The release of Firefox 3 is imminent, and to celebrate its launch, the Mozilla Foundation is organising Download Day 2008 - an attempt to break set the record for the most software downloads in a 24 hour period.
As I’ll be downloading this soon after release for both my home and work computer, I have decided that I might as well join in the merriment. Come, join us.
When it was live, I used to look forward to the next instalment of Creating Passionate Users; a blog on doing business in the IT sector where the writers were “all passionate about the brain and meta-cognition”. The entries were comical and the accompanying graphs were simple, elegant, and really were worth a thousand words.
Under regrettable circumstances it was closed indefinitely in April 2007, but luckily it’s still ‘up’, and for a good overview check out the last post which is a collection of all the greats.
It reminds me a lot of Indexed.
I’ve just written a post on one of my favourite topics; the placebo effect.
Triggered by the article Placebo is not what you think, it touches on the use of placebos by medical professionals (currently a banned practice) and the informed use of placebos by heroin addicts. Strangely enough, in the latter case the use by addicts is self-medicated:
Furthermore, studies done in the 1970s showed that when heroin users inject water (sometimes done deliberately to alleviate cravings when drugs are in short supply), they can experience drug-like euphoria and have been observed to show opiate-like physiological signs such as pupil constriction.
This last point also demonstrates that placebo is not solely about expectancy, belief or ‘being fooled’, as the heroin users knew they were injecting themselves with water. Conditioned responses play a role.
In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, moral virtues and their extremes are discussed. That is to say, personal characteristics and the extremes thereof. These extremes - or vices - are two of the three pillars of virtue, the third of which is The Golden Mean, or the Virtuous Mean. This mean is the position on the ’scale’ where a well-balanced, morally virtuous person would lie.
Here’s that scale:
| Vice of Deficiency | Virtuous Mean | Vice of Excess |
|---|---|---|
| Cowardice | Courage | Rashness |
| Insensibility | Temperance | Intemperance |
| Illiberality | Liberality | Prodigality |
| Pettiness | Munificence | Vulgarity |
| Humble-mindedness | High-mindedness | Vain-gloriness |
| Want of Ambition | Right Ambition | Over-ambition |
| Spiritlessness | Good Temper | Irascibility |
| Surliness | Friendly Civility | Obsequiousness |
| Ironical Depreciation | Sincerity | Boastfulness |
| Boorishness | Wittiness | Buffoonery |
| Shamelessness | Modesty | Bashfulness |
| Callousness | Just Resentment | Spitefulness |
Adapted from the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy’s General Introduction to Aristotle.
An abridged version of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is available from Squashed Philosophers; a site I’ve written about previously.
Trying to keep this site family-friendly (bring the kids… I’ll play with them) I thought a couple of asterisks would come in handy for my most recent find:
The den of iniquity that is Everything2 (I waste spend way too much time there) has a pearl of wisdom in Pseudomancer’s Books That Will Induce a Mindf**k.
By this it means books that give you thoughts so divine and perfect, they could almost be described as carnal. They excite you, they turn you on, they make you think beyond your present beliefs, they make you change your panties. I’ve read a few on the list, all of which I would recommend… a good list to look into, maybe?
(Above I’ve linked to the printable version of this page. I’ve done this as it was the only version I could find that gave me the full list!)