A New National Symbol?

 The Samoan Fruit Bat:

It's perfect for the New America: an intersectional blend of Froot-Loop and Moonbat, and not actually American at all.

The pic above is one of the recent National Parks Quarters. The Mint will also be releasing a series of Pioneering Women Quarters, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wants to hear your suggestions. Of course, they must be "...women known for their work in civil rights, science, the arts and abolition, among other areas, with an emphasis on women from "ethnically, racially and geographically diverse backgrounds..." They also have to be dead.

I plan to nominate suffragist, temperance crusader and Prohibition Party leader Frances E. Willard. She's not very diverse, but I'd love to see that face, and that pince-nez, on a coin. (Here's my favorite picture of her.)

So far, at least, our currency still has the look of a safe, stable medium of exchange: sober green, with pictures of neoclassical buildings and dead politicians. But I suspect within a decade we will have gone Full Third World -- hues of peach and magenta, and pictures of wind farms, Natural Wonders and poets nobody has heard of. And, of course, lots of zeroes:

Ardent

Buttons

The icons are speaking but sometimes they say too much. Don't listen. Or hear them but then have them shut up. 

It's sillier than you might think because it appears to be inaccessibly technical and complex. The engineers are saying the button is important by placing it next to on/off in a short array of small buttons it is first. So there's that. That's what the engineers are saying, "this function is important."

The second thing the button says is "I control exposure compensation" and that is all. Nothing more can be read into it. Even though it offers more symbols. Surely it is telling us more. No, it is not. 

It does not say positive for darkness and negative for lightness. It is not making a suggestion one way or another. It is not saying which direction positive and negative go, toward light or darkness or from light or darkness. The position of the plus and minus symbols within the new icon is arbitrary. The button is not making any suggestion regarding what you want or what you have. The icon designer was not thinking of that. All they were thinking is "this is the exposure compensation control."  Too bad. 

When you get into it you'll be pressing minus for less exposure and darker photos and you'll be pressing plus for more exposure and lighter photos. The opposite of what the button shows.

Photograph from BMW photo via Google images [nikon exposure button] 

This lesson in semiotics is a continuing service of Lem's Comonocreerendios.