Unicode Consortium Looks At Symbols For Allergies 194
AmiMoJo writes: A proposal (PDF) submitted by a Google engineer to the Unicode Consortium asks that food allergies get their own emojis and be added to the standard. The proposal suggests the addition of peanuts, soybeans, buckwheat, sesame seeds, kiwi fruit, celery, lupin beans, mustard, tree nuts, eggs, milk products and gluten. According to TNW: "This proposal will take a little longer to become reality — it's still in very early stages and needs to be reviewed by the Unicode Consortium before it can move forward, but it'll be a great way for those with allergies to quickly express them."
There was a point where Unicode needed to stop (Score:5, Funny)
And they have clearly passed it.
But let’s keep going and see what happens.
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Do they have a codepoint for "jumping over a shark" yet?
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Actually, it's in a proposal, right next to owls and bats...
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L201... [unicode.org]
Re:There was a point where Unicode needed to stop (Score:5, Insightful)
And they have clearly passed it.
Standards should formalize existing, established practices. They should not make stuff up and hope people like it. These allegycons should be implemented as image icons, and if people adopt them, and they are shown to be useful, then, and only then, should they be considered for incorporation into the standard. We don't need another trigraph debacle.
some, at least, are already in widespread use (Score:4, Interesting)
At least some of these symbols ARE in common use already, often printed so small that you don't notice them if you're not looking for them. For example, I never knew that the gluten-free symbol existed until my wife was diagnosed with celiac disease (gluten intolerance) . Now that I know what to look for, I see the symbol quite often; sometimes on packaged foods and sometimes on menus.
Checking a few of the products in my pantry right now, I see that it's about evenly split between the symbol and the words "gluten free". Fritos for example, use the words. Chex cereal has the words and a _different_ symbol. Standardization would make shopping easier, faster and safer.
That said, standardizing WHERE on the package this information is found would be the most useful. It's most often listed immediately after the standard ingredient listing, but there is a lot of variation so we have to carefully examine all around the whole package looking for one of the two pictorial symbols, or the words "gluten free", or the circled GF symbol, or the words "gluten free". The most common is the most useful - an icon of a wheat stalk with the crossed out circle (similar to the "no smoking" symbol).
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"2. Has contact been made to members of the user community (for example: National Body, user groups of the script or characters, other experts, etc.)? "
The submitter answers 'No'. That's a problem. The Unicode Consortium standardizes the codepoint representation of glyphs across systems; but they have zero power(and aren't supposed
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Shouldn't this work the other way? (Score:5, Insightful)
What seems like more of a problem is the idea that the Unicode Consortium is out there fishing for ideas. A project of that scope has more than enough backlog to work through; what possible benefit could there be in putzing around internally with ideas for stuff that hasn't been codified by any relevant user groups, standards bodies, experts, national standards, etc? If they think that they have free time for that, they probably aren't looking hard enough at the stew of natural languages and commonly used symbols out there.
The original round of unicode-ified emoji, while puerile and obnoxious, were at least a solid instance of one of the Consortium's functions: the symbols were in wide use; but saddled with a horrible mess of legacy encoding schemes and general awfulness, so the only thing to do was wade in, hand out code points, and hope that the legacy systems could be burned to the ground as soon as possible. Same reason why parts of Unicode have substantial amounts of duplication, single characters that should be represented as composites, and so on; because various legacy standards had to die.
Here, though, there is no obvious existing standard being modeled on, nor any interoperability issue being solved. If somebody wants Unicode to have a picture of absolutely everything; maybe they should go work on graphics format standards.
Re: Shouldn't this work the other way? (Score:2)
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The proposal comes from a Google engineer who has done all the work figuring out what symbols are needed and what they should look like. Now the Unicode consortium only needs to consider it, and perhaps suggest a few changes.
As the proposal states, the major need here is to bridge the language barrier for important health information. It's actually a real pain for people with certain allergies to travel, because even if they memorize the characters for "peanuts" human beings find it hard to spot them in the
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Yes, except that they didn't. They took a list of eight items (section 4.2.1.4 of the underlying CODEX STAN 1-1985), and presented a proposal for seven of them. What happened to the last? I don't know: perhaps they didn't figure out how to make a character for "Sulphite in concentrations of 10 mg/kg or more".
They also missed section 5.2.1, irradiated foods, with a separate symbol.
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things like the GHS hazard pictograms, DIN 4844-2, ISO 3864, TSCA marks, and similar such things seem like perfectly reasonable additions to Unicode
No they don't, because they are pictograms with very specific visual appearances. Such things don't belong in a character set, because things in a character set are characters. Glyphs (visual presentation of characters) live in fonts and each font designer is free to represent them differently, as long as they're recognisable. If every font has to represent things in the same way, then they don't belong in a character set, they belong in a set of standard images.
The other issue with this kind of cruft i
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You go to war with the army you have
What we have is Unicode and a good set of font fallbacks. What we don't have is an unspecified, unplanned, unwritten way to somehow insert a "pictogram" inside my stream of "glyphs".
What we need is a way to draw shapes on a screen or piece of paper where a designer gets to pick roughly what they look like. Unicode does that, and therefore seems like an adequate tool for this job.
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What we don't have is an unspecified, unplanned, unwritten way to somehow insert a "pictogram" inside my stream of "glyphs".
No, I think we DO have an unspecified, unplanned way of doing that. Or maybe we DO have a specified way -- any of any number of markup languages.
What we need is a way to draw shapes on a screen or piece of paper where a designer gets to pick roughly what they look like. Unicode does that,
PostScript beat them to it, and I'm going to bet there are a lot of other systems out there for doing graphics. What we DON'T need is a "character" that looks like a peanut.
You do realize that the person who uses the "character" for "peanut" doesn't get to "pick roughly" what it looks like when it is displayed, don't you? He gets whatever the guy who designed
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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There's growing evidence that introducing small quantities of emojis daily actually helps lower the risk of a severe allergic reaction later on.
Not necessary! (Score:3)
There's already a snowflake symbol........
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It's nowhere near special enough, though.
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What's a few deaths by suffocation (self-drowning) compared to feeding moral self-righteousness?
sPh
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Humour (in case you didn't realise that's what I was exercising) in the face of trauma is a common human reaction, and not necessarily a bad thing.
FWIW, I have a diagnosed bee and shellfish allergy. One bee-sting in the right place, without treatment, and I'm dead. Not that it's likely, but were I to accidentally eat some seafood pate, that would also kill me - my throat would swell up to completely cut off breathing.
So, just to be clear, I WAS MAKING A FUNNY!
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any bee or wasp sting to the neck is potentially deadly and must be treated as such whether or not you're aware of the patient having an allergy.
(I've been stung six times in the past three weeks by wasps, five of those were to the neck, one to the thigh. Why do the psychotic little cunts go for the neck??).
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Were I a psychotic little cunt, I'd go for the neck. It's such a ..... vulnerable spot.
UNICODE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY (Score:2)
Although it may not be necessary to create allergy symbols, the existence of a similar-looking glyph is not a valid reason why. In Unicode, each code point corresponds to a particular abstract character, not glyph, so the snowflake symbol cannot be used for a food allergy symbol even if they look identical, because U+2744 means "snowflake" and not "food allergy."
For example, Greek capital letter delta (U+0394) and the mathematical symbol delta (U+2206) usually look almost the same, but are completely differ
I hate hieroglyphics (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate decyphering hieroglyphics. I propose that the unicode for "I have peanut allergies" should be the text string "I have peanut allergies."
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I hate decyphering hieroglyphics. I propose that the unicode for "I have peanut allergies" should be the text string "I have peanut allergies."
That works well for 1-2 billion people and not so well for the remaining 5-6 billion. While we're working on that universal language, a few universal "hieroglyphics" are useful and there's no law against writing elevator next to the elevator sign. Like say these [vectorstock.com], these [shutterstock.com], these [featurepics.com] or these [123rf.com].
That said, allergens may be useful for store products but that's usually half the markings on a restaurant menu which typically can be stuff like vegetarian, vegan, hot, garlic and so on. And for many complete dishes many will
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That works well for 1-2 billion people and not so well for the remaining 5-6 billion.
I think it was obvious that the OP meant that the string would be written in whatever the local predominant language is, not always in English. Someone who doesn't speak English isn't going to write "I have a peanut allergy", they're going to write it in their own language. It would be very rare for such a person to be isolated to the point that nobody around them knows what he's saying, and if someone was going to go somewhere like that (vacation, etc) they'd carry a card with that sentence written on it
Do it in Kanji [Re:I hate hieroglyphics] (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple. When you're in Germany, write it it German. If you're in China, write it in Chinese.
Did I mention I hate hieroglyphics?
The idea that we can create a universal language that everybody will understand by abandoning language and simply making a recognizable symbol for every single concept that anybody might ever want to communicate is stupid.
However, if that actually is your proposal, there is a simple solution: let's write everything in Chinese characters. They already did that. And if you don't think that Chinese characters work as universally recognizable symbols, well, that's just your western-centric prejudice. They've evolved those characters for thousands of years; you're pretty arrogant to think you can do better in a decade or two.
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The idea that we can create a universal language that everybody will understand by abandoning language and simply making a recognizable symbol for every single concept that anybody might ever want to communicate is stupid.
I saw a documentary where that worked quite well. Oh wait.. that was "Idiocracy".
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They already did that.
They didn't.
Yes, they created a 'recognizable' symbol for concepts, but they did not create the equivalent of emojis. Emojis generally make sense even if you have never seen them before. Chinese characters do not. At all.
The thing with most languages however is that you need to be able to read and write with them. Emojis are fairly good at being readable, but they really suck at being writable (as apposed to Chinese characters). Try using emojis with pen and paper, it's completely unworkable. Besides that,
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And when you're in India, with its many official languages? Or Belgium, with its three? Or the United States of America, which has no official language?
Or when helping the hundreds of millions of illiterates to not poison themselves?
:/ [Re:Do it in Kanji [Re:I hate hieroglyphics]] (Score:2)
Your belief that you can solve the problems of a universal language by abandoning written language and just invent symbols easily and trivially recognized by anybody is :), but in the real world :/. :( and memorizing thousands of symbols isn't really going to make the world simpler
Symbols just aren't as culturally independent as you think
About all I can say is >:P
We already have proven, functional hieroglyphics (Score:2)
The idea that we can create a universal language that everybody will understand by abandoning language and simply making a recognizable symbol for every single concept that anybody might ever want to communicate is stupid.
IKEA already did that. Creating 80+ local language instructions were a pain and an expense, so now all of them, or almost all of them, are completely comic-strip-like without a single line of text.
That said, the goal isn't to create a symbol for every single concept. We've been successful in creating icons for many things that save real money in not having local words when a symbol will do.
Examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://athome.kimvallee.com/20... [kimvallee.com]
http://webstore.ansi.org/safet... [ansi.org]
"But I don'
Just memorize them [Re:I hate hieroglyphics] (Score:3)
Except many Chinese can't read (or write) a significant fraction of Chinese characters, and no one knows all of them.
My point exactly.
The whole reason we abandoned hieroglyphic representations of language was so that we wouldn't have to learn 80,000 hanzi.
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The whole reason we abandoned hieroglyphic representations of language was so that we wouldn't have to learn 80,000 hanzi.
And the whole point of emojis is that you don't have to learn them either, because you already know what a poo looks like.
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You don't need to learn 80,000 characters for Chinese. In China there are around 3,500 characters that most people need to know, and around 2,200 in Japan. However, most of them are related, made up of multiple simpler characters next to each other, so you don't need to memorize 3,500 unique symbols.
For example, many characters include the base character for "person". Once you know this base character and a few other base ones, you can pretty much guess the meaning of many of the more complex ones just by l
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Symbols are conventional, not realistic (Score:2)
The evolution of those characters was heavily influenced by the media and writing tools of the time, which remained stable for thousands of years. Now we can make a mountain that actually looks like a mountain.
But the symbols we use don't look like what they are. They are symbols that you just have to know the meaning. For example, right now I'm looking at several symbols. One is four concentric arcs of a quarter circle. This means "wifi is receiving". Does that look like a radio wave? No. Another is a vertical line, with an X through it, and on the right side, the top and bottom of the x and the I connected, forming rightward-pointing triangles. Does that look like a picture of a "Bluetooth Connection" to
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And if that doesn't work try all caps.
And because technology is so wonderful, ... (Score:3)
... someone will send you an email which will be turned into Mojibake [wikipedia.org] and you'll discover that your correspondent is allergic to the Euro, the exclamation mark, the pound symbol, and to the Hebrew letter Gimel.
Words (Score:3)
Adding random concepts as characters seems weird for alphabetical languages, where there is a limited character set used to form many words.
Obligatory post for all Unicode articles (Score:3, Interesting)
https://modelviewculture.com/p... [modelviewculture.com]
The above article shows how ridiculous it is to have these emojis in the Unicode standard when they are missing letters in multiple eastern alphabets.
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Interesting read. Thanks for the link.
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Actually that got posted top slashdot a while back, and pretty thoroughly taken apart.
Firstly the unicode consortium is largely voluntary and relies on proposals for advancement. A large amount of the article is him complaining that no one's submitted a proposal. Secondly he got into a big argument (in the comments or another article) with someone from the same culture/background because they strongly disagreed on how the symbol in question should be dealt with.
Expecting the unicode consortium to be magical
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I deal with non-native English speakers on a daily basis as part of my job--and I'm married to one as well. Perhaps I don't have the complete picture, but I do think he's got some valid points.
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He has valid points. Han unification has been a disaster and can't be easily fixed now, but it was done early on without enough consultation. It's all very well to suggest that someone should just submit a proposal, but that costs a lot of money and the ones that will really fix things tend to be rejected anyway.
It is a serious problem that some people can't write their names in Unicode, or that software using Unicode can't ever hope to handle even the top 10 most common languages in the world properly with
Shellfiish? (Score:3)
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I'm glad someone else noticed that. Not that it applies to me, since I've already learnt how to say "I can't eat crustaceans--I'm allergic" in about 12 languages.
Why different symbols? (Score:2)
Why do you need a different symbol for each allergy? Why not just one for allergies in general?
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Yes I did. We have universal symbols for warning. The specifics of the warning are typically written by hand. Symbols quickly become complicated and worthless if you add too many of them. A single symbol that denotes some kind of warning about allergies may be more useful in general than many symbols that require people to learn to decipher hieroglyphs.
The problem with pictograms (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with pictograms is they don't mean squat to someone who doesn't already know what they mean. If that weren't the case, Egyptian Hieroglyphics would still be in active use...
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The problem with pictograms is they don't mean squat to someone who doesn't already know what they mean.
But people generally do know what they mean, even if they've never seen an emoji before. The emoji for "sheep" is a cartoon sheep. Grammar is another matter, of course...
If that weren't the case, Egyptian Hieroglyphics would still be in active use...
Hierogylphics aren't pictograms. The hieroglyphic symbol that looks like an eye doesn't mean "eye."
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the symbol that looks like a snake wrapped around a tapered sword doesn't mean "Snake wrapped around a sword" either, it means "diabetes".
The problem with emoji (Score:2)
So does the emoji for sheep mean you're allergic to mutton, or that you're now a member of a fraternity, or that you have insomnia?
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It means sheep, just like the English word "sheep" means sheep.
I've now used the word "sheep" too many times for one day.
Hipsters (Score:2)
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This is just like making fancy top level domain names like "fish" or calling security vulnerabilities "Shellshock". A professional engineering standard is ruined with cute hipster stuff.
True. A really professional engineering standard should include the fish allergy symbol as a TLD.
Um ... (Score:2)
It needs codes for free-from those things too (Score:2)
But Unicode doesn't standardize the actual glyphs (Score:2)
they need a codepoint for ... (Score:2)
Why is Unicode the right address? (Score:2)
Are there locale-specific ways to refer to an allergy?
Why do we need a font instead of a simple image?
Re:Food Allergies (Score:5, Informative)
There's at least two factors that come in to it.
1) People confuse intolerance for allergy. An allergy is when your immune system attacks food. Intolerance is when your body can't process the food properly.
2) People sanitise everything these days and don't expose their children to anything dirty. They grow up with poorly developed immune systems.
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There are two more factors in play here, that cannot be ignored:
3) Better testing, reporting and ultimately awareness of allergies. That funny feeling you get on your tongue from eating an apple isn't normal. It's a very mild allergy. If eating peanuts make you a little nauseous, that's probably also a mild allergy. Of course, knowing that it's an allergy, you truthfully answer "yes" when an airline asks about the allergy, because you'd rather have a different snack, and that leads to...
4) Utter overreactio
Re:Food Allergies (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a also the third factor: where people who do not have life-threatening allergies, particularly life-threatening allergies to nuts, develop an attitude that (1) such immune system allergies really don't exist (2) those who claim they do, or who experience anaphylactic reactions to foodstuffs are (a) lying (b) morally weak.
I've seen people with that attitude try to push peanut butter cupcakes on 3-year-olds with severe peanut allergies. Oddly they are never very happy to be educated on their ignorance or its source, their attitude.
sPh
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Apparently you can cure peanut allergies by eating peanuts
http://time.com/3719341/peanut... [time.com]
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Apparently you can cure peanut allergies by eating peanuts
If by 'cure' you mean 'desensitize to the point that eating one or two peanuts won't kill you' then yes
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That's a lot of cats [wikipedia.org]
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On the scientific side the "house kept too clean" theory is interesting but by no means proven. Northwest Scotland is considered to have the cleanest environment in the developed world (due to wind and rain from the Atlantic) and that was true before 1970 as well but children there have seen the same increase in nut allergies as elsewhere.
On the human/interpersonal side the use of the word "coddle" points right back to the "illness as moral weakness" syndrome that a large percentage of the human race seems
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You've got to be joking or trolling.
"Clean" because of wind and rain from the Atlantic and "clean" because of extensive use of bleach and antibacterial soaps are very different concepts.
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My diet is severely restricted (as in I'm pretty much restricted to fresh as a result of what I would call a severe allergy to aspartame (we're talking crippling migraines that last a week) and some weird reaction to foods containing sunset yellow (so no more cadbury's creme eggs for me, no loss since they changed the recipe to that awful faux-fondant) that leaves me wired but completely physically drained.
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That is a very good question. The incidence of severe food allergy, particularly but not limited to nut allergies, is documented as having risen sharply throughout the Western world since 1970. So your impression that there are more severely allergic food people today (not just children as the numbers were high in the 1990s) is correct. What the source of that increase is is not known despite a fairly large amount of medical research. The "houses kept too clean" theory is interesting but by no means pro
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The "houses kept too clean" theory is interesting but by no means proven; northwest Scotland is considered to have the cleanest environment in the developed world (due to wind and rain from the Atlantic) and that was true before 1970 as well but children there have seen the same increase in nut allergies as elsewhere.
The wind and rain from the Atlantic isn't really a factor in how clean a house is unless there's something very wrong with the roof and/or windows.
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That funny feeling you get on your tongue from eating an apple isn't normal. It's a very mild allergy.
Sounds more like an intolerance to me... I wasn't aware a funny feeling on your tongue was an immune response.
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That funny feeling you get on your tongue from eating an apple isn't normal. It's a very mild allergy.
Sounds more like an intolerance to me... I wasn't aware a funny feeling on your tongue was an immune response.
Disconnecting the mains supply and removing the battery does the trick for me.
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Wow. I know Apple fans are serious, but sucking on your iPhone is taking this a bit too far, don't you think?
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Besides, the last time Apple made something that you could take the battery out of was a decade ago.....
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It can be.
That particular example is from an acquaintance of mine, who always just thought that apples had a strange texture. It wasn't until her teenage years that she happened to notice that her tongue turned bright red and slightly swollen (hence the funny feeling) afterward. A test confirmed the allergy.
By the time I met her in college, she avoided apples, but never worried about accidental exposure.
Re: Food Allergies (Score:3)
One study I read showed kids that grow up around farm animals tend to have healthier immune systems, which is one reason we keep chickens, let our daughter play in the backyard near them, and also feed her their eggs. Local honey too can be useful, but only after the kid is old enough to balance the risk of listeria. (At least, that's what we decided.)
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Perhaps that's because paranoia has changed, not the allergies themselves. The 'zomg safety' soccer mom mentality has taken over. The fact that it encourages slavish, unquestioning acceptance of and obedience to authority is a 'mere' side effect.
society of fear (Score:2)
That's for sure! And the fear is strangely selective. I have a difficult time understanding a person who is both a hygiene fanatic and a slob. Out of fear, she insists on ridiculous hygiene measures such as washing a bar of soap with liquid soap after it's been dropped on the floor of the shower stall, but she routinely leaves dirty dishes all over the house.
It's similar with driving. Insists on doing the driving herself because she doesn't trust anyone else to do it, then gets stressed out and starts
Re: society of fear (Score:2)
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When I was in school, NOBODY had any of these food problems
When I was in school, we had a kid with a severe peanut allergy in our first grade class. On the first day, the teacher told us all that, under no circumstances were we to trade any of our lunch items with him. That was it. No issues for the rest of the year.
A few bad reactions got some press. (Score:4)
You can become violently allergic to practically ANYTHING. (The immune system, in each individual, creates a large number of clones of cells making different antibodies by pseudo-randomly editing the genome making the antibody, kills off the ones that recognize the infant body, and amplifies the clones recognizing new stuff that appeared at the same time the body experiences damage.)
A few bad reactions to a few particular foods got a lot of attention - and overreaction. Which ones got the attention was mostly a matter of chance. So now the clueless bureaucrats are taking extreme measures against the handful of allergens that got the press, and the rest are completely off their radar.
They have zero tolerance for peanuts.
- Do they have zero tolerance for shellfish? (Restaurants in Silicon Valley were very careful about allergies when I first moved here - because one had been informed that a customer had a shellfish allergy, fed her something containing shrimp, and she died.)
- Do they have zero tolerance for milk? (Some milk reactions are an enzyme deficiency, but some are an allergy, which can be deadly. Also: a protein in cow's milk increases the risk of Multiple Sclerosis).
- Do they have zero tolerance for tree nuts?
- Do they have zero tolerance for wheat?
- Do they have zero tolerance for honey?
- Do they have zero tolerance for corn? (It would be convenient for ME if they did - my corn allergy isn't QUITE to full-blown anaphylactic shock level, yet, but it IS to the "projectile vomiting" and "three days of flu-like symptoms" level. But I won't try to stop others from enjoying corn.)
- Do they have zero tolerance for eggs?
- Do they have zero tolerance for fish?
And that's just the COMMON food allergies.
If they had zero tolerance for every food allergen that had caused anaphyliaxis, they'd have zero tolerance for FOOD.
Re: Food Allergies (Score:5, Informative)
There is some evidence out there to suggest the practice of shielding really little kids (babies on up) from these allergens (which is something more parents are doing because of concerns about the risk) is actually increasing the chance that they will become allergic as they get older and that introducing kids to all these foods very early will lower the risk.
Re: Food Allergies (Score:2)
My wife ate peanuts while pregnant, peanut butter in the baby's first year while nursing, and we introduced her to toast with a little peanut butter at about 10 months. Giving her body no introduction to something didn't make any more sense than flooding immune system with something, and after a study came out showing that light doses of peanuts over time could reduce or eliminate the allergy in some kids who expressed it, I felt there was enough science backing what felt right to me to do it.
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Obligatory George Carlin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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There is more kids? Where? You are kidding, aren't you? We are just having our age of eligibility for rents postponed by two years here in Canada. From 65 to 67 years old because there isn't enough kids and people contributing to the funds. And since we are not in the European Union, we cannot ask someone else to pay for them or lend us money to keep everything as before like nothing change in the world.
We are even closing schools. So, where did you pick this idea there is so much more kids today than yeste
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Glad all this rectal bleeding and stabbing pain is merely "discomfort" .. whew.
The skin sloughing off and leaving sores? That's what we call "the wheat hug".
There's more to allergies than anaphylaxis.
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Actually, Celiac Disease (real Celiac disease) is an immune-response disorder (i.e., allergy). There are four levels of IgE mediated allergic response and non IgE mediated allergic responses [nih.gov]so it gets real complicated, real fast.
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Because the current paranoia in the US is that if a person scratched his balls (or some other sexually appropriate part of their anatomy) within a week of eating a peanut, they're 'allergic' to peanuts (and, BTW, gluten, Republicans and cats).
Over diagnosis of true, life threatening allergies is rather an issue. I don't know how many people have argued that I give them an Epi Pen (pure, unadulterated adrenaline) because their kid had a rash once. You can TEST for allergies but most people don't really bo
Re: Food Allergies (Score:2)
Allegic to (Score:2)
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I have little trouble entering Hanzi with a standard keyboard [wikipedia.org], and your typical Chinese person has even less.
You might recall that Chinese consists of a large number of related but mutually unintelligible "dialects". A Beijinger visiting Hong Kong might pronounce it "Jiulong", but he can still read the sign that tells him he's arrived in "Nine Dragons"--or, as the locals pronounce it--Kowloon.
For that matter, handwriting recognition works quite well these days. Very handy when you're out and about and you s
The issue is Unicode Consortium mission creep (Score:2)
I like the idea of standard labels and icons.
Only the trolls are objecting to that idea per se. Ignore them.
The real argument is that it is the Unicode Consortium's job to define the encoding of existing symbols and not to try and invent new ones in a field where they have no expertise. As others have pointed out, Unicode defines codes for abstract descriptions of symbols - they have no control over the rendering. If you're going to have international allergy symbols its fairly critical that (a) they're based on sound medical judgement, (b) their act