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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.
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).
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.
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
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>
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.'"
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.