Midwifery, homebirth and the Oireachtas

Dot writes: by a rather complex process I came upon this transcript of a meeting of the Joint Committee on Health and Children which included a presentation from the Midwifery Birth Alliance. It’s quite a long transcript but extremely interesting as an example of how a great tangle of factors contribute to the state of [...]

Personals

Dot writes: recession can reach into unexpected corners. For example, the LRB personals column has gone all small and boring. This is the personals column that has given rise to a book of its more outrageous offerings (They Call Me Naughty Lola, ed. by David Rose). Now it has shrunk down from the generous half-sheet [...]

Simple and Complex Translation Schemes and Quine’s Argument for the Indeterminacy of Translation

Ken writes (a philosophy related post from my other blog):
Might a translator have good reason to favour a complex and context-dependent translation scheme over a simple and context-independent one?
For example, would a translator, or more particularly someone constructing a theory of meaning for gavagai-language, have a reason to prefer a scheme that gave the meaning [...]

Planning a homebirth – the big list

Dot writes: OK, I was going to write a brief witty post about something utterly unconnected with toddlers, babies or birth, in the hope maybe somebody in the ether would want to read it and boost our stats. But then I thought – who cares? This is what’s on my mind. Maybe my mum and [...]

Anti-grump

Dot writes: my posts have been a bit morose and grumpy recently. So here are some things that have been making me happy, as an antidote:
* seeing little Hugh in the pool this afternoon, held up by his Dad’s arm under his chest but kicking vigorously and paddling with his hands – almost swimming, in [...]

Ha!

Dot writes: it is with a certain bitter satisfaction that we note, looking at daft.ie, that our old flat is still on the market more than two months after we left. Also, the advertised price is 50 euros less than the minimum the letting agent named when we tried to negotiate a lower rent. If [...]

Overheard in the changing rooms this morning

Dot writes:
Rather formally dressed young man, talking loudly on a mobile in the swimming pool changing area at TCD this morning: ‘They’re some kind of nazis…said I couldn’t go in…they seem to think my lice will infect the whole pool…’
Eh??

Another way to be a bad parent

Dot writes: oh great: turns out we shouldn’t be letting Hugh eat ham or salami, because it puts him at risk of bowel cancer. Unfortunately, Hugh loves ham and salami in all varieties – he will go to the fridge and take out slices of chorizo to snack on. (Yes, we need a fridge lock. [...]

Unrealistic expectations

Dot writes: more reading from the midwifery section (some part of my poor squeezed brain still works, just not the doing-my-actual-job part): Birth in Four Cultures: A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States, by Brigitte Jordan, 4th edn rev. by Robbie Davis-Floyd (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1993) and [...]

But is it Cornish? The identity of resurrected languages

Ken writes:
When the last speaker of a language dies, the language is said to be extinct (maybe that should be ‘fluent native speaker’, but I’m going with the more general condition). Can a language be resurrected? That is, can a language come to life again if people start speaking it again with sufficient fluency? I [...]