All Hail the Smartphone

Given the ubiquity of smartphones, it's difficult to remember a time before they were here. Which is all the more amazing since the event that spurred them into popularity, the launch of the first iPhone, was in 2007 so we've had less than ten years of them in our lives, and already they are completely indispensable.

From that iPhone launch in 2007 there are now nearly 2 billion smartphones in the world as of 2015, which is predicted to rise to 2.56 billion by 2018.

Source: eMarketer

When the iPhone launched in 2007 it debuted at $499 or $599 depending on model, whereas now you can buy landfill Android handsets for as little as $30. So we're not talking elite purchases, we're talking about fully democratised pocket computing, which is why the next billion internet users are expected to be mobile-only. This is why Google's Android One programme is targeting low end phones at the Asian market for around the $100 mark.

The following Radio Shack catalogue advert from 1991 shows computers, phones, camcorders, cameras, dictaphones, music players etc., all of which are nowadays redundant items thanks to that phone in your pocket. Just to put this technological leap in perspective, in 1991 you would have paid $3.56 million to buy the equivalent gadgets individually and corresponding computing power that would duplicate the functionality of an iPhone today:

Radio Shack catalogue from 1991

In fact, you can easily run PlayStation 2 games on your phone nowadays, which back in the year 2000 took the best selling games console ever to run.

Today, your mobile phone has way more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. And NASA had multiple rooms full of IBM System/360 Model 75 mainframe computers, costing up to $3.5 million apiece plus the computers on board the Apollo spacecraft themselves.

Or to put it another way, when the most powerful supercomputer in the world, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, beat chess grand master Gary Kasparov in 1997 it did so with a then staggering 11.38 GFLOPS of processing power (where a gigaflop is a billion calculations a second). Today you can get a reasonably good phone like the Samsung Galaxy S5 which will do 142 GFLOPS in your pocket. Or indeed high-end phones using the same processor as the Google Nexus 9 that will do 364 GFLOPS.

How's that game of Flappy Birds coming on?

Gay Marriage Increasingly Legalised Across World

Now that the USA has formally legalised same sex marriage across all its states, the world has taken another step towards inclusiveness. It's part of an ongoing trend not to exclude consenting same-sex adult couples from designating their pledge to spend the rest of their lives together as marriage, just the same as we heterosexual married couples do.

Source: BBC News

For the past few hundred years of our 200,000 year history as a species, we in the West have had our definition of marriage constrained to a simple 'man + woman' pattern as defined by somebody as the 'biblical ideal' of marriage. Only now are those constraints being challenged, which is particularly timely because as of the 2011 census, 40% of Brits do not regard themselves as Christians and increasingly many do not really see why the church should be able to impose its narrow definition of marriage on them too.

Marriage has, of course, had a much older history than the comparatively recent Christian era. There was marriage in the pre-Christian ancient Greek and Roman worlds as indeed there was in the rest of pagan Europe, and those societies defined marriage according to their own definitions. Same sex marriages were going on during the Greek and Roman period as a fairly common practice. Same sex marriage even persisted in Europe as late as 1061. It seems that same-sex 'Boston Marriage' cohabitation between two women was tolerated in New England as late as the Victorian era.

Even more bizarrely, the Bible itself doesn't actually constrain its definition of marriage to the 'man + woman' template anyway, as this excellent infographic shows. If the Bible itself defines your spouse as loosely as potentially including your brother's widow, your concubines, your rape victim, your wife's slaves, your prisoner of war, your multiple polygamous wives and even your assigned slave partner, then what hope do we have of constraining marriage to a meaningful biblical definition?

Source: Upworthy.com

Increasingly, even the deeply religious country that is the USA now supports same sex marriage, which is reflected in their recent Congress vote, with similar results in Europe and Australia. Around 10% more of American people from all faiths and non-faiths are now receptive to gay marriage than they were in 2001. Figures range from 77% of non-affiliated people approving it, down to 23% of white evangelical protestants approving it, where a 10% increase is quite a shift in opinions in such a short space of time:

Source: Pewforum

The Netherlands was the first country to legalize same-sex marriages in 2001. As of 26 June 2015, eighteen countries have legalised same sex marriage with the practice recognised in six more. Civil unions and registered partnerships are recognised in some or all of 22 further countries and unregistered cohabitation recognised in four more.

That's an amazing increase in just 14 years and it shows the progress being made in simply letting two people who love each other proclaim their intent to stay together in front of their nearest and dearest.

Pandemic Plagues a Thing of the Past

Since the dawn of time, humanity has been periodically overrun by terrible plagues and diseases. So it's hardly surprising we have an ingrained dread of epidemics still to this day.

Since its discovery in 1981, AIDS has caused an estimated 36 million deaths worldwide, which is a terrifying number for those in the regions most affected. The Ebola outbreak on West Africa was a terrible episode, which as of May 2015 had claimed 10,900 lives. Similarly, the SARS outbreak in South East Asia sent communities into a panic and has so far resulted in 775 deaths.

But, terrible though AIDS, Ebola and SARS are for those affected by its appalling symptoms, in terms of the percentage of the population of the day killed, they're often dwarfed by the plagues of yore. This demonstrates how far humanity has come in preventing and treating infectious diseases. This is not in any way to trivialise the plight of those living under the shadow of a modern day epidemic, but it is intended to provide some context to just how good humanity has become at shielding itself from the diseases of the natural world in modern times.

In classical times, when populations were tiny by comparison to today's urban based concentrations of millions of people, it was not uncommon to have plagues that would wipe out hundreds of thousands of people at a time and take out 30% - 40% of a given population.

Source: Listverse

By the mediaeval era there were great plagues like the Black Death in the 14th century, from which the total number of deaths worldwide is estimated at an appalling 75 million people, approximately 25–50 million of which occurred in Europe. That's a staggering 30% to 70% of population killed between 1346 and 1350 alone. The plague is thought to have returned every generation with varying virulence and mortalities until the 1700s. During this period, more than 100 plague epidemics swept across Europe.

Other smaller outbreaks of diseases include the 17th century outbreak of leptospirosis that killed 90% of the population of southern New England. or cholera pandemics that killed 100,000 people at a time in successive outbreaks in the 19th century, and a million people in Russia alone between 1852 and 1860. Likewise, Typhus outbreaks such as the one that killed 20,000 people in Canada in the mid nineteenth century.

Fortunately, nowadays the plague that caused the Black Death can be treated with insecticides, antibiotics and prevented by a vaccine. Likewise, Typhus can be treated with antibiotics and its insect-borne cause prevented via a vaccination. Cholera can be treated using simple oral hydration therapies with its cause through poor sanitation removed better isolation of sewerage from the drinking water supply.

Meanwhile, our treatment of modern day diseases is improving all the time too. HIV / AIDs can be slowed dramatically by the use of antiviral therapies and prevented by safe sex and prevention of blood contamination. The quest to develop a SARS vaccine is ongoing, as is the quest to develop an Ebola vaccine but containment for both is capable of halting the epidemic in its tracks.

Modern epidemiology and drug research will one day remove these diseases from circulation, just like it has done for the terrible plague, typhus and cholera diseases that once wiped out huge swathes of humanity.