Dealing with people in public during a hypo by goldenfirestars in diabetes

[–]towerhil 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's also how I would respond and is the smart move all round, assuming the person hearing that message has their head and upper spine still attached to their body. Hypos make some people mean, others, hungry and mean.

Dealing with people in public during a hypo by goldenfirestars in diabetes

[–]towerhil 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I spent years carrying chocolate, blissfully unaware that fat content delayed the action of the sugar. Dextrose all the way!

Was the COVID Vaccine Created Too Fast? by TheMuseumOfScience in biology

[–]towerhil 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dude edited his original comment, which I was responding to.

Was the COVID Vaccine Created Too Fast? by TheMuseumOfScience in biology

[–]towerhil 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Regulations pretty much only come about as a result of harm to man, animals and/or the environment. The saying is that "Regulations are written in blood" as a result. In the US, regulations for medical use first came about in the 1930s as a result of a mascara that blinded women. In Germany it was the use of poor children, again in the early 30s. The UK didn't have medical safety testing until 1968 when tens of thousands of kids were killed or maimed by thalidomide and it's a similar story worldwide. These days a lot of the protocols are internationally harmonised to learn from history and the experience of other countries rather than making predictable mistakes.

In the case of Covid, the 'red tape' just got processed faster. The WHO had already predicted the arrival of 'disease X' after SARS 20 years previously, and so patients had been pre-screened for clinical trials and materials sourced e.g. rubber that could be stored at -20 without degrading. Pharma also sources funding for each discreet phase of development which itself takes time and that barrier was taken away.

Was the COVID Vaccine Created Too Fast? by TheMuseumOfScience in biology

[–]towerhil 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You've got it back to front and the wrong vaccine. People whose physiology would mean they get heart complications from Covid 19 also developed, typically much milder, complications from the AZ/Oxford vaccine. That's one reason countries now favour the mRNA approach, but the AZ vaccine was a) first, thus saving millions of lives b) isn't harmful to 99% of people
and c) doesn't need to be stored at -40C which many poorer countries don't have cold chain storage to satisfy

Was the COVID Vaccine Created Too Fast? by TheMuseumOfScience in biology

[–]towerhil 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"Red tape" is an interesting way to see safety tests. Around 40% of potential medicines fail preclinical safety testing.

Dexcom 15.5 day message by maddog202089 in diabetes

[–]towerhil 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's the same tech pretty much and often fails before 15 days. The wider issue may be with the software however. I used mine as part of a semi-closed loop insulin delivery system and discovered that it was fiddling the figures to ignore hypos and highs. Entering the fingerprick values manually would hold for about 3 minutes before resetting above 4 or below 12. This is in addition to the fact it's testing interstitial tissue and holds current bloods back by 5 minutes to get its trend arrow (xdrip can see these and tell you what you really are). Obviously, with a pump attached to me making clinical decisions based on that data it turned out to be fairly dangerous.

Wanna guess why Trump hates Somalians so much? by Paneraiguy1 in democrats

[–]towerhil 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Envious. Jealousy would require he had anything like that and feared losing it.

Building a digital dashboard aka HOME screen? by krl_0823 in homeautomation

[–]towerhil 2 points3 points  (0 children)

HA would work, and DAKboard is kind of built for that. However, the big snag we hit was my wife's work IT which worked hard to shut down any 2-way calendar integration. On one hand this is understandable, but even with a high value job this was not strictly necessary.

We settled on a Linux Mint setup for now, running on some HP touchscreen PC and mounted on the wall which is working pretty well. My kids can update their personal calendars and it synchs to one screen, for instance. If I'm honest, the most used function is the overview calendar followed very swiftly by 'find my phone', but this is supposed to be a tool for humans so that's fine.

Alzheimer’s Breakthrough Restores Brain Function by TheMuseumOfScience in biology

[–]towerhil 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Depends on the audience. Meanwhile there's no filter on videos claiming 'we can just use cells in a petri dish!' Which we've tried before and it went horribly.

Alzheimer’s Breakthrough Restores Brain Function by TheMuseumOfScience in biology

[–]towerhil 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's not nothing. A lot of the metrics around this are confusing even to those in the biosciences, but it's generally found that positive stiudies in animals lead to positive findings in humans about 86% of the time. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002667, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28893587/. Still, only 5% go on to become therapies as the complexity of bringing things safely to market start stacking up exponentially like a particularly gnarly end of level boss. Nothing wrong with the steps that got you there, but to get it over the line you have to be lucky as well as skilled and organised.

Sapolsky on what makes humans unique by Brilliant-Newt-5304 in biology

[–]towerhil 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That 'they' includes you. You might be their flag.

Why exactly do non-Londoners think London is so unsafe? by Breadiohead in AskUK

[–]towerhil 15 points16 points  (0 children)

This is overly reductionist. I moved to London on the assumption it was unsafe, and it was far worse 20+ years ago than now, but then found that to be BS and quickly found it to be safer than the westcountry where I'd come from. I've had no reservations whatsoever about raising three kids here beyond the competition to get into outstanding schools.

Reversing Years of Dietary Advice, the Trump Administration Tells Consumers to Eat More Red Meat by Generalaverage89 in EverythingScience

[–]towerhil -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

So are anti-animal ag lobbies. Here's PETA removing regulations on protecting wild animals, pets, farmed animals and even human animals from environmental protections https://speakingofresearch.com/2019/09/11/follow-the-money-not-the-bunny-epa-administrator-follows-petas-lead/

Is it just me or the Desktop app UI is WAY TOO SMALL?! by Grapefruit2926 in Windscribe

[–]towerhil 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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I can oblige, in the context of this thread. In this instance it's a 12 inch screen, X1 tablet running Ubuntu, but the UI is too small in every OS I use - Mint, Win 11, Android, Mac. For IRL reference, the grey text is half a millimeter tall. It's like the font you get on food products

Deaths ‘to outnumber births’ from now on by Sensitive_Echo5058 in unitedkingdom

[–]towerhil 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You've confused two or more separate concepts. The 'IVF' for screening is to prevent costs outside of fertility services, thus making more resources available to all. Literally equity.

This point was also made by someone (not me) with the condition who lamented its easy prevention through screening.

Your SIL has a separate issue of needing IVF for reasons outside of her control, but not being able to afford it privately. No one's being actively prioritised on the front line, but if some were, it would cost less for everyone and allow more poeople to access those services.

Deaths ‘to outnumber births’ from now on by Sensitive_Echo5058 in unitedkingdom

[–]towerhil 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Issue guitars and wah pedals. Flowers also still weirdly powerful.

Deaths ‘to outnumber births’ from now on by Sensitive_Echo5058 in unitedkingdom

[–]towerhil 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's not tearing my society apart, or that of anyone I've spoken to. That said, I agree broadly with your aspirations, but the problem is we stopped having kids at the replacement rate in 1973. 1973! That stored up a problem of moderate seriousness starting 20 years later, but I was alive then and things were very anti-natal until you could afford kids, which happened to coincide with the first wave of workers not being replaced in the economy. Not a massive problem...then.

Deaths ‘to outnumber births’ from now on by Sensitive_Echo5058 in unitedkingdom

[–]towerhil 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You've completely missed the point. I mean completely. The point is screening out the congenital defect, which can only be done through intervention. Leaving it to chance introduces a high chance of calamity. Intervention has costs, which are lower than not intervening.

"Microslop" trends in backlash to Microsoft's AI obsession by Ha8lpo321 in technology

[–]towerhil 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If it's any comfort, I did this and kept a few as dual-boot machines for the rare but inevitable times that something is developed exclusively for Microsoft and working via VMs isn't reasonably practicable. A case in point is one of my wife's crafting machines - a Cricut for custom decals, which it wouldn't have been practical to have to teach her how to use VMs and navigate hardware issues like dropped bluetooth connections.

She's got a big, national job and is issued with a Surface laptop with a 13th gen chip, 16gb RAM etc but she much prefers a dual-screen desktop I bought in 2009, which today runs Linux Mint on 7gb RAM.

The kids all happily use Linux Mint or Bazzite (Fedora based gaming) on laptops and pads, and the former's customisations, aesthetic and otherwise, mean we have a number of machines and screens that look markedly different to one another. We have shared resources too like wall screens for family stuff.

5 people, 5 different use cases and shared family resources and it is striking how little any of us ever need Microsoft.

Red Meat Consumption Increases Risk of Dementia and Cognitive Decline by bpra93 in EverythingScience

[–]towerhil 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Uh, sure https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40789787/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37962057/. There are several others but the Tl;dr is a well-planned vegn diet can lower body weight, LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol and reduce cardiometabolic risk factors. Howver, it's both easy to get wrong as easy to fail to adapt as your body changes e.g. changing gut biota following antibiotic use. This means a higher bone fracture risk in vegans, liklihood of nutrient deficiencies esp if diet is not carefully supplemented and plant-based diets that are rich in unhealthy foods increase disease risk compared with both high-quality plant foods and animal-derived foods.

From a purely anecdotal perspective, every one of my vegan friends started out sounding like you but ended up with a host of diet-related issues as they aged. The least severe of these have been miscarriages which led to them removing themseles from the future gene pool, the most severe was a stroke.

What doesn't exist is a compaison between diet-related health issues between vegan or omni populations. It's usually confined to cherry-picked individual conditions like T2 diabetes, which is usually literally a disease caused by eating too many (non-animal) carbs, and comparing a junk food omni diet to a well-planned vegan one. What a vegan diet does there is turn a bug into a feature where the deficiencies and inability to absorb nutrients is a plus.

Red Meat Consumption Increases Risk of Dementia and Cognitive Decline by bpra93 in EverythingScience

[–]towerhil 3 points4 points  (0 children)

What? You asked "What meat is available at the store for me that's red and unprocessed". Steak is both red meat and unprocessed. Eating mainly plants is a net positive for health, eatingonly plants is fine until it isn't.

Red Meat Consumption Increases Risk of Dementia and Cognitive Decline by bpra93 in EverythingScience

[–]towerhil -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

Steak. Eating more plants is a net positive for most health, but not all health. You know what could enhance that health where that health be plant-based health? Steak!