Lone Gunman

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:

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!)