Do you know the exact time of your birth? Your CW compiler knows his: It was at 4 p.m. on April 20, 19 ... Well, perhaps it's not necessary to be too precise about these things after all.
THE QUESTION: Bruce Cossar of Kingston notes that The Globe and Mail reported on Jan. 2 that Eva Violante, the first baby of 2010, arrived at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto “one second into the new year.” He adds: “The birthing process is not instantaneous. It seems to me that Eva's arrival could just as easily have been recorded in the last second of the old year.” He therefore wants to know how the time of birth is determined.
THE ANSWER: Maureen Dolan of Burlington, Ont., writes: “I am a former labour and delivery nurse and now work in an operating room where we do cesarean sections. In both vaginal and C-section births with the baby's head coming first, a baby is considered to be born with the delivery of the shoulders.” She says this is because the shoulders can become stuck. “Once the shoulders are free, the rest of the body slides out.” She adds that, in the case of a breech birth (when the baby comes out bottom first), “the baby is considered to be born once the head is out.” But Diane C. Campbell of Brantford, Ont., a registered nurse with 19 years experience in several birthing suites, has a slightly different take. She says the time of a normal birth is noted when the baby's feet clear the mother's body. And it never really comes down to a matter of seconds, she writes, “unless, of course, one is vying for the title of first baby of the new year.”
FURTHER NOTICE
Last week, we said a V4 car engine would give more torque than an inline four. Not necessarily so, says David Funnell of Windsor, Ont. He quotes from the book Forty Years of Ferrari V12 Engines by Welko E. Gasich: “Torque is the product of BMEP and engine displacement.”
BMEP, explains Mr. Funnell, “is brake mean effective pressure, and there is no reason for the BMEP of a V4 to be higher than that of an inline four.”
HELP WANTED
Stephen Kary
, 12, of Ottawa says he recently learned in school that the normal human body temperature is 37 degrees Celsius and that comfortable bath water is about 40 degrees. “Then we learned,” he writes, “that the comfortable air temperature should be about 20 degrees. I understand that most people like their baths a little bit warmer than their body temperature, but why do we like the air to be so much colder than our body temperature?”- Why is vanilla (or other flavouring) the last ingredient that recipes specify is to be stirred into the mixture?
Carol Olchowski
of Ottawa wants to know. - Why are the spellings of place names changed when used by other countries? asks
Henry Skoczylas
of London, Ont. “For example, the English call their capital London, but the French call the same city Londres, and the Poles call their capital Warszawa, while we call it Warsaw.”
Send your questions and answers to wisdom@globeandmail.com. Include your name, location and a daytime phone number.
