It's not so much the microprocessor, it's all the trappings of the Arduino, and not using sleep mode. If your project is large and runs on limited battery power, you might want to choose another solution and work on power management. The Arduino is an excellent prototyping tool, though.
I believe your observation is correct. I'll also throw out a possible reason for women being less okay with sexualisation in conversation: We're the target or object of sexualisation far more often than men are, and sometimes in quite threatening contexts. If you keep getting exposed to something in a negative context, you stop liking even fairly mild occurrences of it. (I'm sure a black person hearing even quite mildly racist jokes will be more annoyed than a white person would, because they are usually the target of these jokes.)
"I'll also throw out a possible reason for women being less okay with sexualisation in conversation: We're the target or object of sexualisation far more often than men are"
Okay, but how does this apply to a "dongle" joke? If the joke referred to female anatomy rather than male, would it have been more offensive or less (to someone in Adria's position)?
There is absolutely no such thing as "chemical free". Water, lactic acid, casein, and so on, they're all chemicals, even if you have glorified them with a stamp that says "natural".
Your statement is true, but also useless, as in the true spirit of hacker culture, you're arguing semantics.
"Chemicals" when used in the context of food, means "artificial food additives".
You may disagree that such additives are bad for you health - but just how our early ancestors had low-lactose tolerance, we also have low tolerance for such additives. Maybe our children's children will be able to digest such foods better / more efficiently and without side-effects, but in the meantime there's a wealth of research showing strong links between food additives and increasing rates of cancer, obesity and diabetes.
The sleep bits are (probably - don't know very much about the topic) ok, but once it gets to diet, it goes right into la-la-land. It is riddled with misinformation and the belief that a "raw food diet" fixes all. A raw food diet might make you lose weight, and it might get you food poisoning, but that's about it. For more information, I recommend C0nc0rdance's youtube videos on raw food.
For other clearly wrong, or wrongly interpreted information: While 70% of the population is lactose intolerant, that doesn't mean you are. We do know that about 99% of the Chinese population is lactose intolerant (which proooobably skews the numbers a bit), yet, for example, only about 1% of Dutch people are lactose intolerant. Northern Europeans and other people from historically very dairy-rich cultures have a very high degree of lactose tolerance, and persistent lactase production (the enzyme that digests lactose and makes you lactose tolerant). Very interesting genetics topic :) Statistics will not say anything useful about whether you are likely to be lactose intolerant, but ethnicity will. Get tested if you are in doubt. It's a simple test. Just make sure you go to a qualified medical practitioner.
As for gluten insensitivity, this is called coeliac disease and is very serious. Thankfully, the highest estimate for prevalence is about 1%, not 15%. The anti-gluten brigade has been on it for years, but non-coeliac people can and should eat gluten. It's a good protein of high quality and makes your bread dough stick together. That's why it's hell trying to bake gluten-free bread or pizza dough.
Casein, a milk protein, is also not a bad protein. While there are many scare stories about casein (it being blamed for autism, cancer, et cetera), they don't hold up very well. Casein is a nice, slow-digesting protein with a very good quality, as any body builder who does the diet/protein thing will be able to tell you. Drink your milk if you can tolerate it, and eat more cheese :)
As for multiple sclerosis, we actually don't know what causes it other than that there likely is a genetic component, but that other factors also interfere. For the actual, REAL long term effects of coeliac disease, see here: http://celiacdisease.about.com/od/symptomsofceliacdisease/a/...
As for cortisol, your body regulates this itself. If you're stressed, stress down. But if your body doesn't regulate itself, you have a huge problem and need to see a doctor right away.
While "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" is very good advice, there's also another piece of advice that has been forgotten: "You are probably not sick, and your body can take care if it." Just eat a normal, healthy diet.
Man. That was long. Sorry about that, but I had to get some facts out.
Gluten sensitivity ranges from the coeliac disease on the extreme end of the continuum down to mild inflammation of the small intestine. Gluten sensitivity is NOT just about coeliac disease. There is a growing body of evidence that gluten is in fact a problem in our diets and it's not as clear cut as you present that if you don't have coeliac, you can eat all the wheat you want. I'm not sure there's any "should" to eating wheat/gluten. There are other more nutritional ways to get protein.
Since this is an article on hacking sleep, I think it's worth mentioning. Try dropping gluten/wheat/bread from your diet for 30 days and see if your sleep improves. I know that mine has. If it doesn't, great, you are golden. If it does, you've learned something.
Facts or not, the article is about improving your sleep. Some people are sensitive to dairy and wheat. Try going without them for 30 days and see what happens. It's all a big experiment.
In the U.S. at least, a normal, healthy diet is something of a contradiction. Michael Pollan wouldn't need to promote "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" if people were doing it already. I agree with you completely on your other points, but telling some people to eat a "normal" diet will be interpreted as, "eat out of fast food restaurants and freezer cases," because for many in the U.S., that is a normal diet.
Oh, a "normal" diet varies a lot depending where you are. Myself, I'm in Norway, and the diet here is fairly healthy if somewhat short on vegetables (especially during the winter). I'm sure most other "normal" diets in the world are quite ok, as well. Might need some added vegetables, depending on where you are (the Dutch probably don't need any extra), but mostly, people who are able to afford normal amounts of food will eat better than one would expect given the media hype. They might want to cut down on the amounts, and cut out the sugary drinks, but I think that's it.
Is kale available in Norway? According to most sources (for example, this simple comparison chart: www.wholefoodsmarket.com/pdfs/superfoods.pdf), kale is a super food, and in the US at least, grows well during the winter months.
If you consider a normal, healthy diet as "eat out of fast food restaurants and freezer cases," then sleeping problems are probably not what you should focus on first.
I was just about to say this, too. I've ended up just splitting up the letter æ in my last name into a and e. Even some Norwegian businesses end up mangling my name, which is really very embarrassing. For them, that is. Æ, Ø, and Å aren't considered ligatures, they're considered separate characters in our alphabet. Worth taking the time not to mangle them, since they're fairly common in names :P
+1 for wishing you had a name in ASCII only. :-/ My last name is Schröder, which some systems can't handle, some systems transcribe to Schroeder, some systems make it Schroder, and some systems handle perfectly. I'm always slightly nervous when booking flight tickets abroad, because there's always some mismatch between what's in my passport, what's in the booking, and what's on my credit card, etc.
I'm from Sweden and my first name is Mikael, not that uncommon a name. A while ago I saw that a nordic airline had "helpfully" reverse transcribed my first name on the ticket to Mikäl, which I've never seen as a first name. Wonderful :) Fortunately, I didn't have any troubles with the mismatch between the ticket name and the passport name.
I got pissed off with having a home address that different organisations insisted on putting their own spin on, so I can imagine how frustrating it must be when it's your actual name!
Oh, my home address has a "ö" in it as well, and that's also very hard to handle correctly everywhere, but addresses are pretty resilient, if you get my street name wrong on a letter to me, it will most probably be delivered anyway.
And I just can't help but thinking... "Aha. So that's where the Bananaphone song got its superpowers from!" ><
On a more serious note, I do love everyday comparisons that everyone can understand. For example, science books for kids measuring things in elephants or houses. It's a comparison they can understand. It's like scaling things down for your brain. They're good tools to detect nonsense, too. Take antivaccinationists. For example, they do talk a lot about "toxins" in vaccines - like formaldehyde. Sounds dangerous, doesn't it? Except... That the average pear has about fifty times the formaldehyde in it, and formaldehyde is naturally present in your body in the first place. Then there's the mercury preservative mostly gone from vaccines anyway - gone in a matter of days, since ethyl mercury is easily passed. The methyl mercury from that tuna salad you ate a month ago is still in your body. But when a non-scientific person just hears "mercury" or "formaldehyde"...
Bingo. I'm female, and a comp eng student. The problem might not be the gender bias among researchers so much, but the attitudes little girls face when learning. If you grow up hearing that girls can't do computers, can't do math, can't do science, cos science is a boy thing, while hearing that language is something girls are good at, you get a lot of female language majors. "Encouraging workshops" sounds a bit condescending to me. If they'd treat people the same from the start and let it go on a bit so that even a parental generation has grown up with it, it'll probably even out the numbers a bit. Okay, so more boys than girls have good abilities in the STEM fields, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't treat everyone the same.
>If you grow up hearing that girls can't do computers, can't do math, can't do science, cos science is a boy thing, while hearing that language is something girls are good at, you get a lot of female language majors.
Who says this? I've never heard it except in debates where it is levelled as the reason why boys prefer mathematically biased subjects ("hard sciences").
Are women also worried that they are under-represented in autism figures, something which appears to closely related to the generalised male ability with mathematics and disability in respect of social aptitude.
>If they'd treat people the same from the start [...]
You mean ignore that people are different and want different things?
Who says this? I've never heard it except in debates where it is levelled as the reason why boys prefer mathematically biased subjects ("hard sciences").
My wife's AP Physics teacher told her that (1) "women are incapable of doing a good job in engineering and the hard sciences" and (2) "the only way you'll get a girl as captain of the science/engineering-technology team is over my dead body". The wonderful thing about (2) is that for many years, captaincy of said team was based on who got the highest scores on a technical exam. That year, my wife got the highest score. After she beat everyone else, said teacher explained that the captain would be selected based on a combination of technical proficiency (which my wife aced) and "leadership" (whatever the hell that means). This was not at some podunk school in the middle of nowhere; it was at a very well funded school which performed extremely well in national academic competitions.
Now, I'm not saying this guy is representative of people in general. What I am saying is that you can't claim this bullshit never happens. It does. Within the last few years even. And if you've made it this far in life without ever observing it yourself or hearing any first hand accounts, maybe that has more to do with your own biases and the way you treat women than anything else.
>And if you've made it this far in life without ever observing it yourself or hearing any first hand accounts, maybe that has more to do with your own biases and the way you treat women than anything else.
Oh so not having observed a claimed bias that is inherently unobservable - but still claimed as in the sibling comment (how can you tell that the teacher graded people lower rather than them simply attaining a lower level; people don't achieve equally in exams to their on going work) - not having made this observation makes me a misogynist??
"the way you treat women"? Excuse me, do you even know me.
Perhaps my scientific wants mean that I require proof where others are willing to accept hearsay and anecdote.
Approaching your anecdotal evidence as a crime, as what you claim surely is, one might ask what the motivation of the alleged offender was - why would it matter to a teacher what sex the student is. Are you sure that the teacher didn't just dislike your [now] wife; you're not yourself biased? What did her parents say, or were they complicit? Don't schools in your country care about abuse of power? Did she bother to say "like Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Lise Meitner, ..." granted I can't think of too many examples in the upper-echelons but a clear proof that the teacher was wrong. Is it possible that the teacher was attempting to motivate her, this sort of thing does happen.
Oh so not having observed a claimed bias that is inherently unobservable
I'm not talking about inherently unobservable behavior: I'm talking about things like publicly telling female students that women can't be good engineers or scientists. I think public statements like that, made in front of an entire class, are very much observable. Don't you agree?
not having made this observation makes me a misogynist
I never said you were a misogynist. My working theory is that in conversation, women might be disinclined to share stories with you about how authority figures in their lives discouraged them from pursuing technical careers because you sound like the kind of person who is committed to the belief that sexism doesn't exist or is not significant. I mean, given the bizarre lengths you go to in order to defend this particular bigot, I can't imagine you'd be very sympathetic to such stories....
Perhaps my scientific wants mean that I require proof where others are willing to accept hearsay and anecdote.
Perhaps. Your scientific wants are certainly not requiring you to write intelligible english prose.
You seem confused so let me explain. I never suggested that the story I presented was representative of all teachers. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite of that. What I actually said was: it is false to claim that there does not exist a single person who has ever told young women that women can't do well in science and engineering. To disprove claims of that nature, all I need is one single anecdote. That's it. And that's what I presented.
Approaching your anecdotal evidence as a crime, as what you claim surely is
Huh? There was no crime here. Being an ignorant ass is not against the law.
one might ask what the motivation of the alleged offender was - why would it matter to a teacher what sex the student is.
Because he was a bigot? In general, I don't expect all people to behave rationally all the time, so the notion that some people will occasionally act like bigots doesn't really surprise me. Do you find it surprising?
Are you sure that the teacher didn't just dislike your [now] wife; you're not yourself biased?
I suppose it is possible. But if that were true, I would have expected him to say "even though you scored highest, you can't be captain because I don't like you". In any event, this theory is not consistent with the fact that long before this incident, the teacher claimed that women could not be good at science and engineering. The simplest explanation that fits all the data is that he really believes the statement he made about women being no good at science and engineering and that when confronted with evidence that this belief was false, he decided to deny reality and claim my wife was unqualified.
What did her parents say, or were they complicit?
Why would any of that matter? My point was that a real live female was discouraged from pursuing a technical career by a bigoted authority figure. Your comment seemed to suggest that such occurrences do not happen. Regardless of what her parents did, this incident proves that such occurrences do happen.
Don't schools in your country care about abuse of power?
Ha ha you're funny! No, they do not.
Did she bother to say "like Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Lise Meitner, ..." granted I can't think of too many examples in the upper-echelons but a clear proof that the teacher was wrong.
She made a number of points, but the instructor was not swayed. Which is as you would expect: bigotry is irrational. If you really believe that women are incapable of doing science or engineering, there is nothing that a female student can say that will change your mind.
Is it possible that the teacher was attempting to motivate her, this sort of thing does happen.
Look, I don't know why you're so desperately scrambling to defend a bigot, but it is really creepy. Telling a woman that women can't be good engineers does not motivate them. In general, lying to people is not a good way to motivate them. Telling a woman that despite her superior performance, she won't be permitted to exercise leadership, will not motivate her.
>I'm not talking about inherently unobservable behavior: I'm talking about things like publicly telling female students that women can't be good engineers or scientists. I think public statements like that, made in front of an entire class, are very much observable. Don't you agree?
To nitpick, your anecdote was a presented as a private conversation. Certainly where I am a teacher that told a class that their subject was not for girls/women would be severely reprimanded.
The question at hand is institutionalised sexism - a single instance of apparent bias against a single individual doesn't show that the scientific/engineering establishment nor even the educational establishment [in your country, USA it seems] is biased against females from entering the field.
>you sound like the kind of person who is committed to the belief that sexism doesn't exist or is not significant
I practice sexism myself. I'm more inclined to hold doors for women, I'm more inclined to assist women with traditionally male chores like fixing the car or computer.
The only institutionalised sexism I've observed in education has been special programmes and events put on to encourage women to do things that for whatever reason they've chosen not to do. In business there are programmes for women and extra financial help that isn't available to men. These things are not removing biases they are instigating them.
>You seem confused so let me explain. I never suggested that the story I presented was representative of all teachers. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite of that. What I actually said was: it is false to claim that there does not exist a single person who has ever told young women that women can't do well in science and engineering
So your point then is that there is no institutional bias, that this one bad thing happened to your wife and that is the reason their should now be discrimination against boys/men wanting to do science and engineering and for women regardless of an individuals propensities and abilities. Great.
>>What school was it, who was the teacher?
>Why do you want to know?
Why not, knowledge is power.
Like MichaelSalib says, they're definitely out there, and sometimes they're our teachers. I've got female classmates who have routinely been graded one grade lower in than their male classmates IT class in high school - despite being as good or better than them. It rectified itself at the exams, since they're anonymous, but things like this still happen all over the place - and my classmates are the ones that persevered, and still started a master's programme in computer engineering. We've all experienced this to some degree (we've been asking around), which is probably a contributing factor to the fact that having 11 girls in a class of 120 is a whopping high for our course.
Just because people are different and want different things is not an excuse to be condescending to anyone based on gender. That's what I'm getting at.
Definitely. My bet is that the biggest issue is peer pressure which, honestly, is why I think top down efforts from parents and teachers and governments to boost girl's involvement in STEM are so ineffective. Most of the early development kids do in whatever field, be it sports or science, is driven by a need for approval (so are most other things at school). Unless you have a group of peers that you'd like to emulate and that you want to impress and engage with who are also doing science, you're probably not going to learn science. If the kids that are interested in science are otherwise not interested in anything you like (you like country, they like rock, you like comedies, they like sci-fi), then you're way less likely to end up studying what they do. A possible answer might be to make science clubs for girls, with awesome field-trips and awesome teachers. Physics can lead to, say, kinesiology and dancing, instead of making robots. Biology class can get outside of cell studies and into living animals. Chemistry can lead to molecular gastronomy, the development of organic hairdyes -- these kinds of things. These are the seeds from which the other studies can sprout: unless their planted, girls just won't be engaged.
In my research, and my personal experience, girls (in North America at least) shy away from the sciences well before they are in the running to become researchers. There's problems there too, but you hear more about them because the women thus affected have a lot more at stake and a way to make their voice heard -- not because it's a bigger issue. The slip seems to happen in Jr. High/Middle School, right when social pressures start to really mount. You can see this in some of the literature on mathematically precocious youth, especially regarding the disrupted relationship that girls have with mathematics confidence versus skill (with adolescent girls there is almost no, or in fact a negative, correlation, between their mathematical ability and their belief in that ability -- one might suggest this feeds into significantly reduced efforts in acceleration, extra-curricular work, harder courseloads, etc.)
Actually, I'd skip the super-loose socks and go for a pair of compression stockings instead (and some aspirin before I go), with slightly loose, thick woollen socks on the outside for warmth and comfort. Feet get cold, and deep vein thrombosis is a risk on long flights.
It depends a little bit on what specifically you fear when flying.
If it's the safety of the plane, I'd get really familiar with how planes work. Having flown a lot since I was a child I can "feel" the plane and know that things are all right. I know the sounds of flying through clouds, brake flaps, the thump of the wheels, and it all makes me feel very much in control of my situation. I usually know what will happen, and it's reassuring to see the plane respond exactly as usual to everything (even turbulence). Having grown up with parents in different countries, I've flown quite a lot, and from a very young age, so I've experienced my share of "scary" situations. Finding out why things happened made me able to deal easily with them later, even though I was scared back then. (I also learnt to sit straight during landings in windy conditions - I thumped my head during landing at one time. I was just a small child and excited at finally being able to see everything on the airport on such a cloudy day, but I took home a life-long lesson :P )
I've held quite a few hands and talked to people who were terrified while flying - suffering from anxiety myself, I can sympathise. One such time we actually had to switch a plane because a there was a minor problem with the last check before take-off (something about some control lights - I remember it being fairly minor). The woman I was sitting next to was terrified, of course - instead of relieved that they made us switch planes for an error that probably would not have interfered much with the flight. Logical thinking like that doesn't work when you're terrified, but good preparation to reduce the number of unknowns can get you quite far.
So yes, tl;dr: Go geeky, and learn about how commercial airliners work (they're actually quite cool!). Then compare your knowledge to what happens during a trip and see how predictable it is, and after you can try focusing on just how cool it is how everything works :) Good luck!
