Daily catch-up: Two kinds of infographic in the world...

Plus 'It's as if Margaret Thatcher never existed' and the future of our submarine-based nuclear weapons

Very fine picture by Moose Allain.

• According to a Survation poll published last night, when asked to choose between "The government should intervene in the UK steel industry to ensure its long-term survival" and "The government should not intervene in the UK steel industry and instead respect the consequences of global market forces", 68 per cent chose intervention and only 20 per cent the opposite. Even allowing for the leading forms of words, this is a high score on my "It's as if Margaret Thatcher never existed" index.

Chris Dillow comments on a new paper that sheds some light on why people are bad (as he and I see it) at understanding economics. Its authors, David Leiser and Zeev Kril say:

People are remarkably poor at combining causal links into a system [and] are ill-equipped to cope with the aggregate effects of the individual decisions of many people...Thinking in terms of how an interlocking system of causal links produces an emergent outcome does not come naturally to laypeople.

• To Admiralty Arch last night for the launch of The Silent Deep: The Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945, by Peter Hennessy (pictured below) and James Jinks. It is a beautifully produced book, with five sections of photographs, lovely detailed maps for endpapers and 25 pages of line drawings of the main types of submarines for the spotterish tendency. A labour of love and enthusiasm, it is also timely now that the main opposition party is led, once again, by an advocate of one-sided disarmament who wants to get rid of our submarine-based nuclear deterrent.

Professor the Lord Hennessy last night

The authors conclude:

Our hunch is that there will almost certainly be a British bomb with a "bloody Union Jack on top of it" somewhere in the grey wastelands of the North Atlantic in the 2030s, 2040s and 2050s, carried by one of the submarines currently being laid out on the computer screens in Barrow's Blue Lagoon. When faced with the nuclear question British prime ministers, as primary guardians of national security, seem, knowingly or unknowingly, to have been disciples of Cicero, who wrote in De Legibus:

Salus populi suprema est lex.

The safety of the people is the chief law.

• And finally, a big welcome back to Chris Heaton-Harris:

"Bought a cheap new jumper that kept picking up static electricity.

"So I took it back and exchanged it for another one free of charge."