The Road to Elysium

I apologise for not having posted any replies to any of the comments being given on this site for the past week. Friday last week my son was rushed to the hospital because the doctor found out during the last minute that the infection to his eye was more serious than first imagined. We were there for a week, and came home just yesterday. Luckily they managed to save his eyesight, but it will be greatly reduced on his left eye. I can’t stop feeling guilt.. what if we had done things differently? Would things still have ended up like this? It was incredibly hard to hear the doctors say that my son will never be able to see things as normal with his left eye. It is now currently covered by some white substance, covering the pupil, and we have no idea about how long it will take before it disappears.

The people I’ve talked to have told me that though things are difficult, that I should be grateful that it didn’t turn out more serious, even if the incident is very serious in itself. But how can I not feel a sense of hopelessness and defeat when I know that my little boy might never set his two blue eyes on me again? The doctors suspect the white spot might fade with time, but they give me no estimate or guarantee that it will happen. Not a minute goes by without me thinking “What if I had done things differently?”, which is why this post is named Think Twice. Think twice before doing anything, or not doing anything. Not sitting down at that very moment to play with your child, because something else seems more important at the moment. Not picking your child up when he stretches his arms towards you. Not sitting your child on your lap when it so clearly wants to. You might regret it, for whatever reason. God knows I do.

A little over a month ago I wrote a post named The strangest thing, where something really odd had happened to me. Here I was thinking that some sort of surreal thing had happened, but a friend of mine named Pablo from Chile gave me an explanation that seemed more likely than what I thought had happened. It’s called the Forer Effect:

The Forer effect (also called personal validation fallacy or the Barnum Effect after P. T. Barnum’s observation that “we’ve got something for everyone”) is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. The Forer effect can, assuming their actual falsity, provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some pseudosciences such as astrology and fortune telling, as well as many types of personality tests.

And one more thing, namely Cold Reading:

Cold reading is a technique used by mentalists and fortune tellers, psychics, and mediums to determine details about another person in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than he or she actually does. Even without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by carefully analyzing the person’s body language, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses.

According to my friend, between the numbers 1 and 4, most people will choose 3. Between 1 and 10, people choose 7 or 10. The most common flower out there, for men at least, is the rose. Doing this type of thing to a woman is quite different though. I guess this explains why he wanted money, but who can know for sure but him. :)

Thanks Pablo for clearing stuff up.

I’ve finally reinstalled Fedora 10 on the Acer Aspire One, and documented the changes that I’ve made. Going over what I wrote earlier, I noticed that I was missing a few things, sorry! I’ve now gone through the document properly again, and things should be corrected. This time I tried a spinoff of Fedora 10, an XFCE Live CD. It works better than the one with GNOME. Give it a shot, and let me know how it went. :) To all the people who have sent in suggestions as to how the system can be improved, thank you! A lot of people are getting the benefit of that information. :)

So, to cut it short, the post Fedora 10 on the Acer Aspire One is now updated so that it comes with XFCE. :)