Month: July 2009

A new technology called compressive sensing slims down data at the source

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

ScreenHunter_15 Jul. 15 12.33 When you take a photograph with a digital camera, the sensor behind the lens has just a few milliseconds to gather in a huge array of data. A 10-megapixel camera captures some 30 megabytes—one byte each for the red, green and blue channels in each of the 10 million pixels. Yet the image you download from the camera is often only about 3 megabytes. A compression algorithm based on the JPEG standard squeezes the file down to a tenth of its original size. This saving of storage space is welcome, but it provokes a question: Why go to the trouble of capturing 30 megabytes of data if you’re going to throw away 90 percent of it before anyone even sees the picture? Why not design the sensor to select and retain just the 3 megabytes that are worth keeping?

It’s the same story with audio recording. Music is usually digitized at a rate that works out to roughly 32 megabytes for a three-minute song. But the MP3 file on your iPod is probably only 3 megabytes. Again, 90 percent of the data has been discarded in a compression step. Wouldn’t it make more sense to record only the parts of the signal that will eventually reach the ear?

Until a few years ago, these questions had a simple answer, backed up both by common sense and by theoretical precept. Sifting out the best bits without first recording the whole signal was deemed impossible because you couldn’t know which bits to keep until you’d seen them all. That conclusion now seems unduly pessimistic. A suite of new signal-processing methods known as compressed or compressive sensing can extract the most essential elements “on the fly,” without even bothering to store the rest. It’s like a magical diet: You get to eat the whole meal, but you only digest the nutritious parts.

More here.

Mad, bad, and dangerous, he understood what women wanted

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Katha Pollitt in Slate

090710_BOOKS_byron Not many writers furnish enough material for a biography focused entirely on their love lives. In his short life (1788-1824), George Gordon, Lord Byron, managed to cram in just about every sort of connection imaginable—unrequited pinings galore; affairs with aristocrats, actresses, servants, landladies, worshipful fans, and more in almost as many countries as appear on Don Giovanni's list; plus countless one-offs with prostitutes and purchased girls; a brief, disastrous marriage; and an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. And that's just the women! It's a wonder he found the time, considering everything else on his plate. He composed thousands of pages of dazzling poetry, traveled restlessly on the continent and in the Middle East, maintained complex relationships with friends and hangers-on, wrote letters and kept diaries and read books constantly, boxed and took fencing lessons and swam, drank (prodigiously), suffered bouts of depression and paranoia and physical ill-health, and, in his later years, joined in Italian and Greek liberation struggles. Just tending the menagerie that he liked to have about him—monkeys, parrots and macaws, dogs, a goat, a heron, even, while he was a student at Cambridge, a bear—would have driven a lesser man to distraction.

More here.

David Foster Wallace lives on for an “Infinite Summer”

Posted on by Azra Raza

From Salon:

Book There are many ways to cope with death, but founding an online book club is a pretty unique approach. “When I heard that David Foster Wallace had died, it was like remembering an assignment that had been due the day before,” said Matthew Baldwin. A blogger who regretted never having finished “Infinite Jest,” Baldwin founded InfiniteSummer.org, a Web site and collaborative reading experiment that creates a vast literary support group for completing the late author's 1,079-page tome over the course of this summer.

Published in 1996, “Infinite Jest” was David Foster Wallace's second, and ultimately final, completed novel, and has become known equally for its sprawling attention to detail, its near impenetrability and its effectiveness as a doorstop. Often compared to experimental fiction like “Ulysses” and “Naked Lunch,” its list of characters (and their fictional filmographies) alone may be longer than some entire novels. In the foreword to the paperback release, penned by Wallace's friend and contemporary Dave Eggers, he promises that the book isn't actually daunting, and that its author is indeed a “normal person.” But that's no consolation to the legions who have quit reading the book partway through. Baldwin admits that before he started the project, he had only read about 75 pages — but they'd stuck with him. “It sat in my library for so long that I no longer even saw it when I scanned the shelves,” he said. “But based on what little I had read, I knew for a fact that I would enjoy all 1,000 pages. I can't say that with such certainty for, say, 'Don Quixote.'”

More here.

OUT OF OUR MINDS: HOW DID HUMANS COME DOWN FROM THE TREES AND WHY DID NO ONE FOLLOW?

Posted on by Azra Raza

From Edge:

VanessaWoods150 When children turn four, they start to wonder what other people are thinking. For instance, if you show a four-year-old a packet of gum and ask what's inside, she'll say, “Gum.” You open the packet and show her that inside there's a pencil instead of gum. If you ask her what her mother, who's waiting outside, will think is in the packet once it's been reclosed, she'll say, “Gum,” because she knows her mother hasn't seen the pencil. But children under the age of four will generally say their mother will think there's a pencil inside — because children this young cannot yet escape the pull of the real world. They think everyone knows what they know,
because they cannot model someone else's mind and in this case realize that someone must see something in order to know it. This ability to think about what others are thinking about is called having a theory of mind.

Humans constantly want to know what others are thinking: Did he see me glance at him? Does that beautiful woman want to approach me? Does my boss know I was not at my desk? A theory of mind allows for complex social behaviors, such as military strategies, and the formation of institutions, such as governments.

More here.

the consititution as work of art

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Constitution

In the past century, we have had dozens upon dozens of studies of the origins of the Constitution. Historians, jurists, and legal scholars have all tried to explain the sources and the character of the document. Slauter’s book is the first full-scale effort by a literary scholar to bring the special tools of his discipline to bear on the Constitution and its cultural origins. The result is a smart, strange, and frustrating book. It is a curious mixture of insight and artifice, of careful readings and runaway metaphors, of persuasive arguments and imaginative exaggerations. The historian’s conception of causality is often bent out of shape, and the connections between events become ambiguous and elusive. Still, Slauter’s prose is almost always clear and straightforward, avoiding all of the usual jargon that has plagued much literary writing over the past several decades. Slauter has divided his book into two parts: “The State as a Work of Art” and “The Culture of Natural Rights. ” Each of these parts has three chapters, only loosely related to one another. Consequently, the book is really a collection of six essays on various aspects of the cultural origins of American constitutionalism. Slauter begins by emphasizing a point of which the American Revolutionaries were well aware–that governments and constitutions were the products of a society’s manners, customs, and genius, and at the same time the producers of those cultural inclinations and distinctions. There was a mutual influence, a feedback and an interplay, between government and society, and it was the recognition of these relations that made an eighteenth-century theorist such as Montesquieu so subtle and significant. No doubt the nature of the government had to be adapted to the customs and the habits of the people, but the government itself could shape and reform the character of the people. “It is in the rich terrain of the period’s shifting desire to see politics as an effect of culture and culture as an effect of politics,” observes Slauter, “that it makes sense to consider, as I do in this book, the state as a work of art and the cultural origins of the Constitution of the United States.”

more from Gordon S. Wood at TNR here.

Development in Dangerous Places

Posted on by Robin Varghese

Collier_34.4_soldier2 Over at Boston Review, a forum on Paul Collier's work on poverty, economic development and military intervention, with Collier, Stephen Krasner, Mike McGovern, Nancy Birdsall, Edward Miguel, and William Easterly. William Easterly:

I have been troubled by Paul Collier’s research and policy advocacy for some time. In this essay he goes even further in directions I argued were dangerous in his previous work. Collier wants to de facto recolonize the “bottom billion,” and he justifies his position with research that is based on one logical fallacy, one mistaken assumption, and a multitude of fatally flawed statistical exercises.

The logical fallacy leads to the conclusion that the poorest countries systematically fall behind everybody else in economic growth. Of course they do! Collier selected countries that were on the bottom at the end of a specific period, so naturally they would be more likely to have had among the worst growth rates in the world over the preceding period. This ex post selection bias makes the test of poor-country divergence invalid. The correct test would be to see who is poor at the beginning of the period and then see if they have worse growth than richer countries in the following years. When the test is run this way, there is no evidence that poor countries grow more slowly than richer countries.

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unsticking the conservative brain

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Elephant__1247323986_1104

By definition, conservatism prefers the past to the present – in William F. Buckley’s famous formulation, history was something to be stood athwart and sternly told to stop – but over the past half year, the present has been particularly trying for American conservatives. Politically, they’re in the wilderness, with Barack Obama’s popularity stubbornly high, and wide Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. But there’s also a deeper sense of crisis: a worry within the movement that the Republican Party has lost its identity as the party of ideas. Like all political movements, modern conservatism was driven by demographic shifts and economic changes, but it was also an intellectual insurgency. It gave pride of place to thinkers like Milton Friedman, the towering free-market economist; Russell Kirk, the cultural critic who mapped conservatism’s currents back through centuries of Anglo-American philosophy and literature; and Whittaker Chambers, who eloquently warned of communism’s dangerous seductions. In postwar America, this powerful intellectual bedrock helped the Republican Party unite cultural conservatives, economic libertarians, and military hawks into an effective and cohesive political alliance.

more from Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe here.

Tragic hero: Laurie Taylor interviews Terry Eagleton

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

From New Humanist:

ScreenHunter_14 Jul. 14 20.11 Reading the first sentence of Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion in the October 2006 edition of the London Review of Books was not unlike watching a gunfighter kicking over a table of cards in an otherwise well-ordered saloon. “Imagine,” fired Eagleton, “someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”

And that was only the opening volley. Further down the page Eagleton proceeds to shoot up Dawkins's failure to do justice to the complexity of the God he sought to rout (“He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap”), his literality and lack of imagination (“Dawkins occasionally writes as though 'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness' is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn”) and his belief in the progressive nature of history (“We have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up”).

Entertaining, even exhilarating stuff. But no great surprise to those who've followed Eagleton's career in any detail. He has a reputation for entering other people's rooms and kicking over their cards. He appears equally happy whether outraging conventional students of literature at Oxford with his vigorous espousal of critical theory, confounding his long-time Marxist allies with his periodic dabblings with spirituality, or lambasting Martin Amis for his suggestion that British Muslims “must suffer” for the actions of suicide bombers. (These comments, said Eagleton, were “not unlike the ramblings of a British National Party thug”).

More here.

The Recession Is Over!

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

What America's best economic forecaster is saying.

Daniel Gross in Slate:

090713_$box_recessionTN The economic data that get the most play in the news— unemployment, retail sales—are coincident or lagging indicators and historically have not revealed much about directional changes in the economy. ECRI's proprietary methodology breaks down indicators into a long-leading index, a weekly leading index, and a short-leading index. “We watch for turning points in the leading indexes to anticipate turning points in the business cycle and the overall economy,” says Achuthan. It's tough to recognize transitions objectively “because so often our hopes and fears can get in the way.” To prevent exuberance and despair from clouding vision, ECRI looks for the three P's: a pronounced rise in the leading indicators; one that persists for at least three months; and one that's pervasive, meaning a majority of indicators are moving in the same direction.

The long-leading index—which goes back to the 1920s and doesn't include stock prices but does include measures related to credit, housing, productivity, and profits—hits bottom and starts to climb about six months before a recession ends. The weekly leading index calls directional shifts about three to four months in advance. And the short-leading index, which includes stock prices and jobless claims, is typically the last to turn up.

All three are now flashing green.

More here.

Vocal Minority Insists It Was All Smoke and Mirrors

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

John Schwartz in the New York Times:

031006_aldrin A recent feature,“ Dateline: Space,” displayed stunning NASA photographs, including the iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin standing on the lunar surface.

The second comment on the feature stated flatly, “Man never got to the moon.”

The author of the post, Nicolas Marino, went on to say, “I think media should stop publicizing something that was a complete sham once and for all and start documenting how they lied blatantly to the whole world.”

Forty years after men first touched the lifeless dirt of the Moon — and they did. Really. Honest. — polling consistently suggests that some 6 percent of Americans believe the landings were faked and could not have happened. The series of landings, one of the greatest gambles of the human race, was an elaborate hoax developed to raise national pride, many among them insist.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Important Thing

I've always loved the ways pelicans dive,
as if each silver fish they see
were the goddamned most important
thing they've ever wanted on this earth—
and just tonight I learned sometimes
they go blind doing it,
that straight-down dive like someone jumping
from a rooftop, only happier,
plummeting like Icarus, but more triumphant—
……there is the undulating fish,
……the gleaming sea,
there is the chance to taste again
the kind of joy that can be eaten whole,
and this is how they know to reach it,
head-first, high-speed, risking everything,

…………..and some of the time they come back up
as if it were nothing, they bob on the water,
silver fish like stogies angled
rakishly in their wide beaks,
—the the enormous
………………..stretching of the throat,
then the slow unfolding
……………………..of the great wings,
as if it were nothing, sometimes they do this
a hundred times or more a day,
as long as they can see, they rise
……back into they sky
to begin again—
………..and when they can't?

We know, of course, what happens,
they starve to death, not a metaphor, not a poem in it;

this goes on every day of our lives,
and the man whose melting wings
spatter like a hundred dripping candles
…………………over everything,

and the suicide who glimpses, in that final
seconds of her fall,
……all the other lives she might have lived,

…………..The ending doesn't have to be happy.
…………..The hunger itself is the thing.

by Ruth L. Schwartz
from: Edgewater;Harper Collins 2002

A Patchwork Mind: How Your Parents’ Genes Shape Your Brain

Posted on by Azra Raza

From Scientific American:

A-patchwork-mind_1 Your memories of high school biology class may be a bit hazy nowadays, but there are probably a few things you haven’t forgotten. Like the fact that you are a composite of your parents—your mother and father each provided you with half your genes, and each parent’s contribution was equal. Gregor Mendel, often called the father of modern genetics, came up with this concept in the late 19th century, and it has been the basis for our understanding of genetics ever since.

But in the past couple of decades, scientists have learned that Mendel’s understanding was incomplete. It is true that children inherit 23 chromosomes from their mother and 23 complementary chromosomes from their father. But it turns out that genes from Mom and Dad do not always exert the same level of influence on the developing fetus. Sometimes it matters which parent you inherit a gene from—the genes in these cases, called imprinted genes because they carry an extra molecule like a stamp, add a whole new level of complexity to Mendelian inheritance. These molecular imprints silence genes; certain imprinted genes are silenced by the mother, whereas others are silenced by the father, and the result is the delicate balance of gene activation that usually produces a healthy baby.

More here.

On Hand for Space History, as Superpowers Spar

Posted on by Azra Raza

John Noble Wilford in The New York Times:

Moon The first time I came to Cape Kennedy (as Cape Canaveral had been renamed) was in December 1965. Momentum was then building in the space race between the cold war superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. It all started with the Sputnik alarm in 1957 and then President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to the nation in 1961 to put astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade. The first Americans flew in the Mercury capsules, with room for only one pilot and limited maneuverability. The Gemini was a two-seater built for longer flights and outfitted with navigation systems for practicing rendezvous maneuvers essential for lunar missions. I was at the Cape for the tandem mission of Geminis 6 and 7. After some delay and improvisation, astronauts successfully steered the two craft to a rendezvous in Earth orbit.

Gemini 8, a few months later, was a disaster narrowly averted. Neil A. Armstrong was at the controls of the spacecraft, with David Scott as co-pilot. There had been no hitches at liftoff, and the astronauts docked with an orbiting Agena target vehicle, the mission’s principal objective. Then trouble struck. The Gemini began bucking and spinning because of a misfiring thruster rocket. Armstrong feared that he and Scott might lose consciousness from the high spin rate. They disengaged from the Agena, but still could not bring their spacecraft under full control. Armstrong managed to steer the Gemini to an emergency splashdown before the end of its only day in space. Four more Gemini missions followed, mainly trouble-free, concluding the project in November 1966. The way was cleared for the first flights of the three-person Apollo craft, the first of which was already at the Cape.

More here.

Kiarostami’s ‘Shirin’: watching a movie about watching a movie

Posted on by Jeff Strabone

by Jeff Strabone

KiarostamiWhile the world waits for the second Iranian Revolution, it’s important to recall that Iran is not just a place of political turmoil, nuclear ambitions, and theocratic dictatorship. It is also a place of great poetry and cinema, as the work of Abbas Kiarostami reminds us. How timely then that he has a new film out called Shirin that adapts—sort of—a twelfth-century romance and offers the world a stunning new achievement: a feature-length film whose narrative is made up entirely of reaction shots.

Kiarostami’s career has been distinguished by relentless experimentation, particularly in recent years. His film ABC Africa (2001), about AIDS orphans in Uganda, includes seven minutes of nocturnal darkness. Ten (2002) consists of ten scenes shot in a car with cameras on the dashboard. In each scene, the actors drove Dreyer 4through Tehran leaving the director and crew behind. Five (2003) has only five stationary shots depicting whatever passed in front of the camera.

Like Dreyer’s close-ups in La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) or Michael Snow’s zoom in Wavelength (1967), Shirin (2008) will join a very small group of films known for their singular use of a particular device. However dry or coldly formalist it may sound on paper, Shirin is a deeply moving film that follows the emotional narrative of a female audience’s reaction to watching a period melodrama full of the kind of romantic love that seems to be in short supply in modern Iran. 

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Desire Paths: Reading, Memory and Inscription

Posted on by Daniel Rourke

by Daniel Rourke

The urban landscape is overrun with paths. Road-paths pulling transport, pavement-paths and architectural-paths guiding feet towards throbbing hubs of commerce, leisure and abode.Beyond the limits of urban paths, planned and set in tarmac or concrete, are perhaps the most timeless paths of all. Gaston Bachelard called them Desire Paths, physical etchings in our surroundings drawn by the thoughtless movement of human feet. In planning the layout of a city designers aim to limit the emergence of worn strips of earth that cut through the green grass. People skipping corners or connecting distinct spaces vote with their feet the paths they desire. Many of the pictures on the right (from this Flickr group) show typical design solutions to the desire path. A delimiting fence, wall or thoroughfare, a row of trees, carefully planted to ease the human flow back in line with the rigid, urban aesthetic. These control mechanisms have little effect – people merely walk around them – and the desire path continues to intend itself exactly where designers had feared it would.

The technical term for the surface of a planetary body, whether urbanised, earth covered or extra-terrestrial, is regolith. As well as the wear of feet, the regolith may be eroded by wind, rain, the path of running water or the tiny movement of a glacier down the coarse plane of a mountain. If one extends the meaning of the term regolith it becomes a valuable metaphor for the outer layer upon or through which any manner of paths may be inscribed.

The self-titled first Emperor of China, Qín Shǐhuáng, attempted, in his own extravagant way, to re-landscape the regolith of time. By building the Great Wall around his Kingdom and ordering the burning of all the books written before his birth Qín Shǐhuáng intended to isolate his Kingdom in its own mythic garden of innocence. Far from protecting his people from the marauding barbarians to the West or the corrupting knowledge of the past Qín Shǐhuáng's decision to enclose his Kingdom probably expanded his subject's capacity for desire beyond it. There is no better way to cause someone to read something than to tell them they cannot; no better way to cause someone to dream beyond some kingdom, or attempt to destroy it, than to erect a wall around it. As we demarcate paths we cause desire to erupt beyond them. The regolith, whether physical or ethereal, will never cease to degrade against our wishes.

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Summer time and the eating is easy

Posted on by Gerald Dworkin

Ghareeb nawaz As usual, I am spending the summer in Evanston. My children and grand-children live in Chicago and no amount of whinging about winter weather (which comes in three kinds—cold, freezing, and how the fuck does anybody live here) could convince them to leave for California. And now that California seems to be going down the drain perhaps that is a reasonable decision.

As usual, when I spend the summer in Chicago, I try to catch up on the restaurant scene. This is no easy task as new places spring up like poppies and many of them are very good. Some of the necessary work is done by a number of blogs. The best of these are Chowhound and LTH Forum. The cognoscenti recognize the letters as standing for Little Three Happiness—an ancient dim sum establishment on Cermak in Chinatown.

The bloggers on these sites are generally quite reliable unlike the Yelpers who are too often like the commenters on many blogs—full of ignorance and glad to display it.

So we generally arrive with some short-list of places we want to try and there is always the joy of returning to old favorites which gives rise, in turn, to conflicts about whether to go someplace old which we know will be good or hazard a new one with the possibility of disappointment.

While Chicago is known for its high-end gastronomical temples—Alinea being the best known example—many of the most pleasurable experiences are places that we refer to as “the dump” with context making clear whether it is the Chinese Dump (Sun Wah on Argyle) or the Pakistani Dump (Ghareeb Nawaz on Devon).

My rule of thumb for Chicago restaurants is Q=1/P (where Q = quality and P = price).

The second rule is that the exceptions to the above mostly end in vowels. These include Alinea, Tru, Charlie Trotter (well the first name ends in a vowel), and, most recently a fantastic new place L2O which I cannot decide is a French restaurant with Japanese overtones or a Japanese restaurant with French ones and is, in any case, a tribute to seafood.


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Losing the Plot (The Hotel)

Posted on by Maniza Naqvi

By Maniza Naqvi

Hotel-lobbyOur infallibility—our goddamn innocence, Eileen, the infallibility of—-of—of– our goddamn—-goddammit!

He had slurred-his words when he had called her in the middle of the night-it was 4.22 a.m. to be exact because she had seen the numbers glowing on the digital bedside clock built into the dashboard at her bedside.

Then he said: Wow! D'ya see that? That's some lightning. Storm's coming in.

She had managed to mumble an outraged: Stan, do you know what time—-

But he had hung up.

She had fallen asleep—knowing that this was just Stan—continuing on with an unfinished argument earlier in the evening when he had come over for dinner at the hotel.

In the morning a phone call from the Embassy had awakened her. It was the security officer telling her to spend the day in the hotel—the security alert for traveling anywhere outside the hotel was a level three—

With time to kill, she had spent an hour on the treadmill at the gym, showered and then made her way leisurely to breakfast at 8.00 am. Two of her breakfast companions, the daily newspapers, were handed to her by a welcoming and cheerful hostess at the entrance as she was ushered to her table. Coffee was poured for her—and a waiter fussed around her before leaving to attend to the next incoming guest.

For you everyone is CIA! He's CIA-she's CIA! Honestly!

Eileen hadn't meant to overhear the conversation but it was hard not to, the hotel was packed it seemed—and the breakfast room was overflowing with guests. The young woman, at the next table over, her hands lathered in henna patterns, her face, too made up for this time of the day, probably a bride, newlywed, and probably last night in ballroom two, had just exclaimed this in exasperation to her young husband. The bride groom—perhaps 26—was hunched over his plate and kept glancing over his shoulders suspiciously replied: Well you look around yourself, and tell me what you see? The bride and the bridegroom caught her looking at them—Eileen smiled — they looked at each other self consciously and giggled. He squeezed her hand and she reached out and touched his cheek.

Eileen shifted her attention back to the newspapers——She scanned through them: The twelve Pakistani students arrested in Britain accused of plotting the worst terrorist attack in Britain's history—and all the hullaballoo in the newspapers and on TV and by the Government too—-it now appeared were innocent. No apologies from the British Government. Holbrooke was to be called to the Hague Tribunal to be cross examined in the war crimes trial of Karadzic to testify whether he had cut a deal with the war criminal. Karzai and Zardari were meeting in a conference presided over by Hillary Clinton in Washington DC. The Pakistani delegation was protesting the AF-PAK acronym. Hillary Clinton had made it clear—that unless Pakistan did something about the militants the US military would. Another drone attack in Bajaur–40 militants killed. Over 2 million people had been displaced in Swat. Photographs of babies, small children—– young and old women confined to the tents in the camps. A luxury hotel was being constructed nearby in Chitral by the same company which was doing brisk business in hotels in Kabul and Islamabad. General Mullen was warning about the Taliban being seventy miles from Islamabad. Again. The UNDP man kidnapped in Baluchistan had been released. One of the demands by the kidnappers belonging to the Baluchistan Liberation Army had been the release of 181 women—captured by the secret agencies. Discussions and plans were underway to sell thousands of acres of farm land, to foreign concerns based in the Middle-east— Fishermen's associations were demonstrating at Gwadar port over losing their access to the sea and their land rights—villagers were protesting for having been forcibly removed from the area. Altaf Hussain, based in London, had been visited by State department officials. Again. Altaf Hussain had given another tape recorded speech to his party workers sounding the alarm that the Taliban were waiting within Karachi to attack. And there was a news item about 45 rigs producing and supplying oil and gas across the country. The E&P companies would pay 12.5 % royalty and 40% income tax to the government. The Ministry of Energy had so far awarded 119 exploration licenses to public and private sector companies, while 100 new licenses with more incentives would be awarded under the new petroleum policy to local and foreign investors. Sixth largest coal reserves in the World. A memorandum of understanding presided over by Hillary Clinton was signed by Pakistan and Afghanistan in Washington DC to give India rights for transporting its goods through Pakistan to and from Afghanistan. At a tea time event organized at the Sindh Club Pervaiz Hoodbouy, had shown a scary video of madmen training and warned against the impending invasion of the Taliban. No doubt Eileen thought amused, nail biting and enthralled members must have listened to him while their Pathan drivers wait outside in the parking lot in the heat. Ahmed Rashid followed up on the same act at the Mohatta Palace, same audience, same servants waiting outside.–And Arundhati Roy too had made an appearance- to speak against the Taliban and to speak against the Americans at a Women's Action Forum meeting at the Karachi Press Club. Same audience, same servants waiting outside. Well,well, well—thought Eileen: Ms. Roy and the hoi polloi? Why on earth would Ms. Roy come to Pakistan to speak to Karachi's elite about Talibanization? Interesting. Eileen had never been a fan—but this was certainly useful. The photogenic opposition—singing from the same page as us on Talibanzation? Barrick Gold of Canada and Chile's Antofagasta planned to invest up to US$3 billion in a copper and gold mine at Reko Diq in the southwestern province of Balochistan. The single-largest foreign investment in Pakistan. But of course there were security concerns. More snippets on the oil and gas pipelines agreements between Pakistan, Iran, India, China. The usual lines about The Line of Control: a shot fired here—a shot fired there. A person had been shot dead in Badin for trespassing on a foreign concern's drilling site.

Nothing much there— Her attention reverted to the others in the restaurant. Bright, cheerful in the early morning, the room was transformed from the darkened restaurant atmosphere in the evenings. Now, white gauze blinds, delicately and intricately embroidered in white silk thread covered the ceiling to floor windows but let in suffused sunlight into the air conditioned room. Soft music, along with central air, though unfortunately the same four seasons Vivaldi tune over and over again— was soothing nonetheless. The guests talking amongst themselves created an energetic hopeful, happy hum of well being and assurance.

There, just beyond the young couple, were two tables occupied by military officers—one by Nato officers, the other by Pakistani officers. She recognized their nationalities and ranks from the colors of their uniforms and the stripes and braids at their shoulders and chests. At a third table sat a European General and a Pakistani General. A joint Nato-Pakistan conference was about to be kicked off in ballroom two.

The rest of the room was filled with laptop rollers—everyone in a business suit, the women graced theirs with scarves in deference to cultural sensitivities, several foreigners wore shalwar kameezes. Some looked corporate, they sat up straight—talked with their laptops open in front of them—the rest looked like bureaucrats—hunched over their cereals and newspapers. Bleary eyed and pale from long nights of staring at spread sheets and memos and the suffering from dysentery, no doubt. The chicken biryani and raitha she felt on the room service menu was a repeat intestinal offender. She watched as the six guys who came in every morning around this time, single file, made their way to the same space, in the shadow of a pillar-placed their keys on the table and headed for the buffet. Buffed and buzz cuts—resembling cyborgs, they seemed to be in residence at the hotel. They ate and it seemed went immediately back up to their rooms. They didn't seem to go anywhere else. She never saw any of them in the lobby, or in the other restaurants or the salon or spa, or bakery or gift shops, or at the pool, nor in the lawn or in the parking lot or in line with other guests at the security checks and metal detectors at the entrance to the hotel. They seemed to disappear right after breakfast, emerging only at the same time the next morning.

The atmosphere was having the desired effect on her. She had been uneasy these past few days. The visit to the refugee camp had been postponed. Now her nerves were steadily being soothed. The whole place had that effect on her. Someone had planned this place well. They had really understood the needs of their clients. The corridors of the hotel were decorated with modernized versions of Mughal miniatures of princes and princesses frolicking or in repose. Interspersed with these were the colorful vibrantly painted renditions of flowers, birds and animals and naïve scenes of the Khyber Pass; winding roads and snow peaks in Kashmir these “art works”, were the actual wooden panels, off of the trucks that plied the length and breadth of the country. From the port in Karachi: Keamari, to the Khyber Pass. Replicas of the stone statues of Buddha from Gandhara and Taxila stood amongst hot house orchids and lilies on console tables placed under large mirrors whose frames mimicked the intricately carved doorways oftenfound in rural villages. The intricate embroidered patterns which decorated traditional textiles all over the country had been industrially printed on to cushion covers and bedspreads—giving the sense of handicraft. Everything allowed the guests a sensation that they were experiencing culture and tradition without making them uncomfortable, everything was meant to be just enough— without being overpowering—it was captured, collected, muted for their viewing pleasure—a gentle reminder that conveyed to the guests that this was another country should they want it to be—but easily transferrable and in proximity to what was in their own comfort zone. Like the room service menu—burgers, fries, pizza, eggs any way you wanted, lomein noodles, pad thai—chicken vindaloo, chicken masala tikka, naan. The usual. Nothing unknown—nothing that would clash—scream out…

Still, ten days into her stay she had asked the hotel management for a change of rooms. At the price the hotel was charging, she had said to the young woman at the reception that the sounds of the drilling and the jack hammering throughout the day was unacceptable. The guest relations officer had taken the phone and had explained to her that they were fully occupied at the moment. Eileen had replied as calmly as she could that she would be down in a moment to have a word with him in person. You are welcome Madame he had replied—his voice all smiles.

When she came down, the lobby, with its marble floors gleaming, its fountain at the center gently gurgling, was bustling with guests. A workshop on health, in ball room one, had just let out for a coffee break. Somewhere a guitar strummed. And someone had broken out in song in the crowd behind her, out of tune. Reaching the guest relations officer's desk, she had sat down on the upholstered chair and leaned forward to be heard over the racket. Lowering her voice, she delivered the magic words in a menacing tone: US Dollars. Listen up. The expansion that you've got going outside my window—that construction site–my dollars are paying for it—So, one word from me about feeling uncomfortable here, and your little monopoly on hotels in this town will be history. All I need to do is to let customers like me—know how I rate you guys and that's it. Do you understand? Do you hear me? So what will it be?

A room was soon found. But a pre-moving in inspection uncovered that it was situated directly above the main gate to the hotel, Enraged she had demanded of the guest relations officer whether he was in his right senses—placing her at this security risk location—after all hadn't the truck full of explosives slammed into the front gate of the Marriot Hotel? The guest relations officer, appearing shaken by her fury had apologized quickly and called reception to search for another room. A short five minutes yielded results. Another room, he said had just opened up, this time he assured her it would be to her satisfaction. It was. Situated at the back of the hotel, on the first floor, so that in the event of an incident—she would be able to jump. To restore her confidence in the hotel's commitment to her comfort, the management had sent up an overflowing complimentary fruit basket and an invitation for a Swedish massage at her convenience either in her room or at the hotel spa and salon. Upon inquiry she learned that the hotel only had male masseurs—the incident at the massage parlor two years ago by the crazies at the Lal masjid had forced the hotel, concerned about security, to let go of its female masseuses.

The need to change rooms, truth be told was that it wasn't the noise of drills and hammers banging that had bothered Eileen—valium handled that well enough at night— Besides the hum of the strong central air conditioning—the shut windows and the heavy double drapes dulled any noise from outside—even banished sunlight. Rather it was the early morning view, once she drew back the curtains, which spoiled things for her. From her window she could see the day laborers filing into the huge construction site for the hotel—shivering in the cold at that time—wrapped in large chaddars, their feet shod in tattered chapals. Their daily wage not even half the cost of her morning coffee. It made no sense for her and seemed unfair for her to have to start the day that way: feeling out of sorts.

Eileen had booked her complimentary massage for five p.m. before her dinner with Stan. That would give her enough time before dinner which she knew would no doubt be trying. And sure enough dinner with Stan had been vintage Stan. Afterwards, she had gone to bed early —the massage had relaxed her. Before going to bed, she had fired off a quick missive. The subject line: Assessment. The text was a simple one liner: Needs further probing.

Stan had arrived early, that evening. She met him at the Italian restaurant on the first floor. He had brought along an article for her to read about the killing of civilians by the military in Afghanistan.

She had glanced at the title and nodded before setting it aside and said: Terrible! What a mess huh? But these things happen—those guys are under a lot of stress—and they're all coming from really stressful backgrounds. I can understand that.

He had gulped down the beer, wiped the sides of his mouth with his thumb and index finger and considered her for a long moment—-The difference between you and me he had said—is that you try to understand the murderers.

Whose side are you on Stan?

Side, Eileen?

Yeah Stan, whose side are you on? Because there are sides—y'know. This is not a game—this is real, real stuff—there is bad stuff here—and we're fighting it.

Is that a fact?

Yes, Stan, that's a fact. A capital F—fact.

Uh huh? Bad stuff? Facts. At some point we forget don't we as to who is the source of our facts? Us. We start the chain—send a memo, remember?—Send a memo to report an incident—that sets of an avalanche of discussion till it builds into a body of work, then we turn that into a report There are press releases—–and then that turns into news—we provide photographs, videos, corroborating evidence. An incident occurs. More evidence. Pundits are born. They write more reports—books. Archives full of them. Hearings are held—panel discussions-think tanks take matters up. Facts. The same journalists that were there at the build-up to the Iraq war—suddenly show up here—or report about here from there. A story is built up slowly. And it brews and brews. We're master brewers. One thing's for sure Eileen, Game over. We're the best. We've won. Now what are we fighting for? Who are we fighting? And why?

What are you talking about?

I don't know Eileen. I don't know. The violence—the coldness of it all.

Are you kidding! Stan, surely you understand, we live in the most non violent times. The world has seen incredible violence—Tamerlane—Chengiz Khan. We are fortunate to live in the most non violent times—The only problem is that nowadays every blip that occurs in a war is reported over and over again and over magnified.

Is that right? Every blip?

Just trying to tell you that this is a much more humane and non violent fight then ever was fought before. Stan, don't be on the wrong side of history on this one. We created the swamp, no doubt about it. Okay? We're cleaning it up. Don't get on the wrong side of this Stan. Don't get on the wrong side of history on this.

He had laughed. I'm trying not to Eileen! He had shaken his head: You are so good Eileen. Leave this. You should come and live with me Eileen, stay at my place while you're here. This place gives me the creeps—this hotel—-look at the people in here.

I like it here Stan.

How could you? They're all just us.

That's why Stan. Who are you?

Just look at them Eileen? The Nato guys over there and their body guards in the lobby—The suits in that corner—cutting deals—reading the riot act on loans to some bigwigs in the Government. Buzz cuts—flashy ties—big briefcases—Living in this “Gilded guest house”—internet connected—CNN ready—air conditioned—sanitized—securitized— Everything just so—everything a fantasy of how it should be. The natives, always in the roles of the waiters, the bellhops, the cleaners, the housekeepers—the doormen–indulging our every whim, like nannies watching us in the playground—indulgently, encouragingly urging us on in our every attempt at screwing their country over and all the while wearing ridiculous costumes to indulge our notions of them. Do you think this place is filled with guests who are tourists appreciating what the natives cannot, or guests who are here for commerce and war, taking what the natives must not?

Are you going native as you say, Stan?

You can remain the guest Eileen or you could decide to sleep with them. Did you ever think of it Eileen?

Are you involved here with someone Stan?

Haven't you thought about it Eileen? Sleeping with any of them?

Who? The hotel's hired help?

No the generals, the President—the Ministers?

What's the difference Stan? They're all the same to me. There I said it for you.

Order another Murree brew Eileen, will you.

What number are you on Stan?

I don't know—eighth?

So Stan, no one said you can't sleep with them—Please by all means do! Just make sure you don't forget what the terms of engagement are.

He had left early. Only to call back in the middle of the night waking her from her valium induced sleep:—Our infallibility—our goddamn innocence, Eileen!

No one had seen him or heard from him since. It had been three days. The café was closed. And the Embassy had informed her that unless he appeared in the next twenty four hours they would have to go public with a story.

Read : Losing the Plot (The Coffee Shop) Chapter One: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/losing-the-plot.html