Conflicted Pedestrian

Came across this pedestrian signal (left) as I was walking home this evening at 89th & 2nd Ave. Things like these always make me chuckle. What surprises me is how often I see signals like this. At right, you'll find another I caught last weekend down in the East Village.

This makes the engineer (read: nerd) in me wonder how this happens. I would fully understand seeing a signal with the hand or the man broken, resulting in a prolonged blank image, but both together? Logically, the man and the hand should be two binary states to a common switch--phrased in a more pedestrian manner (couldn't resist), two sides of a coin. This is where I turn to the Inter-web to satiate my curiosity.

15 minutes later
One of the rare times the Internet has failed me. Maybe I just lost interest too quickly. But hey, if I decide I really care enough to know, I can enroll in Berkley's Traffic Signal Engineering Academy. Or not.