Beirupdate, waltz

This guy believes Roethke’s Waltz is about a Waltz and not a fight and when I tell him he’s gone wrong I go warm inside like I’ve been floored but then I realize this guy knows shit about poetry. J saves me with noise and alcohol so we split to a bar called Dictateur like some French fuck factory and I sit across from a mum who thinks I’m her age and a designer who definitely does not look like Zooey Deschanel and answers my questions by blowing smoke in my face. I douse the table in beer and scotch and absinthe before everyone bails to a club called fuck knows what where fags and dykes and chubs prance to eighties classics no one remembers. The last thing I feel is neat Bombay in a large glass and a single drag from a cheap cigarette that burns it down to the nub. Soon we hustle cups and balls for pong with espresso vodka and scotch chasers and despite refraining from a decider we leave to streets of nausea and go Mad. The site says sanity is overrated but before we arrive J shouts lalala at the cabman and throws me to the tarmac. We know that Mad is hundreds down the line so I stand uncontrolled in showers of sprinkler water shouting and jumping as though a god and I feel untouchable and so we fight. With jeers and laughs J eggs for others to come and swing and they do and we make peace between nations when a boxer dances from across the street to punch me in the stomach. The next day I eat sheep spleen in a sandwich and then brains that taste of nothingness and dissolve on the tongue like promises to a girl I once knew.

Beirupdate, water

We walk taxied streets and waterfront promenades. No beaches only rocks and shirts and shiny shoes for half a dollar. In bright colours we walk under flags of gold and green that we see to be Hezbollah, so we pass bowed and hushed but then embarrassed when boyscouts hand us cookies. Then we drive. On roads like pouring water our driver shows us a small boy who returns to windows with factory alcohol in pink plastic. Our driver drinks and drinks a beer before we see Byblos. Roads and souks of cobbled stone draw a coastal paradise. We walk a pier of seaspray and perfect sights all night and faraway lights. From scotch to roadside drinks and beers and scotch again before local liquors that look like semen on ice and taste like anise and our host says fuck your life. Below and beyond the dead zone now we steal mugs and waltzing couples to the taste of hops and scotch some more. Our driver drinks and eats nothing and we laugh in the car while we ride with my hands over his eyes like we’ve already survived. We play five-o-one and finish on deuce checkouts but whoever wins concedes to the abyss while our hosts depart to goodbyes and girls not from around here. Meetings with Kiev and Hackney and Bogotá and lastly Glasgow who touches me beneath his jacket and tomorrow someone says we’re in the shallow part of the pool.

Way to Safety

Two months ago a telecommunications engineer from Beirut launched a start-up company that aims to permanently alter the face of urban warfare and eradicate gun-related crimes around the world.

Utilizing the hardware infrastructure we already have, Firas Wazneh wants to launch an application that uses GPS and wi-fi positioning to pinpoint the precise location of gunfire when heard through the microphones of any laptop or smartphone. It’s called Way to Safety.

“I was sitting and I heard gunshots, machine-guns”, he tells me, “and I turned on the media – nothing. The gunshots were really close. After two hours the media told us the gunshots originated near our house, so what the Hell is the country doing to locate these shooters? I thought of the idea [behind Way to Safety]. Being a telecommunication engineer I know that it is possible. Then I searched online, founded my company and thought of the solution, going mobile as an application.”

It’s a simple idea, and not without hurdles, particularly with regard to patents and privacy, but Wazneh is convincing and didn’t mind me writing about his ideas online. He explained the concept to me as follows:

“It’s an application, a mobile and PC application that will sound-triangulate the source location of gunfire. Whenever a shooter fires a gun we will triangulate the position of the shooter in about fifteen to twenty seconds, and our goal is to send this information to the security agencies primarily, then to the media and press, and it’s free to the people in the hot-zones. So when you hear a gunshot and you have the application you will get the knowledge, the data, where the shooter is, for free.”

Hot-zones refer to isolated areas of high gun-crime. One immediately thinks of Homs in Syria, or Tripoli in Lebanon.

The technology has been around since World War I, when well-placed microphones could locate the whereabouts of canons and artillery batteries. There’s a comparable city-wide system in the US, most recently implemented in Chicago. Wazneh concedes that he’s not doing anything new.

“In the US there’s a similar system for gunshot location that’s been around for sixteen years and it’s still growing and growing heavily. It takes a lot of money. The problem is it needs hardware; it’s not scalable. It costs about $50,000 per square mile per year, which the security agencies pay to this private company. They’re not scalable for this matter. They need help, they need equipment on the rooftops, they need to rent places, they need constant internet and electricity. That’s how my thought came to mind: to use the existing infrastructure that we have from phones and laptops, and locate the shot.”

Needless to say for the software to work it requires a lot of people to download the app. “The more people you have, the more accurate it will be,” claims Wazneh. “Basically you need ten to twenty people in a circle with a radius of 1.5km. That much and we will be accurate to 25 meters.”

When I press Wazneh on its usability and the reliance upon its own ubiquitousness, he explains how simple it would be to market, especially in the middle-east, where gun-related deaths are so prevalent. Not only in war-torn countries like Syria, but also in the United States, where the topic of shootings is so hot as to melt steel.

“Because of the scalability of my product,” he says, “being an application, of course I expect it to expand in America. They have about 10,000 people killed per year in gun-related crimes.

“I think it will market itself in the hot-zones,” he goes on. “For example, in Tripoli now they are firing. If I go to the media and tell them, use this application; it will tell you where the shooter is and where they’re shooting from. Or if I go to the media personnel in the hot-zones; if I tell them I need five or six of you to install this application and then I can tell you where the shooter is, and the direction he is shooting, and the quality or type of gun he is using, they will install it.”

Every gun produces a different sound when fired, as identifiable as a fingerprint. Wazneh and his partner will spend a lot of time mapping the sound-signatures of hundreds of weapons over the coming months.

Way to Safety is intended free for civilian users, which one suspects is essential given its prerequisite for popularity, so when I ask about monetizing the service I’m told they will find a way to sell the data to the media and emergency services.

“I’m working on the concept to maybe get investors to help me,” says Wazneh. After he’s granted proof of concept he can deploy the application to different platforms. “Now I’m getting permitted to one platform [Android], then investors will help me to hire mobile developers and draw other mobile users.”

The start-up is young, and already it’s secured its share of funding, but in November Way to Safety placed third in a social innovation competition hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum after someone raised a question about invasion of privacy. Listening in on a user’s microphone is a delicate issue, which Wazneh recognizes.

“It’s a really good question about privacy. Later on I came up with a solution to make the application mostly open source [code available to the public]. I will verify it with a different company, get my application certified by a different security company to show that it will not hack your phone, nor spy or spam you .”

Technology is not my scene, but where Wazneh is unclear about his strategy for commercializing the concept, he’s sure about his plan: to revolutionize gun control.

“My solution is not for a particular party,” he concludes. “It is for every party all over the world, so there is no more gunfire. It is an ideal thought but I want shootings to stop.”

You can follow their progress on Twitter.

Beirupdate, an intro

We arrive to streets and calls to prayer and generous hosts and shawarma. In minutes we find and fund a Beirut barfly where pink gorilla suits welcome girls onto the bar for a dance all in flames. Friendly tweeps colour the wall in warmth and invitation and soon I have followers and phone numbers from Brits, Lebanese, and Danes, girls and gays surfing the foam of bottomless beer. As the flame subsides and the monkey man leaves the stage a game of beerpong centres the room in clear cups and cheers. No one knows any rules but no one cares and my host tells us this is a perfect representation of society in Beirut. The staff no longer ask for empties and instead pour pitchers and pass along the bar. We meet W, a writer drinking who gets greeted across the street with a bottle of tequila and fresh oranges. It sours from the wrong side of the dead zone that’s been tracked all night by classic rock. I nudge his ribs and he smiles and we pour the stuff from a great height to our throats because we’ll never drink again.