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Comment by chillacy | Hacker News Reader

That's neat, the symbol had no agreeable associations back then, but now it's become this nefarious looking thing, at least for me, due to things like 28 days later: http://imgur.com/Ym1PqPE

I can't tell if the symbol itself should be nefarious or not, due to all the cultural baggage. From psychology research, we know that shapes are commonly associated with sounds within a culture [1], but it's a very flower icon in an abstract sense.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/talking-apes/201505/do-...

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I can't tell if it's just cultural association, but the biohazard symbol looks viscerally evil to me. It suggests the barbs of a stinging insect or the mouth parts of a parasitic worm. I feel an instinctive aversion to it, akin to disgust or horror.

The ionising radiation symbol doesn't have anything like the same gut impact; aside from the yellow and black colour scheme, it looks quite neutral and unthreatening.

The ionising radiation symbol doesn't have anything like the same gut impact; aside from the yellow and black colour scheme, it looks quite neutral and unthreatening.

They seem to have fixed that nicely:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/35/Lo...

That's the symbol for "The extractor fan in this room is haunted"

I thought it meant "turn up the speakers and head over to the mosh pit or die."

I agree with that, but struggle to articulate why it looks evil. Does it look like decay? Like a weapon? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As mentioned, it looks vaguely like some kind of horrible insect or a spider or something. Probably close enough to itch at your subconscious.

I agree. Trychtophobia (spelling) is definitely a real thing, so I don't think it's out of question. It seems that (in some people at least) certain patterns or images can have very, uh, "deterring" properties, I guess.

The biohazard symbol looks flat out dangerous to me. While the radiation trifoil scares me because I've learned what it means, the biohazard symbol is something more instinctual to me. It says "someone who knows more than you do wanted to freak you out by putting this here, so stay away!"

I wonder if it's because it looks like three sets of pincers. I feel like the effect would be muted if the outer circles were consistent width and didn't end in points.

Growing up, I had superimposed the belief that the central circle was supposed to represent an original infected cell, and then, I thought the sharp hooks were supposed to be forming three new infected cells violently emerging from the original infected host, destroying the host in the process.

The imagery seemed to make sense to me, since viruses load up in a cell, and force the cell to churn out copies until it explodes.

I figured the knifey looking sharp hooks were just stylization, to communicate danger and get the point across. (see what I did there?)

Apparently even babies have an innate fear of spiders (and snakes)(according to at least one study).

http://www.livescience.com/2348-fear-snakes.html

But rotate it 60 degrees, and it looks like a happy monkey face. At least to me.

While you might argue that "nefarious" is an overly serious descriptor, I don't think it's wholly inappropriate to think of a symbol intended as a warning as such.

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