Editor's pick: Childbirth in a calm, quiet place
Reading your interview with Michel Odent about clinical settings repressing women’s capacity to give birth (4 July, p 26), I recalled the wise midwives of the Princess Mary Maternity Hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne.
At midnight, when I was in early labour, I was invited to rest in a homely bedroom. The low bed, which had a white pillow and sheet and a scarlet tartan coverlet, was illuminated by a lamp on a bedside table. There was an electric button at the edge of the table. The midwife asked me whether I would prefer the lamp on or off and I said, “Off, please.” In the darkness, I saw a line of red lights along the skirting board, enough to enable a midwife to walk safely, but not enough to disturb me. I felt so safe that I went to sleep.
A few hours later, she took me to the delivery room, which was lit but the lights didn’t shine in my eyes. I felt relaxed and confident, and the birth was quick and easy.
That was 50 years ago, but women in early labour always need somewhere to wait, and they can still be given peace, darkness, safety and surroundings that are homely rather than clinical.
Heddon on the Wall, Northumberland, UK
Climate cognition constraint clamour
Of the 33 psychological “dragons” that Robert Gifford says stop us countering climate change (11 July, p 28), I fail to see why number 13, Technosalvation, is to be slain at all. Indeed, I believe our only chance of mitigating global warming is a technosolution.
Many of the changes that people call for are simply impossible to implement. Most are worthless without a strong world government and, worse still, they would crash the global economy if they were to be implemented. People are far too stubbornly resistant to change to do anything significant about global warming until they are personally suffering hardships and the death of loved ones 鈥� at which point it will be far too late.
Encouraging climate positive behaviours such as bike riding makes a negligible difference. What’s needed is some cheap solar-powered device that can produce neat carbon pellets by the megaton to be promptly sunk to the bottom of the Pacific.
Technology doesn’t require majority agreement. It can be deployed unilaterally by a few countries that agree.
San Antonio, Texas, US
Climate cognition constraint clamour
Surely that headline should be “33 excuses for not thinking clearly about climate change”?
Kempston, Bedfordshire, UK
Climate cognition constraint clamour
Reading Paul Younger’s article cheering on the UK’s fracking industry (11 July, p 24), I wondered which of the “33 reasons we can’t think clearly about climate change” (p 28) clouded his judgement. It is generally accepted that we need to leave most of the known fossil fuel reserves in the ground. So does it not seem perverse to begin investing heavily in a new source of fossil fuel? Turning around Younger’s final paragraph: in the short term isn’t it better to import more of our gas from countries such as Norway and the Netherlands, which are noted for better due process than we enjoy in the UK?
No doubt confirmation bias would allow him to pigeonhole Robert Gifford’s article as “pseudoscientific gobbledygook”.
Great Edstone, North Yorkshire, UK
Climate cognition constraint clamour
I am convinced there are many more than 33 reasons why we fail to act on climate change. For example: the world’s sovereign states seem to have agreed that the impact of military activities on climate should never become a topic for high-level discussions. Future generations may come to see this as the largest unexplained crime against humanity in the history of our species.
Even if the next crucial climate conference in Paris in December yields the lasting results we hope for 鈥� unlike the 2009 conference in Copenhagen 鈥� it is civilians alone who will shoulder the consequences.
Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey, UK
Climate cognition constraint clamour
鈥� There are many such further “structural” barriers to action on climate change, but Robert Gifford’s research focuses solely on the psychological reasons for us not acting.
<b>First class post</b>
There’s no one right way for everyone, and no one should be shamed for doing what’s right for them.
Sarabeth Burns intervenes in about advice on vaginal and caesarean birth (25 July, p 5)
Official drugs boringly on tap
David Nutt protests proposals to outlaw “psychoactive” drugs (13 June, p 24). There are indeed many problems with these proposals: one is how to define “psychoactive”. Establishing that requires testing, which would now be illegal. It is too easy for governments to outlaw chemicals that have no conceivable psychoactive properties. We need a policy that takes the money, the mystique and the thrill out of recreational drugs.
I suggest that the NHS should provide doses of recreational drugs with known toxicology for a nominal price, say 拢5 a shot, in plain packaging, no more than two shots at a time. The real criminals couldn’t make money if we did this. But the “hang ’em and flog ’em” party would cancel out the rational policy-makers.
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
New drugs on your kitchen table
Jon White writes: “synthesis machines will eventually mean anyone, scientist or layperson, can make a new molecule” (11 July, p 34). On the same day, I of users of “legal highs” being admitted to hospital with car-crash-like internal injuries.
Just as 3D printers may spawn illegal weapons, I fear such a synthesis machine will give drug makers a lucrative new avenue. History indeed “shows us that putting technology into the hands of non-experts can have tremendous impacts” 鈥� but not always for society’s benefit.
Edinburgh, UK
What's bad for some is not for all
Many of the articles in your series about guilty pleasures (30 May, p 30) are based on a fallacy. Most of the studies cited are epidemiological, dealing with statistics at the population level. Unfortunately, population statistics can only inform population-level initiatives: individual circumstances need to be considered when making individual recommendations.
As an example, there is some evidence that extreme endurance exercise can increase morbidity and mortality, and exercise can harm undernourished people and those with injuries. Advice based on population statistics that average over these cases may harm the majority for whom, in general, exercise is beneficial.
Chesterfield, Derbyshire, UK
Heaven on Earth and the Coal Board
Sumit Paul-Choudhury is right to emphasise the way architecture and landscape have long celebrated the cosmos and are doing so again today (4 July, p 44). There is one point I would like to clear up. He mentions the “yellow gorse creeping over the spiralling mounds” of a former Scottish Coal site I designed, which is “succumbing to entropy after its funding ran out”. It is called The Scottish World Project and its present state is the result of Scottish Coal going bust. The Scottish people were furious over the way 拢250 million of restoration bonds disappeared from moribund coal sites, which remain eyesores.
My design saved Scottish Coal money, because instead of them having to restore the land back to flatness, I incorporated their existing slag-heaps into artful mounds. Let us hope somebody will make good on the funding promises in future.
Holywood, Dumfries, UK
Climate change and an expanding Earth
Michael Le Page reports updated calculations of sea level rises due to climate change (13 June, p 8). Is it possible that these omit the thermal expansion of Earth? The very large size of Earth multiplied by small coefficients of expansion and relatively small temperature rises could significantly increase surface area. Would this reduce sea level rise?
Kangaroo Point, New South Wales, Australia
Climate change and an expanding Earth
鈥� It takes a very long time for heat to penetrate to any depth into Earth’s crust: this factor will be relatively insignificant over the next few centuries.
Sex, lies and gaps in surveys
You highlight a claim that the average number of sexual partners in a lifetime is 12 for men but only 8 for women (27 June, p 34). As others point out (Letters, 18 July), this is impossible if we assume the great majority of couplings are of two people of different sexes; and it is a bit unrealistic to expect people to necessarily tell the truth about such matters. The figures may simply reflect a tendency among women to be more reticent about their numbers of sexual partners.
It is also possible to account for surveys producing these false results if men count women who they pay for sex as “partners”, and these women are either under-represented in surveys or do not report the men.
If you had claimed that the modal numbers were 8 and 12, rather than the means, that might have been more accurate.
Cambridge, UK
Turn up the bass, Rheinm盲dschen!
You report testing the impact of music on people’s ratings of how powerful, dominant and determined they felt (20 June, p 40). Had I been there, I would have rated boredom at the genres mentioned. Dennis Hsu and his team concluded that the presence of strong bass in the music induced a sense of empowerment: might I suggest the prelude to Wagners’s Das Rheingold?
Glasshouses, North Yorkshire, UK
<b>For the record</b>
鈥� It is the presence of nitrites in urine that could indicate a urinary tract infection (11 July, p 38).
鈥� We’re all in a spin. A pulsar emits radiation from its magnetic poles (4 July, p 10).
鈥� Apologies: autism is not a psychiatric condition (27 June, p 38).