Over the past century or so, or even the last 10 years, technology has grown immensely. We have seen new innovations such as phones and computers and this has all helped us a great deal over the years. However not all of it has been good for us, for our most recent unit in Social Studies we have been studying how technology has changed or disrupted our world. To help us with this unit we have read book called Little Brother. This book was about a terrorist attack on San Francisco and the the aftermath that followed. We follow several teenagers as they are hunted by bad guys and create a new internet that is private from the rest of the world. The technology in this book acts as a huge disruption to the people of the city and their normal lives. To go along with this book we have been given a small research assignment. We were given a topic that was from book and we have to research it and connect it to our life and the real world as well. My topic for this assignment was the Scoville Scale.
The Scoville Scale was created in 1912 by an American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville. The Scoville Scale is used to determine the spicy heat of chilli peppers or other spicy foods. In short it is a way to measure how spicy food is. This is Scale isn’t very commonly used but it is in a couple of different comedy shows or YouTube videos. In these videos or shows thy use it to determine how for up the Scoville Scale people can go. One of these shows is called Hot Ones. In this show two people sit down and try and go up the Scoville Scale with hot sauce in some chicken wings. There is an interviewer and an interviewee and it is normally a famous celebrity. This is a very successful comedy show that lots of people enjoy watching and it definitely uses the Scoville Scale in the show.
Some people have also made YouTube videos paying people to eat the spiciest pepper on the planet with an extremely high Scoville level. These are popular in YouTube as it is funny to watch people suffer from the heat of peppers.
The Scoville Scale is used in Little Brother, but I think it is a very insignificant part of the book. The only time it is mentioned are when two characters are talking about a very spicy item of food. This was the only time it was mentioned in the book and I don’t think it had any large impact on the characters or the rest of the story. As for our disruption unit I don’t think it can connect to it in any way. The Scoville Scale hasn’t really adapted over time and isn’t really any new sort of technology. It hasn’t acted as a disruption it is merely a form of measurement. At the moment it hasn’t disrupted or changed anything and all though I don’t believe it ever will change anything, it is possible.
This book has really been a good start to the unit as the theme was all about disruption. It was about what would happen if all our technology was used against us. The people had to find away around it so that they could continue with their normal life. The Scoville Scale was something that I knew about but didn’t realize how much it was used in everyday life and other entertainment purposes. I am looking forward to the rest if this unit because a large part of it is also our trip to California which I will have a whole separate Blogpost on. I hope you enjoyed reading about the Scoville Scale and about our unit that we have started. There will defiantly be more blogposts for you to read in the near future.