Some random thoughts on this situation which I have been in as well.
- bring lantus pens
- bring a backup pump. If you've been on a pump for more than 5 years you've probably gotten a new pump because the old one went out of warranty coverage. I have 2 old pumps which still work in an emergency (although without closed-loop - they will still do basal and bolus).
- regarding being forced to prime 10 units of insulin out of the tandem x2 just to use the existing cartridge when the tube is already full of insulin. This has always annoyed me as well. If you are in a pinch or really don't want to waste insulin what I've done is take the needle part off a two-part syringe (assuming you have that kind) and stick the end of the pump tube (the coupling part of the pump site) into the hole of the syringe and prime directly into it. Then you can put the needle back on the syringe and inject the primed insulin back into your insulin bottle.
Lantus alone is going to keep do a majority of the work from keeping going into DKA.
Insulin pumps are going to fail. They are mechanical devices. Batteries fails. The connected phone can fail. At some point in a diabetic lifetime…it is going to break.
The entire reason most patients are taught with subcutaneous insulin is at the start is that there is good chance complex tech will break.
As healthcare providers we get this - we see these patients on the weekly. As patients you may only get experience it once in your lifetime…. Technology will always break at the most inconvenient time. You need to have a back up plan with your health. SQ insulin is the back up plan.
I had the space games and the adventure games book as a kid and I was obsessed with them. I’d type in the whole program to play a game and then because I didn’t have a floppy drive on my C64 I’d have to type them in all over again the next time I wanted to play. This was how I learned BASIC and started programming. 40 years later I’m still at it.
There was a Swizz cloud backup system existing until some years ago.. can't recall the name but it started with a 'V'. They also encrypted the files on the client side before transmission, but the files were encrypted with their own md5sum or some such as key, and therefore similar files from different systems, encrypted, could still be de-duplicated across their whole system.
Interesting! I can picture how the clients could calculate a hash prior to encryption and that would let the server know those files have the same contents once decrypted but how would that let them save on disk space? They still can’t see the contents of the file itself even if they know it’s the same so how could they deduplicate the storage? If they drop either one they are just left with a single encrypted version using only one clients key which they can’t serve up to anyone else.
I assume they had a kind of pool for files, and a system linking files (or should I say "blobs" to each client's directory layout. Kind of like if I have a disk with different subdirectories, I could run a tool (which do exist) to find duplicates, and delete all except one copy, and hardlink the rest to that one.
As for the cloud storage system, the files were, as mentioned, stored in an encrypted form, using a hash of the original file as key (possibly md5, possibly something else, I can't recall that at the moment). Which the cloud provider didn't know, but the client's application would know it. The encrypted file is provided to (every) client, every client can decrypt it because the clients keep the encryption keys (the original hashes, one for every file).
The details of that I don't have anymore, there used to be a document describing the whole thing. I probably got rid of all of that after they stopped the service (which I used for several years, with no issues).
Funny enough, Saul and I recently hacked on getting visidata's Ibis integration updated, so you can use visidata for poking around databases of any size, really. You might like that, but also visidata has non-ibis support for SQLite I believe.
This doesn’t ring true to me. Having processes which rely on communication between humans using natural language can of course be either structured or unstructured. Plenty of highly functioning companies existed well before structured data was even a thing.
Structured data doesn't have be a database. It can be a checklist, a particular working layout, or even just a defined process. Many high functioning companies spent a lot of time on those kinds of things, which became a competitive advantage.
How about because spent nuclear fuel will be hazardous to humans for the next ~20 thousand years? How do you amortize that cost? You can't just assume someone else will deal with it and call that cost savings. People talk about burying it but in reality it sits in containment vessels above ground and the more there is the higher the cost to deal with it so the less likely it ever will be dealt with.
Isn't that only applicable for Uranium 235 based reactors? Thorium is converted to Uranium 233 and when split the byproducts have an half life of 10s of years, meaning that the radioactivity drops to safe levels in "only" few hundred years.
This is much more manageable.
Anyway, that is to say that nuclear is a spectrum, and the current mainstream tech I believe it is the one that won because of the military applications (and therefore funding) back in the cold-war era.
This article was 160 pages long when printed in the New Yorker. Modern nuclear warheads are around 30x more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. For comparison sake the equivalent resulting story would be 4800 pages long.
- bring lantus pens
- bring a backup pump. If you've been on a pump for more than 5 years you've probably gotten a new pump because the old one went out of warranty coverage. I have 2 old pumps which still work in an emergency (although without closed-loop - they will still do basal and bolus).
- regarding being forced to prime 10 units of insulin out of the tandem x2 just to use the existing cartridge when the tube is already full of insulin. This has always annoyed me as well. If you are in a pinch or really don't want to waste insulin what I've done is take the needle part off a two-part syringe (assuming you have that kind) and stick the end of the pump tube (the coupling part of the pump site) into the hole of the syringe and prime directly into it. Then you can put the needle back on the syringe and inject the primed insulin back into your insulin bottle.
reply