miri's comments

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.)

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".

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.

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.

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

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"...

Studying in Norway - at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. I <3 Gløshaugen.

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.

Male nurses is probably the most glaring example of that.

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.

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.

Why compression stockings? They reduce the risk of deep vein thrombosis during air travel. Here's a link to a Cochrane review for those curious: http://www2.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab004002.html

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!

Yeah. That probably works if you live in a place that has more than two hours of "darkness" (it's 1:41, and it's twilight) during the summer, and that has decent quantities of daylight during the winter.

The light adjustment thing works, though, it's just that up north (this being Trondheim, Norway - not that far north, but far enough) you have to enforce by using dark curtains, or even aluminium foil taped on the window. Just wish I had any. The joys of living in student housing - less choice in curtains. So I've gotten used to sleeping even in daylight, since it usually turns up in my room at 3:30 in the morning :P

http://www.heavens-above.com/sun.asp?lat=63.417&lng=10.4...

Note how there is no twilight ending or starting time.

Hm, wasn't Facebook launched in 2004?

I don't think you can do away with five hundred or so years of typographic history that easily. The use of Lorem Ipsum and the first Oration against Catiline came through need, not through a desire to flaunt random Latin texts. There is a definite need for filler text that doesn't distract as one finishes a design. If leaving lipsum text up in a live design is a problem, the solution is to replace it with real content, not replacing it with more dummy content. At least lipsum is recognisable as such. Wouldn't it worse if a user took the content for real?

Why, yes! I've grown up with hard rock/heavy metal, opera, and good food. Food usually gets good when mum's rocking out in the kitchen :P

Oh, the iPad might be all fancy-glitzy-waste-of-money-blah-blah, but as a product, it's good at it. It provides an experience, as well as providing usefulness. I have used a laptop for recipe purposes in a kitchen, too, but using an iPad to do it just makes it feel a lot more cool, which makes people bother to use it more. My mother never saw the use for mp3 player speakers until she realised that it was a very easy and convenient way to listen to Alice Cooper in the kitchen while cooking. She could've gotten a portable player/radio - the technology's been around for a while, I'd say - but she didn't.

It's a brilliant marketing idea. I'll probably stick to my laptop and paper notes, but I guess I, like everyone, have some sort of dream of a future where we have fancy computer screens everywhere. Kitchen computers, robo-butlers (or a disembodied mildly sarcastic voice with a British accent answering your questions), projectors projecting the next recipe on your kitchen cupboard, fridges keeping tally of your shopping list, you name it.

Not sure if it is a contributing factor, but it was also posted on Reddit a day ago. But title probably helps if you want to catch eyes :)

Vitamin C, you need it in sufficient quantities as not to get deficient and interfere with collagen synthesis. Moderate amounts of fresh fruit and vegetables will see you well covered. Extra supplementation is not helpful, no matter the belief of Linus Pauling. He has no evidence for that his megadose vitamin therapy is helpful at all. The problem with large doses of vitamin C is that it gives you diarrhoea, and may lead to kidney problems. It also increases absorption of iron, which can be a good or a bad thing. Either way: It's well enough absorbed either way. Less acidic variations may be useful to those with sensitive stomachs, but you'll get your vitamin C either way. Fruit and vegetables is still the way to go, though.