I was just updating my google reader subscriptions. About a year ago I had subscribed to a bunch of productivity and self-improvement type blogs, a lot of them with the underlying “think positive and great things will come your way” aspect. “Five ways to do this” “Eight reasons for improving your that” “Twelve new ways to keep track of your stuff”

You know, the kind of stuff aimed at telling you how to keep moving forward.

Half of those blogs stopped updating. I wonder what that means. Maybe just doing is a better way to keep moving forward rather than just reading and writing about it.

This has been a concern of mine for a while now. Pretty much everything we are exposed to on TV, radio, News, the Internet, etc is chosen for you. Someone even chooses which books appear at the book store and library. With enough willpower and effort you can dig to find out what you are missing, but the problem is we do not know what we are missing.

There are a number of variations on the motivation for filtering what you see. Mostly, it is financial profit. Someone wants you to stay tuned and come back so they ensure the content will compel you to stick around and soak up more advertising.

My guess is all this has more of an effect than missing out on a somewhat accurate general representation of reality. Take television – content is structured both to ensure you come back for more next week and to ensure you stay tuned through the ten minutes of commercials every fifteen minutes. Build suspense, pause, four or five companies tell you about a problem of some sort (crappy paper towels, expensive car insurance, weak erections, body odor, etc) and then insist their product is the only solution.

It matters to me that the people who decide what events are news also want to make sure I’ll sit through a tampon commercial or three to get it.

You can pan and zoom in on the image when you follow the link below.

This is the largest image I have ever created, pushing the boundaries of the software and hardware as far as they can go. It was unveiled at the Photo Plus Expo in New York on October 28, 2010 as a work in progress. A 25 foot light box was constructed to display the piece that has been printed on a new material being introduced by Epson.• The image size is 60 inches by 300 inches.• The flattened file weighs in at 6.52 Gigabytes. • It took four years to create.• The painting is comprised of almost three thousand individual Photoshop and Illustrator files. • Taking a cumulative total of all the files, the overall image contains over 500,000 layers.

via Times Square.

The recipient’s health insurance pays for the procedure and immediate care for both the donor and recipient, “but what if there are complications for the uninsured donor later? What if the recipient dies?”

Questions like that wouldn’t need to be asked if we still lived in a culture where people knew it is their responsibility to arrange their own health care. But that’s not the case. Now we just assume it is someone else’s responsibility – the employer, the government, etc.

If health insurance is so important, and it is, why do we trust it to someone else to provide, limit, and ration? Why do we tie something we need permanently to things that can be temporary like a job? People don’t even trust their car insurance or home insurance to their employer – why not?

And for something that better be efficient and tailored to our individual needs, why do we trust it to government which is hardly ever efficient and has to treat everyone the same way?

The answer to the question is the donor – the donor is responsible for his or her health care when complications from anything arise.

Give An Organ And Get Health Insurance Headaches : Shots – Health Blog : NPR.

I created this from two separate photos I took here in Hawaii. All I did in Photoshop was put the sunset picture behind the visible part of the building. All that you see of the structure is the same as it appears in real life except the coloring. Can you identify the building?

See more of my photos at http://photos.ericlauritzen.biz