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wanderingmoose

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wanderingmoose
·vor 5 Monaten·discuss
He still works at WDI.
wanderingmoose
·vor 7 Monaten·discuss
High blood sugar should be considered a symptom. High blood sugar can be caused by:

1) Having enough basal or "baseline" insulin but eating too many carbohydrates. This will lead to a high blood sugar reading but no immediate danger (this will cause long term health issues like kidney failure, blindness, etc if you run a high average blood sugar over time.)

2) Not having enough insulin which is incredibly dangerous. This will often presents with high blood sugar but not always. Your cells are not getting enough glucose. Your body responds by releasing lots of short term energy stores. The stores that become glucose still can't enter your cells since there is not enough insulin so your blood sugar will often read high. Your body also breaks fat into ketones which use a different mechanism to enter the cells and don't require insulin. Ketones can provide the energy your body needs and keep you alive for the short term, but they are acidic and will kill if the concentration gets too high (diabetic ketoacidosis -- your blood pH changes enough that it interferes with the normal chemical reactions your body requires)

So the real test for dangerous situations when experiencing high blood sugars is to test your urine for ketones.

From the FDA article, it sounds like the CGMs were incorrectly reporting low blood glucose values for extended periods of time. The closed loop pumps respond to a low blood glucose by lowering the basal rate of insulin. The is dangerous if done for too long a time. Also note that insulin response varies wildly by individual.

From the pumps I use, there is a maximum basal rate adjustment allowed before the pump alarms and kicks you out of the "insulin auto-adjust mode". This was with both medtronic and tandem pumps.

I haven't used the abbot cgm or pump. I would expect there would also be limits to how much the pump will lower your basal insulin rates before alarming. I haven't seen any specifics, but I bet the software bug is allowing a lowered basal rate for too long under continued false low glucose readings and patients going into DKA. (IMHO bad sensors should be accounted for in software and user alerted under any suspicious circumstances)

Needless to say, this is a horrible situation and my heart goes out to everyone impacted.
wanderingmoose
·vor 7 Monaten·discuss
The unfortunate part is gimp is intensely useful software with many amazing features...buried under such an awkward interface.

I used it today for doing a color range selection to get an estimate for parameters to use in image magick. It had the easiest dynamic visualization of the matte for the selected range as I was selecting. It did exactly what I needed, very well.

I also tested out krita and nuke. Was easier in gimp.

But gimp is still the tool of last resort as it is just so painful to use. I wish there was a more positive engagement between the graphics community and the gimp devs. It feels very combative and negative compared with tools like krita and blender.
wanderingmoose
·vor 8 Monaten·discuss
I work in vfx, and we had a lecture from one of the art designers that worked with some formula 1 teams on the color design for cars. It was really interesting on how much work goes into making the car look "iconic" but also highlight sponsors, etc.

But for your point, back during the pal/ntsc analog days, the physical color of the cars was set so when viewed on analog broadcast, the color would be correct (very similar to film scanning).

He worked for a different team but brought in a small piece of ferrari bodywork and it was more of a day-glo red-orange than the delicious red we all think of with ferrari.
wanderingmoose
·vor 10 Monaten·discuss
If you want a book that is more technical and really gives a sense of what the scope of the project was, I'd highly recommend The Los Alamos Primer by Serber which was the intro lecture given to scientists when they would arrive. Serber did a great job of annotating the lecture to explain in more accessible detail each section. A quick read, and well worth it.