Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki

sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"

Wife now loves Blackberry

[Caffeinated Geek]

Leroy said before the birth of Mahalia on December 1, his wife disapproved of his BlackBerry because he was always playing with it but now she has "changed her tune".

Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr

[Achromatic1978]

The most annoying bit is that Wikipedia has latched onto this... it had nothing to do with Wikipedia [wikipediareview.com]... but was in fact "WikiHow", completely independent.

WHAT!?!?

[ignitionxvi]

"Wait...babies come from a girls...OMG"

Looks like an urban myth / tabloid madeup story.

[zombie_monkey]

This is form the British tabloid The Sun. I googled a few keywords and found no other mention of this except for a similar story in pravda.ru from 8th April this year, a Russian tabloid, with appropriately Russian names of the people involved and details.
http://english.pravda.ru/society/family/08-04-2009/107373-deliver_baby_mobile_phone-0

Actual article

[saibot834]

He probably read this wikiHow article [wikihow.com]

Re:I'm inclined to suspect...

[moonbender]

Bullshit. From fittingly/where-else Wikipedia:

Determining the prevalence of miscarriage is difficult. Many miscarriages happen very early in the pregnancy, before a woman may know she is pregnant. Treatment of women with miscarriage at home means medical statistics on miscarriage miss many cases.[28] Prospective studies using very sensitive early pregnancy tests have found that 25% of pregnancies are miscarried by the sixth week LMP (since the woman's Last Menstrual Period).[29][30] Clinical miscarriages (those occurring after the sixth week LMP) occur in 8% of pregnancies.[30]

The risk of miscarriage decreases sharply after the 10th week LMP, i.e. when the fetal stage begins.[31] The loss rate between 8.5 weeks LMP and birth is about two percent; loss is “virtually complete by the end of the embryonic period."[32]

Likelihood of miscarriage drastically increases with the mother's age; the average age of mothers at childbirth has steadily increased in the past decades, although I was very surprised to see it's still at 25 in the US. So it's got fuck all to do with "bypassing natural selection".

Re:Cool

[Rene S. Hollan]

Until the first hospitals for deliveries were set up the death rate for women in childbirth was around 16%.

I'd say those would be dicey odds for anyone delivering without emergency equipment or trained medical staff nearby,

Now, if a midwife was to have performed the delivery, this mother to be was likely deemed "low risk", so sampling bias will apply if we look at "home births where the midwife was late", but giving birth is not exactly risk-free.

Re:A geeks geek...

[newcastlejon]

Because Macguyver without the Mullet isn't Macguyver at all!

Re:Cool

[jim_v2000]

Giving birth, in most cases, is not life or death. In fact, the mother's body is going to go through with it whether or not anyone helps.

Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr

[adolf]

Mars XXX. Google it: The first hit is a Wikipedia article describing Mars candy bars, which says that the XXX variant is gold-wrapped and filled with bourbon. Every other hit for "Mars XXX" relating to candy is a copy of the Wikipedia article. This part of the Wikipedia article hasn't changed for months (at least).

I'd like to think that if Mars were selling bourbon-filled candy bars, that someone would've mentioned it outside of Wikipedia. Alas.

Re:Cool

[Dun Malg]

Reduction in the infant mortality rate had more to do with improvements in nutrition and hygiene (germ theory). The early-mid 19th Century is when the modern hospital concept really spread, but there wasn't a significant improvement in infant mortality until the turn of the century. Having a baby is not a medical procedure. More good was done for the IMR (and the expectant mother MR) by getting whoever it was delivering the baby to wash their damn hands than anything else.

Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr

[ThreeGigs]

Ok, I'll bite:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_iron_cookware#Seasoning [wikipedia.org]

Seasoning isn't magnetite formation, it's amorphous carbon formation. Someone got blueing confused with seasoning. Not too many people at home boil their pans in potassium nitrate and lye to season them. Worse, the article says something about oil protecting the metal from the oxygen in the air so that rust won't form, yet the formation of magnetite requires oxygen to react with the iron.