Hi

This is a selective invite to a new forum. By ‘selective’ it means that those whom I have sent this invitation to for one reason or another impressed me with their writing and fields of interest on their website, blog, or from somewhere else and sometimes it was just the feeling I got between the lines that I thought they might be interested in this type of forum.

It’s called, Nowhere Forum and whenever convenient please visit to have a look and read the introduction, “Welcome to Nowhere Forum” in the ‘Center’ section to get an idea of the intent for it. It has been been online for a couple of months now and has 13 participants thus far. There’s no rush to fill it up with names or postings, the premise is somewhat different than other forums and the reasons for that are also noted in the intro.

Though this invitation can be regarded as a solicitation for registrants, my personal attitude is more that I’m letting some individuals know of a place on the map and they can decide for themselves if it suits their itineraries.

Thank You and Best Wishes

Daniel

Nowhere Forum

I decided instead on a more conservative route though. Selective recompiles should keep my system from being borked while giving me the maximal experiential benefits e.g. recompiling Firefox; KDE etc. instead of recompiling obscure libraries and dependencies I have no idea about.

I managed to genkernel a post-localmodconfig kernel that has a few other changes from the stock Sabayon one, like the specific optimization for the Pentium4 architectures and selection of a low-latency desktop build. No huge differences I feel on this level yet, if any. I think recompiling the kernel doesn’t really have a huge effect on performance, lest you are talking about drastic recompiles that include some really big patches.

I’m satisfied with my system now, though. Man, I never knew that Linux could be faster.

If not for the fortunate surrender to the premise that humans are indeed unpredictable, I would not have so quickly passed the above comment about psychology. In my descriptions I do not seek to simply call psychology a “social” science, but I like to see what method gains the most brilliant insights; and it is from that method that I proceed. Look at economics, where people are starting to, in consideration of the failure of economic “laws” that have caused the economic crises of today, trying to rewrite the entire field of economics by rebutting its basis in “science” and “prediction”, instead attempting to convince economists to see human economic behaviour as something rather more speculative and critical. It would be indeed sexy if psychology was to slant towards a similar orientation, for good, instead of going with “revolutions” and “with the flow”.

But I would not campaign now for such a radical interpretation of psychology; psychology’s affiliation with science, to a certain degree, has up to today allowed it to compete with its “harder” cousins like psychiatry with theories that stem from critical and humanistic origins e.g. the triumph of humanistic psychology in 1960s over biopsychiatry. If not for the basic grounding in the retroductive method of science, it is difficult to consider how psychology could have survived till the 21st century; instead it could have been lumped together with astrology; new-age and various other movements without scientific and public legitimacy. It could even be dismissed immediately as literature or mere philosophy by the people who live in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and conquer of Reason – which, will bring us back a full circle, to perhaps the academic interpretation of the human as a fully scientific being. Hence, I am thankful of all these “artists” in psychology for their contributions finally.

And I thought Burn After Reading was watchable. Not brilliant, but watchable. I didn’t like that woman with the short hair and the balding guy who took an interest in her, but the ending was okay. Brad Pitt was annoying. And the very starting part and last part where they zoomed in from some satellite was kinda weird (i.e. lame) but okay. 5.5/10 at least.

MUST WATCH REVOLUTIONARY ROAD. And Match Point. And Cassandra’s Dream. #hellodarkirony