Apples in India

While reading about that too-good-to-be-true cheapo smart phone in India last week, I was reminded about how iPhones barely sell there:

Now, a sales target of a million iPhones is within breaching distance in a country where the installed base of smartphones is very low. According to Counterpoint Technology Research’s senior analyst Tarun Pathak, 106 million smartphones were sold in India in 2015 but 300 million more smartphones are expected to be sold in the next two years. Significantly, Apple has only about 1 percent share of this booming smartphone market. “It is a huge, enticing market that just cannot be disregarded,” says Pathak. “India is a high-potential market not only in terms of volume but also the massive scale and opportunity that lies ahead.”

Amazing.  (But then again, it could just be that I'm easily amazed.)

It would be, like, Peak America

Douthat Apologizes For Trump Joke | The Daily Caller

Poor old Ross Douthat attempted a joke about how an assassination attempt (like one in a movie, which involved the target using a baby to shield himself and thus losing credibility) could end the Trump campaign.  He's since deleted the tweet and said sorry.

Well, normally, conservatives would complain about PC self censorship, but not now, hey?

Because, honestly, who with any imagination at all hasn't had an idle thought about how deeply ironic and "peak America" it would be if Trump were shot on the campaign trail, preferably by some schizophrenic migrant nutter with no health care plan (perhaps with immigrant parents from Mexico?) who had still managed to legally buy a gun with cash supplied by the Koch brothers?

And, as I have noted before, Right wing nutters have been fantasising about Obama being shot for his e-vil (non-existant) plans to seize American's guns.

So Ross should be cut some slack...

Ooh, a mystery!

BBC Future - The quest to solve YouTube’s strangest mystery

I suppose if I read Reddit more carefully, I would have known about this earlier.  And now it's slightly more mysterious, given that when I check the channel in question, it seems the recent Youtubes have been taken down.

All sounds very "numbers station" to me...

A reasonable take on lock out laws

Sydney wasn't vibrant before these alcohol laws, it was embarrassing - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Inner city areas change all the time - weren't people complaining about Oxford Street dying long before the lock out laws?   As the author writes in this very fair minded article, it's also the case that 24 hour liquor licences and sudden popularity with hoards of drunk youngsters crowds out other, more sedate, businesses (like restaurants).

Overly liberal licencing laws therefore benefit some type of businesses at the cost of others.  Tightening those laws means there may be a transition to the other type of businesses in the area.   Residents may well find their property values increasing; drug peddlers, prostitutes and strippers may have to find some other area to work from.  Such is life when governments decide, with voter approval, that regulation needs tightening.

President Troll

I was going to post about how much Trump's campaign behaviour resembles one gigantic troll of the Republican party, and the entire planet, but I see the point has been made before.

The thing is, some trolls can be pretty funny, and I'd be pretty sure that at some of those supporting him think it is all part of a game.

But I can't see it lasting all the way to the White House.

The fact that the Koch Brothers are starting to fight harder against him doesn't mean much - didn't they blow a huge amount of money on the Romney run?

Trump winning the candidacy would therefore have a couple of benefits - it may further impoverish the Koch's bank account and influence, and (presumably) blow up the Party whose behaviour and nonsense ideology for the last decade deserves blowing up.

I also didn't mind this article that gives a possible explanation as to why even evangelicals are voting for Trump:  as a "last hurrah" against a lost culture war.  Or, maybe, evangelicals just enjoy a funny troll, too...

About that Safe Schools program...

Many years ago, I wrote a post complaining that American schools with their gay support clubs were going too far, in the sense that I don't see that teenage sexuality really warrants school based scrutiny or endorsement.   All sensible adults don't really want high school teenagers of any type having sex;  that complete sexuality self understanding is not something that teenagers (in particular) actually need to be certain of seems badly unacknowledged these days; and an emphasis on the right to privacy in terms of sexual feelings should (to my mind) be the priority.   But, as is usual, I find it hard Googling my own blog successfully, so I haven't re-read it for a while.  I think that is how it went.

So now we have some hoo-ha about an anti-bullying program that concentrates on sexuality based bullying.  The idea of an anti bullying program that incorporates sexuality based bullying is fine.   Part of the concern about the Safe School program, though, is that some of the suggested exercises seem a tad too advanced for the age intended.   (The bit about asking 11 year olds to imagine they're 16 and with "someone they're really into".   My recent experience with 2 former eleven year olds is that this would have been like asking them to imagine they're an aardvark - it would have been pretty incomprehensible. )  But as I understand it, educational material like this is not set in concrete - the manual gives suggested exercises that teachers can pick and choose from, as would appear to suit their circumstances.

So part of the complaint appears overblown to me; but it probably does grate somewhat against my views about how sexuality is dealt with not just in schools, but in the media and broader society these days.

Can't an anti-bullying program just emphasise that it's none of  a student's business to care or complain about which gender a fellow student might feel some sexual attraction towards, and that bullying based on that will be sternly dealt with?

But this is not to say that I have any particular problem with school based, quite detailed, sex education material regarding how your basic sex works, and its practical and emotional consequences.  (And contraception, of course.)  After all, the European approach to this does seem to work reasonably well.  And as if teenagers want to hear the details about it from their parents...

A modest proposal

Malcolm Turnbull sticks to Tony Abbott's defence spending pledges in long-awaited white paper - ABC News 

Well, Malcolm Turnbull seems to be truly turning into an Abbott Lite (or "Not So Lite") with this announcement that we'll be going for 12 new submarines.  (And a commitment to a 2% GDP defence budget.)

Now, I like defence technology as much as the next, um, man/woman/transgender defence person, but the whole problem with our submarine fleet has long been not being able to convince sailors to serve on them, hasn't it?.  

How do they propose getting around that problem with a fleet of 12?

My proposal - which will presumably cut costs too - subcontract out their running to the Filipinos.
I understand that they already run a huge percentage of cargo and passenger shipping.  They'll work for half the salary, too, provided they are left with tips after a successful voyage.

I cannot see why I'm not a politician. 

Amazing technology

Li-fi '100 times faster than wi-fi' at shine of a light presented at Mobile World Congress - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Did I post about this before?  I forget, but I have read about it previously.  I find it hard to believe that an LED bulb can transmit data this quickly:

Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of over 200 gbps —
fast enough to "download the equivalent of 23 DVDs in one second",
founder and head of Oledcomm Suat Topsu said.

"Li-fi allows speeds that are 100 times faster than wi-fi" which uses radio waves to transmit data, he said.

Fair enough

Proposed Senate electoral reform is essential

The man with the dorkiest face pic at the Conversation (please change it, Adrian) writes about the Senate voting reform, and figures that (unlike Labor's concerns) that Labor and the Greens may benefit from it.

Brain parasite reconsidered

The Myth of "Mind-Altering Parasite" Toxoplasma Gondii? - Neuroskeptic

Hey, maybe cats aren't quite as evil as we all suspect.*   Read above for an interesting study looking again into the question of whether toxoplasma gondii has much effect on human behaviour.


* I doubt this.  I have a theory that they may explain libertarianism.

Marked "not to be trusted"

Chris Uhlmann should mind his language on 'cultural Marxism' | Jason Wilson | Opinion | The Guardian

Interesting column here about Uhlmann believing a right wing campfire scare story that I had never bothered looking into because I always thought it improbable.

Look, my rule of thumb for reliability across a spectrum of subjects holds good here:  Uhlmann years ago made it plain that he thought belief in AGW was more religion than science - a favourite trope of climate change denialism.   This alone indicates he's not the brightest, and his time as host on 7.30 confirmed him as not particularly quick witted, and routinely soft on the Coalition and dismissive of Labor. 

You can't really trust him on anything.

Entirely reasonable

Government set to change Senate voting in bad news for 'micros'

I find it hard to credit that making people vote so as to indicate their actual preferences, as opposed to letting people vote when they are absolutely in ignorance of where their preferences will go, can be argued as being bad for representative democracy.  

I suppose that the "micro" argument is that, regardless of how they get there, having more micro members (so to speak) in the Senate is better for democracy.   They like the current system, but they should be more upfront that it pretty much like running a lottery for a handful of Senate seats each election. 

I would also assume that, should this reform be followed by a double dissolution, it will be goodbye to my favourite Senator to hate, Leyonhjelm.  I will have to re-focus the target of my political hatred elsewhere if that happens.  But I can live with that.  

Goodbye to Ms Lee

Harper Lee, Author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Dies at 89 - The New York Times

I did enjoy this obit for Harper Lee last week.

One thing I am curious about:  it reminded me that she had said her father (a lawyer) was the model for Atticus Finch, and according to her obit, she appeared in photos with him in a profile done once she was famous.

But, with To Set A Watchman, which was virtually an early (although very different) draft of Mockingbird, she painted a father with racist attitudes.

So, has anyone worked out what the true attitude of her father was? 

News of no interest to Republicans, I presume

Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries - The New York Times

It's a bit weird, isn't it, that despite some Republican friendly East coast states of the US having increasing coastal flooding problems, Republicans seemingly don't believe this could be tied to global warming.  Because, I guess, they just don't believe AGW is possible, as the water laps around their ankles?

OK, time for a new theory, that ties in with my last post.

The Right in American is currently so bizarrely nutty (hello, Trump: but also nonsensical tax plans and climate change denialism of the rest of the candidates) that there might be a hitherto unknown pathological cause.  A mosquito borne virus, perhaps?

You heard it here first...

A panic worth having?

At first I thought that the spread of the zika virus might not be as big a global health concern as some seemed to think.  (Although, of course, it would be a big worry if you were planning on having a baby in a poor area with poor mosquito control.)

But more recent articles tend to make it sound definitely worth worrying about for a variety of reasons.

This article in the New York Times talks about its possible mental health consequences, for example:

The possibility that in utero infection could contribute to mental illness first emerged with an observation in 1988 by Finnish researchers that children born during the 1957 Asian flu epidemic had high rates of schizophrenia later in life.

Researchers have long noted that schizophrenia is highest in adults who were born in winter and early spring — just after the peak of flu season.

But estimates of the size of the risk vary. One 2011 analysis of other studies estimated that maternal infections of any kind account for 6 percent of all cases of schizophrenia. (Researchers have done very large studies in Finland, Sweden and Denmark because they have cradle-to-grave records on millions of citizens.)

By contrast, a 2001 study of adults born to mothers infected with rubella, or German measles, during the last American epidemic, which lasted from 1964 to 1965, found that 20 percent had schizophrenia symptoms. The expected rate among adults is below 1 percent.

Dr. Alan S. Brown, the director of birth cohort studies at Columbia University Medical School and leader of that study, said it was “certainly possible” that Zika posed a similar risk, “although ideally, you’d want a controlled study.”

And at Vox, this article starts with the surprising information that:

Before last year, scientists knew very little about the Zika virus. As late as 2007, there had only been 14 documented Zika cases in the world. Research on the virus was so limited, in fact, that printouts of all the world's published literature could basically fit into a shoebox.

A bit of a worry...

It'll blow your mind

A Journey recommended

A couple of weeks ago, SBS showed a Chinese comedy fantasy which really catches one's attention with its opening sequence.

The movie is Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, and its only towards the end that it became clear (to me) that it was like the origin story for the Buddhist Monkey King.  It is on SBS on Demand., and I think its success in China was well deserved.

A salacious South Seas post (part 5)

Well, time to remember that cultural misunderstandings, bacteria and viruses can all conspire to darken the picture.    From this post, I also get the answer to the earlier question about Captain Cook's attitude to his crew's frolics:

Europeans frequently misinterpreted Polynesian codes regarding dress and bodily performance. For example, as Anne Salmond has explain in Aphrodite’s Island, a history of Europeans and Tahitians in which sex plays a central role, “in Tahiti people stripped to the waist in the presence of gods and high chiefs, and a high-ranking stranger was often greeted by a young girl swathed in layers of bark cloth who slowly turned around, unwinding the bark from her body until she stood naked—a ritual presentation with no necessary implication of sexual availability.”[7] Captain Bougainville’s men, who had not seen women in many months, misunderstood the ritual’s meaning, and some of the girls sent to greet the first European ships in Tahitian harbors narrowly escaped (and sometimes did not escape) sexual assault. Not at assaults were simply the results of misunderstandings, of course. A little over a decade later, Captain James Cook would discipline his men for raping women on those same Tahitian beaches.[8]

Consensual or not, sex between Europeans and Islanders had devastating results. Rates of death due to diseases, particularly those sexually transmitted, were extremely high. As Nicholas Thomas notes, the extent of population decline “is highly debatable, indeed this is one of the most controversial topics in public as well as academic argument about the Pacific past.”[9] The debates stem from the fact that there is no reliable data on population before contact. What is clear, though, is that populations declined significantly. In the Marquesas, Thomas’s particular area of expertise, he notes that between 1800 and 1840 the population dropped from at least 35,000 to under 20,000.[10] Howmuch the population had already declined before 1800 is not clear. Some sailors were unaware of the effects of these diseases, but most Islanders and Europeans figured out what was going on; figuring out how to stop it was another, far less successful, matter.

On Cook’s third and final voyage, the one on which he “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands, his crew was riddled with gonorrhea and syphilis after their 1777 summer in Tahiti. Cook demanded that his crew cease sexual contact with Islanders. He threatened his crew with harsh punishment, including flogging (something he did far more often on the third voyage than on the first two, as Gananath Obeyesekere famously emphasized), if they had sex with women. Upon their return to the islands, nine months later, they approached Maui, a considerable distance from Kaua‘i, where they had been earlier in the year. Cook surmised that the people of Maui were indeed of the same people group as those in the western Hawaiian islands. He quickly published an order prohibiting any contact with the islanders. It was already too late, though. He recorded the November 26, 1778 entry in his diary: “Women were also forbid to be admited [sic] into the Ships, but under certain restrictions, but the evil I meant to prevent by this I found had already got amongst them.”[11] The population of the Hawaiian Islands was decimated.

 But back in Europe, Michael Sturma (who I quoted earlier) explains how the tales of Tahitian sexual mores became a public sensation:

Sturma writes that this publicity lead to a bit of revisionism by Cook and some colleagues, who started insisting that the Tahitian women who not as bad as all that - those who were married were generally chaste, and not all of the unmarried were throwing themselves at the sailors.   Sturma suggests it was concern over the effect on public morality that was behind this.   Indeed, there was a bit of press backlash against the book:

Hawkeworth's Account raised so many unsettling questions about the true nature of society that he was widely attacked in newspapers, journals and pamphletts for his 'immoral' book.   The resulting furore was blamed for sending the Account's now notorious editor to an early grave six months later.

But, the sensationalism continued:

The general English and European fascination with Tahiti was aided by a 2 year visit to Britain of Omai, a handsome young man with good manners brought there courtesy of one of Cook's ships in 1773.  A brief summary of how his time went in England can be found here.  

It would seem that all of this was part of the motivation for setting up the London Missionary Society (although the "need" for conversion of India and other parts of the world played a large role too.)  

But things did not go easily for them when it came to Tahiti (in 1797):

Nearly seven months later Wilson anchored the Duff off the island of Tahiti, after a voyage via Gibraltar and Cape Horn. Seventeen missionaries were to disembark here, including all those who were married. As the island came into view, the missionaries on board began to sing a hymn, `O'er the gloomy hills of darkness'. The weather was bad, so Wilson moored out at sea for the night, dropping the missionaries by boat around midday the next day. ...

    The men Wilson dropped that morning wore tail coats, high stockings, knee breeches and buckled shoes; their wives wore bonnets and heavy cotton skirts. The missionaries' immediate instructions were commonsensical, if vague: to make as friendly contact with the islanders as possible, build a mission house for sleeping and worship, learn the language of the island and, until able to preach in the native tongue, offer examples of `good and co-operative living'. The Tahitian king, Pomare, who came to examine them from the beach, wore a girdle of bark cloth, jewellery of shark teeth and shells, and a crown-bunch of feathers. He rode astride a slave crawling on hands and knees.

The missionaries who had been left in the South Seas quickly discovered an unforeseen problem. Since Cook's voyages, other ships of exploration and whaling (Russian, French, British and American) had paid visits to the islands. Rum and firearms were now a part of life, as were disagreements and occasional violence between crews and islanders. The natives watching the missionaries disembark from the Duff were as wary about their intent and greedy for their possessions as they were incredulous at the sight of them. The introduction of firearms into Tahitian warfare had made the islands increasingly dangerous places, but most dramatically, bacterial diseases carried to Polynesia by European crews had had a terrible impact on the populations: some islands had seen their numbers decimated. Though the islanders seemed to attribute these plagues to vengeance by their own gods, they were still wary of the crews. The missionaries left on Tahiti probably would not have obtained Pomare's permission to settle at all, had it not been for a marooned English-speaking Swedish sailor called Peter Haggerstein, who had been living on the island for four years and who was able to act as interpreter.

    Of those left on Tahiti, eight of the seventeen soon wanted to leave. Another two, the harness maker Benjamin Broomhall and the Reverend Thomas Lewis, `went native'; the latter having first taken a native woman as his wife. (Broomhall was never seen again; Lewis's broken skull was found two years later.) Most of the deserters left Tahiti aboard the first ship to stop there, a British vessel on its way to Sydney two months later. Two of them had gone mad; one missionary suffered a nervous breakdown, during which he tried to make love to King Pomare's wife and teach Hebrew to her court.

Yet, they persevered and attained success, as you can read at the previous link.

And this seems as good a point as any to end this bit of public self education.

A salacious South Seas post (part 4)

So far, we haven't much touched the matter of same sex sex in the Pacific.   From this review of a 2003 (very academically oriented, by the sounds) book, it would seem that being a good looking fellow on a trip with Captain Cook could get you involved in a bit of unwanted attention with the local royalty:

Although most commentators focus on the relationships between Cook's men and the Polynesian women, his journals show "an inscription of masculinity that is not yet our own" (p. 45), particularly in the form of the aikane, comely young men who were apparently sexual favorites of the Hawaiian royalty. According to one report from Cook's voyage, "their business is to commit the Sin of Onan upon the old King" (p. 45). Strikingly, the aikane does not exhibit gender inversion, as do the Tongan fakaleiti, the Tahitian mahu, or the Samoan fa'fafine, which will be discussed later. Perhaps because of the influence of Said's model of the male Western conqueror and the feminized subaltern, these gender-inverted figures are far better known than the aikane.

Wallace is particularly interested in the attempt by Cook and his men to write about the phenomenon of the aikane with objective disinterest, which stands in contrast to their reports of active participation in the sexual customs that take place between men and women on the islands. There are, however, breaks in the record, when Cook and his men reveal some level of participation in the erotic relations between men in Polynesia. The Hawaiian nobleman Kalinikoa reportedly asked to retain at least one of the attractive men from Cook's crew as an aikane. Far from rejecting the proposal out of hand, Cook, his man, Kalinikoa and his aikane exchanged names "in the Tahitian manner" (p. 47), which Westerners at least conceived as a kind of Polynesian male-male marriage ceremony. Subsequent scholars have found in these reports evidence that there was "something about" some of the sailors, particularly Captain Bligh. As Wallace argues, the point is not that scholars and film-makers have used such anecdotes to question Bligh's sexuality, but that these pejorative representations produce--and continue to reproduce--a modern understanding of homosexuality"(51).

  More about the cross cultural confusion here:

Funny how none of this intrigue during Captain Cook's time in Hawaii seems to get a mention in popular histories about him.

Must be about time to wind this all up.  One more part to write....

A salacious South Seas post (part 3)

OK, not exactly South Seas this time, but if you thought the Tahitians were relaxed about sex, seems to me that they may have had some fierce competition from the pre-contact Hawaiians.

This chapter from a book gives an eyebrow raising account of societal sex arrangements, and there are too many matters of explicit detail to mention here; but in terms of general description of a relaxed attitude to sex and relationships, this section is worth reading:

Until fairly recently, the birth of an infant to an unmarried female in Hawai‘i, as elsewhere in Polynesia, was not a problem for her or society. Her fertility was proven, and the infant was wanted and taken care of by the extended ‘ohana (family). illegitimacy, in the Western sense, is inapplicable in regard to traditional Hawai‘i (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee, 1972, p. 96).

While betrothals occurred, occasionally arranged by parents of chiefs or by other prominent persons, such formalized relationships were uncommon (Kamakau, 1964, pp. 25-26). Specific words for “husband” and “wife” did not exist; he was simply called kane (man) and she wahine (woman) (Handy and Pukui, 1958. p. 51; Sahlins, 1985, p. 23).

Individuals stayed together or not by choice rather than by commitment or obligation. One member of a pair could be monogamous while the other was polygamous. While public announcements of intentions to stay together among ali‘i were noteworthy and often elaborate affairs, they were uncommon. David Malo, an advisor to King Kalakaua III and an Hawai‘ian convert to Christianity, wrote in 1839: “Of the people about court there were few who lived in marriage. The number of those who had no legitimate relations with women was greatly in the majority. Sodomy and other unnatural vices in which men were the correspondents, fornication and hired prostitution were practiced about court” (Malo, 1951, p. 65) ⁹.

A “pairing” ceremony among commoners was even more rare (Sahlins, 1985, P. 23). Couples that wanted to sleep and live together just did so (Sahlins, 1985, p. 23). Typically, no contract was expressed openly, although there probably was a vague set of expectations that linked the couple. Sahlins (1985, p. 23) expressed the situation thus: “For the people as for the chiefs, the effect of sex was society: a shifting set of liaisons that gradually became sorted out and weighted down by the practical considerations attached to them.”

Monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry coexisted among ali‘i and among commoners. Often, polygamy involved siblings (Morgan, 1964, p. 361).¹⁰ Taking another sexual partner usually was acceptable if the first mate knew about the relationship and sanctioned it. Secret relationships were not approved of, however, although the discovery of such a relationship usually was disruptive only temporarily. Such sexual license greatly disturbed the early Christian missionaries. The “crimes” most commonly reported by the haole (foreigner, now refers to Caucasians) to occur among the Hawai‘ians, recorded as being 4-5times more common than theft or property crimes, were fornication and adultery (Sahlins, 1985, p. 24); these terms, of course, had no meaning to the Hawai‘ians.

“Adultery” came to be defined by the Hawai‘ians as “sexual activity with a nonregular partner within the hale. If the coitus occurred outside the house in private, it was not a problem to the Hawai‘ian, since it did not disrupt the status quo.

Sexual exclusivity was not associated with “marriage.” Such an idea would have been unusual to Polynesian society (Danielsson, 1986, p. 115). Gregersen (1982, p. 250) reported monogamy in only 30 of 127 Pacific island cultures studied, the rest of the cultures being polygamous. Worldwide, Ford and Beach (1951, P. 108) found multiple mateships permitted in 84% of the 185 societies in their Human Area Files sample.

Relationships were dissolved at the desire of one or both partners. Sex with others was not seen as a cause for separation. Jealousy was considered unwarranted. Handy and Pukui (1958, pp. 57-58) wrote: “… where love of one man by two women were involved [and vice versa], it was considered bad manners (maika‘i ‘ole, “not good”) for apunalua (lover) to hold spite or malice in their hearts towards each other. The very existence of the formal [punalua] relationship. . . worked against ill feeling...

The Christian missionaries really had their work cut out for them!

But it's funny:  no matter how libertine a society can organise itself in some respects, it seems that it can't resist having silly rules about something:

 Under the kapu system, there were forms of bondage and slavery, human sacrifice (Valeri, 1985), and infanticide (Malo, 1951, p. 70; Kamakau, 1961, p. 234). While adult females were afforded many rights and some had great status, it was kapu for them to eat certain foods; they could be put to death for eating pork, certain kinds of bananas or coconuts, and certain fish (Malo, 1951, p. 29). Poi and taro⁴ (basic staples of the Hawai‘ian diet) were not to be eaten from the same dish by males and females. Furthermore, in certain circumstances upon threat of death, adult males and adult females were not allowed to eat together, although they could have sex together. Religious laws controlled eating more than they controlled sex.

(Yet another instalment to come...)