Grrl Power #685 – Things are looking up… the scoville scale

If Sydney interpreted the symbol and chef correctly, "dangerously spicy" could mean most humans fall off the stool and start licking the ground to get the burning to stop, or it could actually mean they almost immediately need medical attention after ingestion. It's probably not fatal, or it would have the downward red triangle next to it.

I was thinking about some universal icons that would make sense, and ultimately I came to the conclusion that such a thing probably couldn't exist. In America, a check means yes, in Japan, a circle does.

Certain things could work. In a galaxy full of humanoid aliens, you could probably get a lot of mileage out of a generic skull symbol. Colors would be all over the place. Most humans generally recognize green as good and red as bad. Green is healing items, blood is red, taking cover behind red barrels is a bad idea, etc. But to people in some culture, (probably not first world ones, because we all play the same video games) but red could mean life because blood is red. And who knows what colors alien cultures would associate with what?

Fire pretty much looks like fire no matter who you are" unless your vision is entirely infrared. I assume fire looks really different in infrared. Probably not like little flickery tongues, but more of a flare at the bottom and a column of heat above it. With some wavy air currents mixed in. Of course, if you can only see in infrared, the monitor technology you'd need to replicate it would be entirely different anyway, so you could make different icons for them anyway, but you get my point. Could you see fire if you could only see ultraviolet? I assume you'd see something, but I also assume the fire icon you'd create for it would look different than a species that saw in the visible light spectrum.

So basically, on a station like this one, you'd basically have to just come up with some icons that everyone agreed on and somehow didn't offend some race. (I mean, imagine if the 'universal' symbol for death was a gold cross or whatever.)

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