Will Mutual Assured Destruction Continue to Deter Nuclear War?

This month’s Skeptic is raising and dealing with an existential question nested in the human nature.

Here it is:

When I was in elementary school in the early 1960s, we were periodically put through “duck and cover” drills under the risibly ridiculous fantasy that our flimsy wooden desks would protect us from a thermonuclear detonation over Los Angeles. When I was an undergraduate at Pepperdine University in 1974, the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, spoke at our campus about the effectiveness of mutual assured destruction (MAD) to deter war. He said that by stockpiling many weapons neither side has anything to gain by initiating a first strike because of the retaliatory capability of both to send the other back to the Paleolithic.

Read the clicking on the image below:

Scientific American Mutual Assured Destruction

Here is the final artwork:

Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) artwork

And here is my rough for this illustration:

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A Silver divorce

My last piece for Investment news was around the topic of  what’s called a Silver divorce, a separation between two mature partners which should involve in their separation agreement all their earthly assets including their pension funds.

I am sharing here the roughs that eventually brought about the final artwork, as I personally preferred the first idea, The editor was in fact looking for something that would spell out in a more pronounce way the actual players in this sorry event, so here they are.

Retirement Income

Silver divorce, rough 1

Silver divorce , rough 2

Silver divorce AW

 

Naughty or Nice? When Does It Begin?

This is the title for Michael Shermer’s May Skeptic column for Scientific American.

A the title suggests, the text explores the tipping point between a moralistic elevation or a stumble into the pits of evil.

Shermer  brings the example an incident captured on a cctv camera in a subway station, showing a woman being pushed from the platform onto the rails by another man. The next thing that happens, is the arrival of a man who witnessed the incident from the other end of the platform, reaching straight to the assailant, hitting and punching him for his aggression. Only then, he attends to the lady who’s been lying on the rails, vulnerable to a potentially lethal arrival of a train.

This course of events, raises many questions about our instinctive view of right and wrong and our inherent sense of justice. The surprising results of an experiment with babies, shed some light on a possible explanation for this behavior.

unfortunately, a YouTube video which relates to the text, and eventually to my illustration, had been removed and can no longer be watched. However, the text in the article describes the sequence of events in a clear manner.

Worth reading.

Naughty or Nice? When Does It Begin?

 

Disappearing professions

Well, it been a while, it’s been a while since the article with the illustrations here below was published and I was just being lazy not posting it here.

In my previous post I had put up two roughs in preparation for these final artworks. The illustrations were published in Calcalist for a special about the changing landscape of the culture of work.

This in fact was the brief, therefore it allowed me great margins of metaphoric freedom.

I don’t feel like I have gone too far with the ideas, still I hope I have managed to be communicative yet sufficiently inventive.

Rowing

Rowing detail 1

Rowing detail 2

The frog experience

The frog experience details

A matter of time

Falling from grace

Falling from grace detail