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Comment by jayalpha | Hacker News Reader

I am excited. Worth looking into. Even if it violates (current) physical laws. Potential payoff to big.

But I have also seen google projects that did not look scientific sound to me. Measuring blood glucose with contact lenses? How? Lag time is around one hour for eye liquid. Your are dead and the sensor does not know it yet. Your need to be below 10 min lag time.

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>Measuring blood glucose with contact lenses? How? Lag time is around one hour for eye liquid. Your are dead and the sensor does not know it yet. Your need to be below 10 min lag time.

Why? What if you don't care about having your blood glucose data that quickly, and just want to see the overall trend, even if it is delayed an hour? This won't help people who really need to be able to see what their glucose level is right this second, but for others it's a lot more convenient than having to prick yourself every morning.

If the lag is one hour, you still need to prick.

If you want to see "overall trend" and don't care about any "lag time", just measure in Urine.

There is an enormous difference between ease of use of a contact lens sensor that you presumably wear most of your awake time and that gives you constant stream of measurements with 1h lag and urine test kit that you carry with you and with luck remember to use every few hours.

Yeah. As a non lens wearer sounds pretty comfortable to me.

But if you have money I can offer you a non-invasive glucose measurement start-up with peer reviewed publications.

I wear contact lenses. If I could instead wear lenses that continuously monitored my glucose level and it didn't cost me anything extra, and they still gave me the visual acuity of my normal lenses, why wouldn't I use that? I already wear them every day so for me, it requires zero effort.

Having to get urine samples regularly, or worse, blood samples, is a LOT more work on my part (not to mention painful for the blood samples), so it's not something I'm as likely to want to bother with.

"it didn't cost me anything extra" Good luck with that.

How about people walking abound 24/7 with an anal plug?

Wow, that's an incredibly asinine comparison and comment. Millions of people walk around with contact lenses every day, myself included, and don't find them uncomfortable at all (or at least, much more comfortable than glasses). If they had an additional useful feature built into their lenses for no extra cost, I'm sure plenty of them would be happy to have it. If you don't like contacts, that's your issue, not mine.

An idea that violates physical laws is just wishful thinking, no matter how big the potential payoff.

You should study the scientific method. Nothing is set in stone, science is an evolutionary process. Even the scientific method itself.

If experiments violate CURRENT laws of physics, the laws have to be revised. Guess how we came to our current atomic model from the plum pudding atom model?

this is absolutely true, but, what drives experiments are hypotheses, not just wishful thinking.

a hypothesis is "a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation."

it's arguable whether "is cold fusion possible?" is a valid hypothesis, because currently there is no accepted reason, evidence, observation, or starting point for that investigation. only the hope, the wish: "what if it was..."

Well, trust me, what drives most experiments is not hypotheses but "this is strange" results.

"it's arguable whether "is cold fusion possible?" is a valid hypothesis, because currently there is no accepted reason,"

I am not a nuclear physicist, but my chemistry is good enough to know that it should not be possible.

But take into consideration that Fleischmann was a pretty good chemist. Possible he fucked up. Looking backwards likely. But discussion is possible only based on date. Not believes what should or should not be possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischmann%E2%80%93Pons_exper...

Exactly! I think people forget that physical "laws" are mental models, working hypotheses that need to be constantly questioned, tested against reality and revised.

FYI that project was killed last year[1]. Also, like a lot of research projects, there was a lot of auxiliary research that could end up quite useful, even if the initial idea didn’t work out. For example, figuring out how to put an antenna into a contact, how to safely store power, etc.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contact_Lens

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