Cecil, please show us the international warning sign for radioactivity.
Add a vertical line upwards from the center.
What do you get?
Welcome to the Boards, John.St. It’s helpful to give a link to Cecil’s column so that everyone can follow along. It’s as simple as cutting and pasting the URL, or you can dress it up a bit with coding as What’s the origin of the peace symbol?.
Notice Cecil gave the facts, one of which is that the symbol was done by an artist in 1958. Can you show me what the “international warning sign for radioactivity” looked like in 1958?
Exactly what it looks like, now.
Which…doesn’t look like the peace symbol at all, really. Extend the blades so they come close to touching, and get rid of the centre circle (similarly expanding the blades into its place), then the stated method almost works…but then you’ve got a completely different symbol. (Specifically, the Mercedes-Benz logo…)
I’m surprised about the origin of the radioactivity symbol as described there - I had understood it to be a representation of the business end of a radioactive source container - three apertures in the end of a tube, exposed or covered by a rotating disc with three similar apertures.
Pretty much the same, actually, right down to the color scheme; it was designed in the 40s.
But the “peace sign” does not particularly resemble it; the angles are wrong, to begin with.
For whatever it’s worth, the “ND-semaphore” origin was what I was told ca. 1965, by people who should know.
A Welcome to someone who joined 6 years ago? Or is the “Join date” screwy?
Or maybe the OP holds the record for time between posts?
:smack:
It never occured to me to see his join date. He posted another “Cecil, you got it wrong” six years ago.
Well, some people have their priorities. 
Maybe we’ll see him again in 2017. I’ll mark my calendar.
A pinwheel?
You guys are too obsessed with the facts. Back in my hippie days in the 60’s everybody just “knew” the peace symbol was derived from the footprint of the dove (a bird-like creature sometimes associated with peace). We didn’t have a single shred of fact to base this on but somehow we didn’t notice or care too much.
I understand each word in this sentence, but the sentence as a whole makes no sense to me. Perhaps that’s because I’ve been hanging around the SDMB too long.
Um, I’m sorry, English is my first language. Perhaps you enjoyed the 60’s more than I.
Seriously though, what do you find wrong with the sentence?
How can you be too obsessed with the facts?
Oh, I see. First of all it was meant as a joke. Maybe it was a bit too flippant given this venue is focused on fact finding.
But the concept would be like some authors choose to write history text books while others do science fiction or like some artists choose realism while others do expressionism. All noble endeavors but with varying degrees of factual basis.
I apologize for causing this discussion of the origin of the peace symbol to get off topic. It was just a joke that doesn’t really deserve any more attention.
Don’t apologize. For one thing, the discussion was 5 months old when you made your comment, so it had already died a natural death. And for another my comment was just as badly off topic as yours …
I was also told this, in the 1960s, by my parents, who were very active in the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. (As a child, I was taken along on several of the marches/demonstrations held in that era.)
Heh. And at about the same time, my church just knew that the peace symbol represented the “witch’s footprint,” whatever the hell that was supposed to be.
Like this one in Trafalgar Square? (Which I went to as a teenager living in London.) You can see the peace symbol on the banner under the name “Committee of 100”.
There is a well-known “witch’s footprint” in folklore (it is mentioned in Goethe’s Faust), but it’s an inverted pentagram. As far as I know, any connection with the ND logo is outright false.
Yes indeed, although the “Committee of 100” were the more militant wing of the movement, prepared to use (non-violent) civil disobedience. Bertrand Russell was a leading light in the “Committee of 100”, as I recall. My parents, however, were associated with the more mainstream “Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament” (C.N.D.), which eschewed civil disobedience, and mainly organized marches, often lasting several days and usually culminating in a rally in Trafalgar Square or Hyde Park.
It is perhaps worth pointing out that this was all in the early '60s (that picture is apparently from 1961) or even the later 1950s, well before the era of the hippies, and, I think, before what we then knew as the C.N.D. symbol (or “Ban the Bomb” symbol) was taken up in America and re-christened the “Peace Symbol”. Originally it did not symbolize peace in general, but nuclear disarmament specifically. Of course, many people in the C.N.D. were pacifists, but by no means all of them were opposed to war in all circumstances, many just wanted to make sure that, if there was another war (as seemed likely) nuclear weapons would not be available to be used. My father fought in World War II, and I think he considered that a necessary war. He respected people who were pacifists and had been conscientious objectors, but was not tempted to be one himself.