Category: learning curve

On Hitting Children

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Much local outrage (again) at the news that the government is considering a ban on the use of corporal punishment in the home. I suspect we’ll see one (or more) open letters written this week on the subject.

“Yippie.”

The furore has, once again, ignited the fires of indignation at alleged government interference in our private lives, and with it, brought out a bewildering defensive pride in some parents, unapologetically crowing that they hit their kids and no-one was going to stop them.

This post is not here to agree or disagree with the proposed legislation. In addition, in writing it, I’m not intending to pass comment on your choice of parenting methods either. Although, I think some of these examples are going a bit far and I was unpleasantly surprised to find the Bible thinks corporal punishment is just fine (but apparently only cos it’s preferable to Hell):

The rod is the family’s symbol of authority: “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with the rod, he will not die. Punish him with the rod and save his soul from death.” Proverbs 23:13-14.

Whole. Different. Argument.

So let’s not go there.

No, I just wanted to point out the strange (to me, at least) differences in the way we regard physical action against kids compared to physical action against other members of society.
To that end, I’ve taken some of the comments I saw on the subject this morning and I’ve removed any reference to kids and replaced it with a reference to women.

So now, they look like this:

My wife knows if she does something wrong, I’ll give her a hiding.

My dad used to beat my Mum, and it never did her any harm.

Sometimes, my girlfriend just won’t listen, and it’s the only way to get the message across.

My wife needs to know that when she doesn’t do as she’s told, she’ll get a good, hard smack.

It’s part of womanhood. It’s the only way they learn right from wrong.

Suddenly, it doesn’t seem quite so acceptable. Does it?

And before some idiot suggests it, I’m not accusing you of child abuse (the accepted legal definition thereof, anyway) or perpetrating domestic violence. So let’s be clear on that.

Mischievous? Sure.
Disingenuous? I don’t know so much.

It’s a dichotomy I’ve never understood – the social acceptability of corporal punishment in kids versus the disgust at domestic violence. There’s obviously a difference between the two, but at the end of the day, it comes down to using physicality to exploit or demonstrate one’s superior power over a vulnerable individual.

There will be those who argue that the rules for adults and kids need to be different. And they’re absolutely right, but those differences should then be in favour of protecting children, not vice versa.
And then there’s the other way of looking at it: that rather than comparing adults and children, we’re actually comparing humans with humans. So what makes it right to physically punish one group, when it’s plainly not ok to physically punish another?

So where do we draw the line? And why and how exactly did we choose to draw it there?

Royal Baby Excitement: An Explanation for (some) South Africans

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There were a lot of people getting very excited about events at a London hospital yesterday. And there were a lot of locals here who didn’t seem to understand why there were a lot of people getting very excited about events at a London hospital yesterday and they actually got quite annoyed about the people who were excited.

I’ve never really understood why if something doesn’t interest people, they feel that they have to aggressively criticise it. To me, it suggests some sort of insecurity. Who knows?

Anyway, I fell into the middle of the two of the groups. I wasn’t hugely excited about the birth of the royal baby, but equally, I didn’t have a problem with the people who were.

So here’s a way I thought of explaining it, in a journalists outside a hospital kind of way.

Compare this line (much used yesterday as a reason to belittle those excited people):

“It’s just a baby. Hundreds of women have babies every day.”

with this line:

“He’s just a patient in a heart hospital. Hundreds of people are patients in heart hospitals every day.”

Which is a pretty ridiculous sentiment for anyone* in South Africa to accept, because Madiba has almost deity-like status here. He’s a special person. His is a public interest story. So yes, there are many other heart hospital patients around, but Madiba is South Africa’s heart hospital patient, and that’s why his hospitalisation is different.

Well, the birth of the royal baby is Britain’s version of Madiba’s hospital stay. You can see that it matters to “us” in the same way that Madiba matters to SA simply by looking at the similar scenes outside the Pretoria Heart Hospital and St Mary’s in London.

It’s not an ideal analogy, but it’s not far off.

Live and let live: whether it’s babies, former presidents or excited punters.

 

* 99%+ of people, anyway.

Visible wi-fi?

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Gizmodo has published a little piece about what we things would look like if we could see wi-fi signals. While it’s quite interesting, for example:

A ‘normal’ field of wi-fi is typically spherical and can extend 65 to 100 feet.

…(i.e. they’re 3d, not simply unidirectional), it’s also not ever so scientific, as if we were able to see wi-fi, we’d surely be able to see all sorts of other (currently invisible) electromagnetic waves as well: infra red, ultraviolet, radio waves etc etc. The picture would surely be far more complex. Your microwave oven would be psychedelic.

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Above is a bit of Washington DC with a depiction of low level wi-fi hanging around the Washington Monument like a colourful mist (or smog, as the hypochondriacs would have you believe). And below, an image showing the decreasing amplitude of the wi-fi waves as they get further from their source. That’s why you can’t get a signal if you’re too far from your router.

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My physics A-level made me wonder if the reflection from the pond would happen. And then I decided that it probably would, since wi-fi is represented as being within our visible spectrum.

But while this is all very pretty, does it really mean anything?

Well no, it doesn’t. But it is very pretty. But I was thinking that it was rather sad that we couldn’t see this sort of stuff with our naked eyes, instead of having to resort to arty depictions. And then I read this comment on the Gizmodo page:

I see things like this, all the time – I see them right now. They’re not as vivid as the photos, they’re more like transparent solids that act as waves and move in specific patterns. There’s more than one pattern though, which I assume would be other noise beyond the visual spectrum. They’re not eye floaties, I’ve researched every visual phenomena that I could find, and though one came close it didn’t really explain everything.

I want some of whatever he’s on.

Double Vision

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We’re heading back to the Tips page of Popular Mechanics for this one. It won Top Tip for July 2013.

Double Vision

As time moves on and we get older, some of us are faced with the loss of our close detail sight. Fading eyesight is usually addressed by purchasing reading glasses from a chemist (I have pairs of these dotted all over the house and garage). However, sometimes the magnification of these glasses is just not enough for close-up work.

My simple solution: acquire a second pair of reading glasses (perhaps from your wife), place one pair over the other and hey, presto! You may look like a character from Revenge of the Nerds, but it really works!

Ian Ruinaard
Kenilworth

Why has no-one else thought of this?

Ian has obviously got a keen mind. Perhaps, in these winter months, he noted that in order to be warm, he could put one jumper on, but in order to be warmer, a second jumper, place over the top of the first, was required. Or, potentially, he had to get something down from a particularly high shelf and became aware that while standing on one box got him closer to being able to reach said object, it took another box, place on top of the first, to make it possible for him to actually get to the shelf.

These may seem like simple observations, because they are, but let’s face it, none of us took these observations and applied them to optics and the correction of age-specific deterioration in vision, now did we?

Ian did. He did that.

And then he wrote to Popular Mechanics about it.

What Ian did then, though, is deeply puzzling. He stopped. He halted in his extrapolation of this great idea. Why he chose to do this is unclear, because surely for a great mind like that of Ian Ruinaard, merely sating himself with having the vision to complete close-up work would not be enough. Surely an exploratory continuation into this 1+1=2 phenomenon could have yielded further amazing results?

Ian stopped. But that didn’t mean that I had to.

Right. So. What if we took Ian’s 1+1=2 idea and made it 1+1+1=3?

Three pairs of chemist-bought reading glasses, perhaps acquired from the wife – perhaps selected from the pairs dotted all over the house and garage, it really is up to you – placed over each other and hey, presto, I could see LOADS OF STUFFS.
This gave me another idea. I quickly acquired an extra pair from the wife and then collected all of the pairs that were dotted all over the house and garage. Then I burgled the local chemist and chucked all the pairs on top of each other.
And then I looked.

Oh. My. God.

The results were remarkable, if a little scary. It appears that I had created a nerd-like (but rather effective) face-mounted microscope. With incredible power.

We’ve all heard how many bacteria there are on a kitchen dishcloth, right?
Well, now I could count them.
Individually.
From my bedroom.

This was fantastic, and I’ve already applied to the local patent office to ensure that no-one steals my idea.

Indeed, the only issue I could see (geddit?!?) with this marvelous new-found vision-accentuating device was that my field of vision was now sadly some distance beyond my field of reach, making it rather difficult to actually utilise this undoubtedly exciting and potentially life-altering ability.

“Now, if only I could somehow change that,” I thought, as I pulled on my gloves and headed out into the cold.

New Quagga Foal Is Very Cute

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This is very cute. And great news for the environment. I like the environment, but not to extremes.
That said, I’d never eat a quagga. Probably.

A new Rau quagga foal was born about 10 days ago in the Nuwejaars Wetlands Special Management Area to parents Susan and Freddie.

And here it is:

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 Awwwwww!

What’s a quagga, you ask? It looks like a a unfinished zebra. Wikipedia has all the answers:

The quagga (Equus quagga quagga) is an extinct subspecies of the plains zebra that lived in South Africa. It was long thought to be a distinct species, but recent genetic studies have shown it to be the southernmost subspecies of the plains zebra. It is considered particularly close to Burchell’s zebra. Its name is derived from the plains zebra’s call, which is heard like “kwa-ha-ha”.

This follows a typical naturalist trait of naming animals after the noises they make. They did ok with the Kittiwake, but they failed miserably with the Hadeda ibis, which should obviously be called the (ever so slightly less catchy) “Raap-Raap-Greer” ibis.
I can’t comment on the accuracy of the nomenclature of the quagga, because I’ve never heard one calling. Anyone?

A few others among you may have spotted that the quagga is extinct, which does make the news above seem a bit of a stretch, so let Wikipedia explain again:

After the very close relationship between the quagga and surviving zebras was discovered, the Quagga Project was started in 1986 by Reinhold Rau in South Africa to recreate the quagga by selective breeding from plains zebra stock, with the eventual aim of reintroducing them to the wild.

The founding population consisted of 19 individuals from Namibia and South Africa, chosen because they had reduced striping on the rear body and legs. The first foal of the project was born in 1988.
Once a sufficiently quagga-like population has been created, it will be released in the Western Cape. In early 2006, the third and fourth generation animals produced by the project were reported to look very much like the depictions and preserved specimens of the quagga. This type of selective breeding is also called breeding back.

The practice of breeding back is controversial, since the resulting zebras will only resemble the quaggas in external appearance, but genetically they will be different.

Three quagga in the Nuwejaars Wetlands Special Management Area feature in the Top 10 of Quagga specimens in the Quagga Project (go look at this website – really interesting). Among them is Freddie – in fact – he ranks as the number one Quagga specimen in SA. So this is big news. Nice one Freddie.

This is now on my list of things to go and do next time we’re down in Cape Agulhas, and it doesn’t hurt that the Nuwejaars Wetlands SMA is just down the road from these places.

Photo credit: Mick D’Alton