Odd Signs & Symbols

The nutritional labels on food & drink have a long history in the USA, and I will try to cover that someday.  Today I just wanted to point out an error that Anne caught on a bottle of flavored water today.  Check it out: According to the label, if there are 0 calories in one serving and 3 servings per bottle, the bottls has 10 calories.  It's hard to tell if it was an error rounding up or an error rounding down, but it was definitely a proofreading blunder. It's that New Math, I suppose.

It seems like there are an awful lot of warnings at every city park.  Anywhere people might go to unwind, there are stacks of signs listed all the fun that can't be had.  Here's one from Christmas Day ... The "No kite flying" is because of the high voltage powerlines that run overhead.  But it's sad they have to say not to drive cars on the grass.  I guess someone did that, and some resolution was passed a city hall about not doing it, so the taxpayer money was spent on designing and installing a new sign on the stack.  It's like a demented totem pole of pointing out the obvious. Do you think that the people who are going to drive on the grass and going to read all the signs first and care whether it applies to them or not? On the comical side, the very last line explains how to use the poop bags. 

I have another blog about board games and app games, and I do like to try out a few new games each month.  Lately, I've noticed that the boxes the games come in have been sporting more and more weird icons. I was going to just write about the cute symbols used to state the age range, estimated game time, and how many players can play a game.  These are high on the list of simple criteria for choosing the right game.  Anne & I have no use for a game with a minimum of 3 players, or one that's estimated to take 3 hours.  Age range isn't really that important, since some of the kid's games on the market are the most fun, with clever twists on themes.  There is clearly no industry standard for these icons, as they have no regulatory value.  The variety used by different game makers is appealing. Then there are actual regulatory markings, and I was surprised at how many there are.  The big two are the CE logo for meeting Euopean market manufacturing guidelines, and after

How often do we walk past the health code signs at restaurants, never looking at them, just assuming they're always going to be an A?  Well, it takes a lot of hard work to meet all the safety and cleanliness requirements.  So let's take a look at one of those signs: I assume there is a lot of variation across the country and around the world.  In the top corners we can see the County of San Diego logo and the San Environmental Health Department logo.  They're a bit blurry here, but I'm impressed at the resolution of my phone camera -- surprised they came out readable at all from 20 feet away. Next I wonder what the barcode scan would take us to.  It goes to SDFoodInfo.org which starts by saying you can search for over 95,000 inspection results for San Diego restaurants, markets and food trucks.  Click to get started and you get a map saying "Hold on, loading Food Info."  Oddly, when I click a map marker of the nearest food place near us, it is unresponsive. 

There are still a lot of social distancing markers on floors, leftover from the pandemic.  Social distancing is still a good idea, since the closer you get to a person the more pathogens you're going to be breathing.  I'm not sure there was ever a mandate to remove these signs, and scraping them up is probably quite a chore.  For a while, rules were flip-flopping every few weeks, so maybe it's good to leave them in place as reminders.   Like usual, human creativity kicked in and produced a huge range of styles and iconography, so I guess we can still check out the artwork (or lack of artwork) until they are completely rubbed off by time and foot traffic.  I expect that the next time a pandemic strikes, they will reappear and we will all line up at whatever distance is best.    I like this one at the car repair place.  6 feet, 66 degrees. I feel like some of these posts will be ever-expanding collections of signs/symbols of a related theme.  So look for more in t