4 ms·

Time to retire the Scoville index. Anything with that range is next to useless as a real measure.

• beaconstudios 8y ago
  it's not so bad if you treat it as a log scale.
  • thomasfedb 8y ago
    pScoville
• headcanon 8y ago
  You gotta understand how it works though - basically, it works by diluting a pepper seed concentrate as many times as necessary until every member of a panel of 5 testers can no longer taste a hint of spiciness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale the problem is that we don't have a physiological basis for "spiciness" in order to create a more objective scale. Instead, we rely on subjective taste tests to get those numbers, and mitigate the subjectivity by having multiple taste testers. I'm actually thinking about applying a similar process to a few image analysis problems at work that are (currently) necessarily subjective, in order to produce better data for the eventual ML algorithms.
  • emmelaich 8y ago
    What's the error bar on that I wonder.
    • animal531 8y ago
      In secondary link in the top comments they say that it can now be measured mechanically (they mention only capsaicin though, so I'm not sure if it works for the other types).
• andrewflnr 8y ago
  I wouldn't say range is a good heuristic for retiring units of measure. Do you retire the meter because both galaxies and bacteria exist?