Attention Jaffo.

This article, placebos can be as effective in curing depression as all those happy pills they make with Z's and X's in the names.

The confounding and controversial findings do not mean that antidepressants do not work. But clinicians and researchers say the results do suggest that Americans may be overestimating the power of the drugs, and that the medicines' greatest benefits may come from the care and concern shown to patients during a clinical trial -- a context that does not exist for millions of patients using the drugs in the real world.

The article's point is that it's not necessarily the placebo effect, so we can't just charge people $80 for thirty green M&M's and get the same results. Rather, it suggests that therapy is so effective that it reduces the effect of drugs to a background hum.

(no subject)

Last night, I downloaded a game demo for the first time. It's called Freedom Force. It's a comic book sort of game. Interesting controls, and I liked how the tutorial works.

I was surprised at how well it ran on my machine. The only thing I've upgraded internally since two years ago was the RAM and the hard drive. I still have a 400MHz Pentium II and a pretty tame video card. No fancy Athlon gigahertz megaprocessor. In fact, I think the Athlon might have come and gone since the P2/400 was invented. I haven't been following.

Maybe that's just because I'm still using Windows 98. But I hear even Windows XP doesn't have much higher requirements than 98.

I'm astonished, really.

(no subject)

Does this look real to you?