For hundreds of years, the image of the skull and crossbones has
been a universal symbol of danger - leave this alone, don't
touch this, keep away, bad juju, etc.: Then, a few decades back,
a study showed that the image of the grinning skull and
crossbones might actually attract the attention of young
children to things they shouldn't touch, and so was born the
image of "Mr. Yuck," a new, supposedly more child-scary symbol
for poisonous substances: There's an art and a science to
designing and delivering effective warnings, and one of the most
important warnings we may ever post is also one of the most
daunting to design. I'm now reading a very interesting book
titled The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. Mr Weisman's book
examines what might happen to man's works if all of us suddenly
disappeared - through plague, assimilation by the Borg, or
whatever. How long would our skyscrapers, dams, canals,
agriculture fields, and cloverleaf intersections last? What
would replace them? What sort of animals would repl