A blog post in a comment 

Doc Searls: "My main long-term concern is with The Environment."

Decentralized Twitter, day 2 

Interesting comments continue to appear in the thread we started yesterday.

http://www.tribler.org/ sure sounds interesting!

How are you feeling? 

Okay, if the mind is powerful, how is your mind making you feel today? It's worth thinking about -- with the stock market down this year, every day worse than the last, many of us are losing lots of money, I know I am, and it's not a good feeling.

I keep arguing with myself, even though I'm losing money at a huge rate, I'm still in good shape financially, I have a nice house, I can pay the bills. But it doesn't help. Inside I feel unsettled, poor, I'm having trouble concentrating.

Does it help that I've been through this before? The crash of 1987 was much worse than this downturn, and then I had no cushion, nothing to fall back on, I wasn't even employed when it happened. I was a lot closer to being broke around the turn of the century, even though the market was doing very well. But it doesn't help. No matter how many times I've been through it, I've always known that it's cyclic, that the outlook will likely improve, but knowing isn't the same as feeling. The feeling is much stronger, it can't be counteracted with logic. I can't reason with the feeling, you might say it's un-reasonable.

Then I heard that a friend of mine, much younger, with a lot less at stake in the market, is having trouble sleeping because of this feeling. I realize I'm not alone, probably millions of people have a heightened sense of insecurity right now. Does that make it better? Not really...

Anyway, I thought, let's post something and find out how others feel about the economy and how much of an impact is it having on our state of mind.

The power of the mind 

I heard a report on NPR a couple of weeks ago, and thought it was very interesting.

A study of a group hotel maids found that even though they lead active lives, get lots of exercise, their health isn't good. High blood pressure, overweight, body-mass index, the usual signs of a sedentary life.

They interviewed them, asking if they were active -- no. Did they get exercise? No. (The correct answer was yes to both.)

So they formed two groups, with one group they did nothing, with the other they had a series of classes where they showed them how doing maid work compared to other forms of exercise. The kept going until they understood that they were active and living a healhty lifestyle.

A few months later they checked blood pressure, weight, BMI and amazingly the group they had educated had become healthy!

FAQ: Why only 20 pics? 

When you first subscribe to a feed in FlickrFan you generally will get 20 pictures in the folder for the feed. People wonder why this is and how they can get more.

The reason for this is that Flickr keeps the 20 most recent pictures in the feed for each account. So when I post a new picture to my Flickr account, it replaces the oldest picture in my feed. Then, anyone who has subscribed my feed, will get the new picture next time they scan. It works the same way RSS works for blogging or a newspaper -- you only get the last few posts or stories, not all of them, in the feed.

I think this is the right way to do it. You might feel that 20 is too small, but people would probably also want more if they just got 100 pictures.

So the answer is over time you will get more pictures, if the person posts more pictures.