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Unicode Consortium Looks At Symbols For Allergies
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."
And they have clearly passed it.
But let’s keep going and see what happens.
This doesn't seem like an intrinsically bad idea; things like the GHS hazard pictograms, DIN 4844-2, ISO 3864, TSCA marks, and similar such things seem like perfectly reasonable additions to Unicode(some of them are already there).
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.
I'm allergic to emojis. I hate them with a passion I usually reserve for bad drivers.
There's already a snowflake symbol........
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
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.
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.
Wait, Slashdot actually knows what Unicode is?
I hate decyphering hieroglyphics. I propose that the unicode for "I have peanut allergies" should be the text string "I have peanut allergies."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
... someone will send you an email which will be turned into Mojibake and you'll discover that your correspondent is allergic to the Euro, the exclamation mark, the pound symbol, and to the Hebrew letter Gimel.
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).
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.
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 overreaction, because it's "better safe than sorry". Somebody on a plane says they have "a peanut allergy", and rather than put effort into identifying where that passenger is sitting and how severe their allergy is, the entire plane must be treated differently because the allergy might be severe.
Unfortunately, thanks to those two factors, the impact of allergic reactions is greatly increased, as well. There's still only a small handful of kids at a school who are allergic to peanuts, and maybe one is severe enough that he needs to be careful what he touches, but now every parent knows that, thanks to allergies, they have to pack something else as the quick-and-easy lunch. Every informed citizen knows that schools are increasingly restricting lunch options due to allergies, and everybody has a friend or coworker who has some weird allergy. The obvious conclusion is that allergies are becoming more predominant.
After that realization, humans do what humans do best: we rationalize. We may think humans are evolving to be weaker, due to advancing technology reducing the pressure to have a strong immune system. We may blame modern medicine, finding tenuous links between medicines/vaccines and allergies. We may criticize overbearing parents for minimizing their child's exposure, beyond what links have been shown. We may simply gloat over our allergy-free life.
There are several factors and mechanisms at work, but the bottom line is that perceptual changes are outpacing biological ones. That's often a recipe for knee-jerk politics.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Adding random concepts as characters seems weird for alphabetical languages, where there is a limited character set used to form many words.
https://modelviewculture.com/p...
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.
The allergens listed are all common in children. The most common allergen for adults is shellfish, which isn't mentioned in this (apparently short-sighted) proposal.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
Why do you need a different symbol for each allergy? Why not just one for allergies in general?
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.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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 yesterday to explain the difference?
Achille Talon
Hop!
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.
Apparently you can cure peanut allergies by eating peanuts
http://time.com/3719341/peanut...
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...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Pedantic: Food allergies that cause mild to moderate discomfort are common. Food allergies that cause sudden anaphylactic shock and death are rare.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
stupid
It's pretty damn scary to witness someone endure an anaphylactic reaction to a food allergen as they desperately hope that the epinephrine injection will save their life.
Better global labeling of food allergens will help eliminate the risk. I like the idea of standard labels and icons. This unicode idea is a good one -- we should support it.
An even better solution would be figure out what is causing the increase in food allergens and fix that problem. Until then, yet another unicode standard seems helpful.
If you'd like to learn more about food allerges, check out https://www.foodallergy.org/ (FARE - Food Allergy Research and Education)
You can coddle your children into having a lot of allergies if they live in a sanitized environment.
I used to have a mild allergy to cats. That doesn't stop us from having 9 cats because it completely went away with exposure to cats.
Why would the same thing be happening with allergies? I would think that it's a bit more deterministic to test for allergies than for vague mental issues.
Where were all these people years ago? Apparently peanuts are so lethal that they are banned from public schools. When I was in school, students weren't dropping dead left and right from peanuts. So what happened?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
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.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
I have little trouble entering Hanzi with a standard keyboard, 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 see a character you don't know--just trace it on the screen of your smartphone with your finger, and up it pops in your dictionary, with the meaning and pronunciation. (NB: You *must* know the stroke order rules for writing Chinese characters for this to work. You don't have to write the character especially neatly, but the strokes need to have the correct order and placement.)
I'm not saying I *prefer* an ideographic writing system, just that what you're alluding to is already (AFAICT) a solved problem.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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 cutting other drivers off, speeding, tailgating, and lane hopping. She hates the middle lane, feels trapped when cars are on both sides, so she hops from right lane to left and back to the right, making double lane changes if on a 6 lane street. If she sees road construction or a traffic jam ahead, she instantly takes the next turn, and never mind whether that takes her further from her destination.
She's also afraid of crime. Has 2 deadbolts on each door. I pointed out that this could be dangerous if there is a fire and she needs to get out quick, doesn't have time to fumble about hunting for keys and keyholes. But she has not made any changes there, remains much more afraid of criminals than fires.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
That's a lot of cats
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It would be as useful (possibly more so) to have icons to say something does NOT contain allergens. i.e. gluten free, lactose free etc. People buying gluten free food often look for a gluten free symbol (e.g. this one) and only then scan the ingredients to look in more detail. So for every code they reserve for an allergen, there should be another code for the opposite - free from that allergen.
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.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
What would the point of this be? In general, Unicode standardizes codepoints and other abstract properties of characters, but it doesn't standardize how the character looks. U+0067 is "g", the "LATIN SMALL LETTER G", but exactly how that looks depends on which font you're using. Or more relevant, many emoji are very different between Android and iOS. I'd think that symbols for food allergies need to look the same everywhere if the point is for them to be used as warnings on food packaging, menus, etc.
Obligatory George Carlin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Food Ideas - http://foodsideas.com/
Amphetamine Deficiency Disorder is a very real and tragically under treated condition. Do you think those poor bastards paying black market prices for God-knows-what crap cooked up in somebody's trailer would be doing so if they could just get a nice, cheap, legal bottle of pep pills at their local pharmacy?
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 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 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 to suffer from.
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?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
That is nothing. My mom forced dead measels into my bloodstream to become immune.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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 actual appearance is standardised and (c) there's a publicity campaign to get them recognised, ideally tied in with regional laws such as food hygiene training and workplace posters.
Once the symbols are known then, yes, it would be a jolly good idea for Unicode to assign them codes.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Being a character implies a bunch of other stuff such as different graphical representations (fonts) for the same semantic symbol and a collation ordering. This doesn't make sense for a load of stuff that's now in unicode. If these are meant to be glyphs with well-defined visual representations, then they don't belong in a font with their representation dependent on the font designer's whim. If they're not characters used in any language, then what are the collation rules for them? What order do dog-poop and contains-gluten sort, and how does this vary between locales?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
... allergy to Anonymous Coward.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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/...
http://athome.kimvallee.com/20...
http://webstore.ansi.org/safet...
"But I don't want to have to learn all of these things!"
You don't need to. Simply print off the local-language version of the ones you need and place it in the area it is needed. For example, laundry care instructions on the wall in your laundry room, or tableware symbols in the kitchen.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
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
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Are there locale-specific ways to refer to an allergy?
Why do we need a font instead of a simple image?
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.
meh
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 bother and most allergy tests don't give you a good handle on the degree of allergy (itching vs. cessation of breathing).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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 responsesso it gets real complicated, real fast.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Wow. I know Apple fans are serious, but sucking on your iPhone is taking this a bit too far, don't you think?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Besides, the last time Apple made something that you could take the battery out of was a decade ago.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
would think that it's a bit more deterministic to test for allergies than for vague mental issues.
Hahahahahahahahha....you're funny.
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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 different concepts. They alphabetize differently, are searchable differently, and are not interchangeable.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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 you? Next to that is a horizontal rectangle, with slightly curved left and right sides, with a symbol in it that could be a stylized Pac-man with a tail, or else maybe a stylized rocket. This symbol means "battery plugged in to charger."
In fact, at the top of the browser there's a symbol that looks a little like the handwritten form of the kanji for "jin" inside a dark green rectangle. That symbol, in fact, means "you're on slashdot".
There's a dozen other symbols in my line of sight. Not a single one of these symbols looks even slightly like what it is.
(I guess you don't drive since horse riding has evolved for thousands of years and people would be pretty arrogant to think they could improve on that.)
Yes, I ride horses. There has been a little evolution of riding since the invention of the stirrup in the middle ages... but not much. If you're saying that cars are a better way of travel than horses-- yes, that's my point. Writing words is a better way of communicating than playing pictionary.
BTW the Chinese ideographical character set is not called "Kanji".
It is when it's used in Japan. Yes, I do know that Japanese is complicated, and that the Chinese word is only one of several readings of a given kanji. This is a /. comment, not a dissertation on writing systems.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.
A comic-strip depiction of how to put something together is much different than a single symbol standing for the entire process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is a marvelous example of how these symbol things should work. The Japanese washing instruction label at the top of the page contains four symbols, NONE of which match anything shown later as the standard. The closest is the "do not wash", but the label has a red X and the standard is black.
The "natural drying" icons are not very obvious, either. The "line dry" kinda looks like "put in an envelope". The "drip dry" looks like "hang over the heater vent." "Tumble dry normal" looks for all the world like "you need to keep close watch (both eyes) on the dryer or the clothes might go up in flames."
"But I don't want to have to learn all of these things!" You don't need to. Simply print off the local-language version of the ones you need and place it in the area it is needed.
Exactly what would be the "area it is needed" for a list of the icons that stand for food allergies? Most people don't do laundry outside the laundry room, but people tend to eat stuff anywhere they are. Where would I find a translation for "peanut symbol" to "I have a deadly serious peanut allergy" when I'm sitting next to someone at a Laker's game with a bag of peanuts and they're busy pointing to a peanut tattooed on their arm? Or would I assume a peanut tattoo means they like them alot and here, have one?
Food Ideas - http://foodsideas.com/
At first I was thinking "this is dumb" but now that I think about it, it may be good for kids. Especially youngsters into trading lunches etc. Sure we all survived when we were kids without it, but with the ever-growing population of stupidity and inadequate parenting... this may be a good idea. At least it gives kids a chance.