Hot Pepper!

What is a hot pepper? No really, what is a HOT pepper? Anyone who likes hot sauces or watches Man v. Food on the Travel Channel will know that peppers are rated in "hotness" by Scoville Heat Units. So what do these mean and what is a HOT pepper?
Chiliworld.com has a great list of peppers, sauces and extracts along with their corresponding scoville unit measures. The pepper pictured above is a Naga Jolokia (ghost chile) pepper found in Bangladesh and it can be rated at just over 1,000,000 scoville units. The link below has more chili links and sites!

For those spice lightweights out there, a jalapeno pepper is about 2500-5000 scoville units and a habanero pepper is 100000-350000 units and those are puny compared to the ghost chile. Here is a little intellectual rationale for avoiding criminal activity, police strength pepper spray is made at 5,000,000 scoville unit strength (for number crunchers that is over 1000 times hotter than the hottest jalapeno), that just sounds like ridiculous pain, it would almost make getting tazered sound fun! BTW, I just had a funny mental image of getting literally hit with 1000 jalapenos rather than the pepper spray, it doesn't sound fun either.