils or trade associations. The first row has just 4 icons, which I'm pretty sure mean 1) this side up 2) fragile 3) don't stack more than 8 high 4) keep dry It's always an open question about whether a certain icon is intuitive or not.  I think these all do their jobs with no language needed at all.     Of course there's a big long barcode, because the box is a product.

This bag I got from the grocery store is jam-packed with icons, warnings and blurbs: - it contains at least 40% recycled content - it can be reused 125 times (but almost certainly won't be) - red recycling instructions - it is a suffocation hazard - it has at least two patents and a group exists called bagpatents.info - little logo: recycle it as HDPE (high-density polyethylene) - made in USA - company logo Hilex On the flipside it has a big blue Environmental Claims Validation certificate from SCS Global Services, which has an interesting website all about their services. But rather than using words, they just give a bunch of number babble. Sure, CA SB is probably the California Safety Board with a chapter 270 section 1 given. I can only guess what the following Chapter 5.3 refers to. But it ends with SCS-ECV-04389 which is like a barcode for the exact certification done by SCS. This part is not user friendly, but I guess it serves some kind of purpose. It's just a bag, p

We stopped at a stamp show at a local Elks Lodge today, and I am happy to say that I can add some comedy to this series about all the kinds of parking spaces in the world. We saw this, and wondered where the E.R. was: There's no hospital in the area.  But then, what's that on the wall? Oh, right.  Totally.  I gladly add this as a new category of parking space to look out for.

We stopped at the San Diego Botanical Gardens this weekend and were surprised to see that they gave away one of the handicapped spots to be used for electric vehicles.  And this isn't the first time we saw this.  About two weeks back another handicapped spot in town had been hijacked for the same reason. This is not acceptable, and it does not feel like it could possibly be legal, either.  I don't care if the sign says to give precedence to handicapped people.  Once your dumb car butt is in that spot, NOBODY else can pack there until you leave. After we went all around the lot and ended up parking in the next lot over, we came back and saw a van with a handicapped sticker did park here, and a young man in a wheelchair was getting out.  But what if someone in an EV stole the spot?  The guy has to wheel himself a quarter of a mile because his car wasn't good enough? In this case, there was some justice, because the vehicle charger was broken anyway.  So there was a paper sign

I took a few days off from work and we spent some nights in a hotel room down on the coast.  We are both pretty sluggish in the mornings, and when we went into a supermarket we had never been to before (Smart & Final) we had a funny OMG moment when we saw this ... Seriously, since when is celery 75 bucks a pound.  I know prices have been going up, but this was a funny scare.  It turns out this is the price per crate or bushel or carton or whatever. The reason I included it in this blog is that we see these signs all the time, and we expect them to mean what we think they mean.  I have never seen a supermarket with wholesale prices all over like this.  At least make them a different color or something.

Here is a set of symbols that we pass all the time, but probably never pay attention to: walk signals at intersections.  I have a good idea in my mind of what they should look like, but I'm sure there is a whole history of designs and testing. This feels like the basic pattern to me, growing up in the 70s and 80s. But we recently saw one of these newer ones that lays out all the rules. I'm not sure how many people are actually helped by that, who have never seen one before and are willing to read all the rules to see if the button still does what they expect it to.  There are very few pedestrians out on sidewalks in our town these days. Aside from the visible sign, I know of a few intersections in town (Escondido, CA) which have a stereo "chirp" sound that would help blind pedestrians know which direction to walk in.  We have some that have voices saying exactly which of the roads it's safe to cross, as in, "You may now cross Broadway."  Over in the beac

One of the most widespread and underappreciated set of symbols around us are the chemical elements.   It was a major milestone in human thought and ingenuity that uncovered all the elements and classified them, and in the top labs of the world there are still efforts to produce newer, heavier elements never seen before and figure out their properties.  Here is an odd shot of a periodic table: From simple hydrogen (H) to gold (Au) and beyond, these symbols unlock a wealth of knowledge about the world and what everything is made of, and how substances will behave and combine.  Everyone should take some time to learn more about chemistry -- the basics are easy to grasp, and it gives so much insight on the technology around you, and so many news stories will make more sense. Why are the USA and China and other high-tech countries scrambling to control supplies of "rare earth elements" like europium?  Because this element is key to making cell phones. Why waste money creating tiny

There are a lot of pointless bumper sticker out there, and some people clutter their back numpers with tiny unreadable stickers not even made for that purpose.  But here is one that caught our attention on the back of a Tesla. "I'm Probably Not Driving" We immediately started watching that car to see if it was using human logic.  It made a few odd maneuvers, like stopping in the middle of a triple-wide crosswalk.  But of course we have seen plenty of human drivers do that.  In the end, we couldn't tell, so we figured it was a human driver and the bumper sticker was just trolling everyone.  Or was it? This brings up the question of whether the automated driving systems are advanced enough to handle vehicles in the real world.  It sounds like tests are going well.  There are so many variables, and surely some combination will confound the software.   Then again, human drivers drink and talk on phones, and have anger issues.  Maybe we should just turn it over to well-cod

Here's an odd little warning found on the vending machine at work. I have often half-joked that more people are killed each year by vending machines than by sharks, but the point of the joke is that both numbers are so small it feels like they should go together.   They're both the same order of magnitude (1 to 10), but where they don't compare is that for shark attacks you have a public health risk and can pull people out of the water to prevent further injuries, but the vending machine incidents are just one-off dumb accidents.  I guess you can put a sticker on there saying not to rattle the machine, but again, when someone gets angry they don't exactly stop to read warning labels. Here is an excellent review of the history and numbers over at Slate.com. The article comically mentions that warning labels were added, and ends up sounding like the problem went away after that. There's a Wikipedia page for this very topic, even though it doesn't meet their stan

Here in southern California, it feels like every little shopping center has some stack of signs laying out some big list of rules.  Many of them have names and maybe they are trying to establish some kind of identity, but nobody calls them by name, and the only real evidence of their backing corporations are these signs telling us how to behave. By the way, in this image, the name of the mall is Grand Plaza, but their sign called them "Desert Plaza".  That feels like an oversight somewhere in all these decisions. But don't drink the water wherever you are. One little strip mall by my house has an actual Code of Conduct on the wall. I'm not sure who these signs are meant for.  Nobody driving into the parking lot has time to jam on the brakes, clog up traffic, and read all these paragraphs.  Nobody is going to park and then walk all the way back over there (where there isn't even a sidewalk) just to find out that they shouldn't loiter or vandalize the

All things have a lifespan, and information is strongly tied to timelines.  Here is a sign that used to say something about a permit application for this land, and the sign has been there for about 5-6 years now.  Now it's still there, but in tatters.  Sometimes, things just fall apart, or get defaced or destroyed by disruptive people, but in this case I can say exactly what happened to it. It was buried in campaign signs during the last election.  Signs were staked to the ground around it, and a few were hung on it or taped to it, or whatever the people did to cut corners.  Surely, someone ripped the sign apart trying to get their signs down. The election was last November 8.  Whoever owns this sign has not come to repair it.  Maybe that was an old deal that fell through?  I'm not sure if the FOR SALE sign next to it is recent or not.  Surely a new sign will appear one of these days, explaining how this patch of land will be plowed into some set of buildings and

I was expecting the pet food industry to have a lot of signs and symbols on their packaging, but was surprised to see very little of that on an actual shelf full of products.  Some bragged that they were "Veterinarian Approved" in what looked like little seals of approval, but I'm sure those were just empty sales blurbs. As with the packaging in other industries, there is a certain iconography when products try to distinguish themselves from each other to catch your attention (a.k.a. your dollars).  Sometimes the icons were no more than glorified bullets in a bullet point list, like this one: Is "freeze dried" really a bonus worth mentioning? Here is one package that got me thinking, though: It boasts about using upcycled ingredients.  That was just confusing at first.  Upcycle ... upcycle ... where have I heard that before?  Oh yeah, it's when you turn waste items into new products, like melting down old tires to make shoes.  Do you really want to do this w

Parking lots for retail places have gotten a lot more complicated after the pandemic and the switch of a certain percent of the market to pick up and home delivery.  Here we were looking for a spot the other day.   We saw parking spaces reserved for drive-thru overflow and curbside pickup.  We had just been talking about how annoying it is when people back into their spaces, potentially jamming up an already crowded line of cars, when we turned this corner to see a sign saying not to do that.   But wait, the sign is in the singular case.  Does it mean not to back into just this one handicapped spot?  Everyone else gets to just do what they want? I don't know, folks used to simply park in a 15 or 20 minute spot and run in and get their stuff quickly, or use the blue curb spots for that.  Or was it the white curb for loading and unloading only? We also have a block of spaces reserved for recharging electric vehicles.   I think I saw a spot last week reserved just for Door Dash worker

Sometimes, signs just add a spot of color or fun to an otherwise routine location.  We were out at an Asian buffet for Christmas and as I looked around in between plates, I saw this: You know, thanks to the owner for taking the time to add a little bit of good humor.  It was fun at the time but did not soften the blow of having the price per person be more than double what it was the last time we went there, before the pandemic. I will hold this space open for other food-related "enjoyment" signs as I find them.