 Hi, I'm Louise. I'm the interaction designer on the WNYC data news team. This is my first Ignite talk. So I'm going to spend the next few minutes navigating us through some of the things we know about the color red. To provide us some context, I grew up in Gruppettino, California, which is home to Apple headquarters, where everyone's parents knew programming, and I would spend summers in Taiwan where everyone was totally superstitious. So red, red in the American flag represents hardiness and valor and the bloodshed that was that happened for the independence of the 13 colonies and red for the Taiwanese flag stands for the red soil under the brilliant sun. Red is all over Taiwanese and Chinese households. The red door is important. It beckons in good fortune and happiness. In Chinese lore, the red thread represents your fate. It represents love in kind of a faded way. The red thread connects you with your beloved. It'll tangle, it'll stretch, but it'll never be cut. In ancient Hindu and Tibetan thought, the red chakra, which is the root chakra, is the basis for your will to survive and to want to live and to reproduce. It sends up energy to let you think and relate to others. Red in the Western world here, it's Valentine's Day. Red represents love in a sweeter way. That's where we really start to see red take on this literal way, because the heart is red. Red lipstick, very much in fashion this year. It's kind of a two-way signal. You're projecting that you have confidence and power, and at the same time, you're wanting the attention, like the red doors. In our representation of the circulatory system, red represents the blood that's oxygen-rich that's sending nutrients and will send oxygen to your body. Oxygen is what our body needs, and blood is red because blood has hemoglobins, which binds to iron molecules, which bind to oxygen molecules, which replenishes our body. So iron also is very important to us in other ways. Here's an iron sickle from the Iron Age in ancient Greece. Iron melts at a higher point than bronze, which the Bronze Age was just before the Iron Age. And it was around the time that we started to develop the written alphabet and language. Iron all over Mars. Iron is in the iron dust that's spread over Mars. But what actually makes it red is the iron on Mars is already oxidized. This is kind of a tangent. The God of War, Mars, stands for war and virility and savagery. But people actually worshipped him to keep rust off of their iron tools and to keep wheat fungus off of their crops. Here's hell in one of my favorite shows, Ugly Americans. It actually has a subway system. I find it so interesting that red in the Western world has this kind of like, no, do not do this. And I think it's interesting that maybe that's why we chose red for a stop sign because it's so urgent. It's louder than yellow, for instance. It has this idea, don't do the thing that's in this sign or there will be consequences. And I think that's why we choose to use red in interactions online like this. Like it tells you, hey, this needs your attention. It's not, we wouldn't really use blue. We wouldn't really use other colors. It's always red. So what I want to end with is, I know that this has been kind of schizophrenic. What I want to end with is the boy, which is this kind of wooden half moon thing that you use in Chinese temples and Taiwanese temples to ask the gods questions. When both flat sides are up, it means no. When there's a flat side and a round side up together, it means yes. But there's a third possibility, which I love, which is that the god is laughing. And I love this because I think it's awesome because it tells you to pause and reflect and think about the possibility outside of yes or no. Like we've seen red take on all of these different meanings. In a day, we see shades of red with contradictory meanings and they're all valid and they're all kind of powerful. We don't really think about it. The only difference among all of them is the context. Thank you.