In Mission With Afghan Police, Issues of Trust
After the Americans set up cots in their new barracks at the police headquarters — an unfinished concrete building with no doors, windows or electricity — they moved quickly into their first task: determining the competence of their Afghan partners. Using packages of Meals Ready to Eat to simulate vehicles, Lieutenant McCarthy gave a lecture on convoy operations in an ambush. And then the Americans and Afghans together acted out maneuvers to counter ambushes. The Afghans spoke no English, the Americans spoke no Dari or Pashto, and there were only two translators, neither of them fully fluent in English. Hand signals and sound effects would have to suffice. Still, the Americans came away pleasantly surprised. “These guys have definitely done it before,” said Sgt. First Class Craig Pritchard, the platoon sergeant. Indeed, many were like the police company commander, Nyaiz Muhammad. Short, stocky and bald, with a white beard that made him look older than his 47 years, he took up arms against the Soviets in the 1980s. By contrast, his American counterpart, Lieutenant McCarthy, tall and trim at 24 with a smooth-shaven Burt Lancaster chin, was on his first deployment. The police chief, Gulam Maideen, said what other Afghan police officers seemed to have on their minds. “I don’t want more training,” he said. “I want the Americans to fight with me.”
In 1994, Microsoft corporation designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk approached Brian Eno to compose music for the Windows 95 project. The result was the six-second start-up music-sound of the Windows 95 operating system, The Microsoft Sound (.wav). In the San Francisco Chronicle he said:[19] The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 31/4 seconds long.” I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.”
“We buy a new house, we get accustomed to it,” says Professor Lyubomirsky, who studies what psychologists call “hedonic adaptation,” a phenomenon in which people quickly become used to changes, great or terrible, in order to maintain a stable level of happiness.
To the last time I will ever ride bus 25.
“All this, however, presupposes codes or axioms which do not result by chance, but which do not have an intrinsic rationality either. It’s just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift.” — Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands
