It's a good time to specifically note one built-in bias of mass media, particularly the real-time variety. They have been created by monkeys, for monkeys. Monkeys like us naturally focus on change. Change is where threat might come from, change is where food might come from, or maybe even sex. The mass media are a finely honed, market evolved system that has templated itself onto our own genetically evolved perceptions.

What you see on the tube is not the state of the world, it's the rate. It's not an 'expression of anxiety' when the view of the war swings precipitously day by day, it's reporters and talking heads who can't perceive the water where they swim. Day-to-day, overemphasizing change sells commercials and papers. In times like this, it's a disservice. A good time to turn off the talking heads. Focus on the state of things. Check the map at StrategyPage. Where the troops are located, that's a state variable. Look at a media view that's filtered by military professionals. Those are the events that a trained eye picks to actually affect the state of things. Then use your own head.

The blogosphere is being hammered in the forge along with Iraq. Things change fast in war. GW I made the 'Scud stud' and CNN. Now CNN carries the URL for Salam Pax. Too early to tell where we're going - we're at the cusp, in the singularity. But I like the feel of it. Nick Denton says in the NYT article above:

"It's standard Weblog style when everybody's enthusiastic to say, `Wait a minute, war is ugly,' .... So when talking cable heads start to get gloomy, the Weblogs' natural tendency is to say, `Well, it was always going to be difficult.'

Update: Den Beste has an excellent post that is the flip side of this one: How our military may be exploiting the media's monkey instincts to distract from things that matter, likely because the enemy could do something about them. He cites an Israeli article where some military professionals lay out what can and can't be discerned from the reporting so far.
9:18:23 PM    

From Strategy Page:

The Patriot missile that shot down a British Tornado fighter over the weekend did so because of a software problem that ignored the Tornado's IFF signals (that the Tornado was friendly) and instead had the Tornado showing up on the Patriot radar as an enemy missile or aircraft.

10:38:40 AM    

Silicon Valley pioneer Adam Osborne died at the age of 64, in India, after a long illness. He was best known for the creation of the first portable (luggable, really) computer, the Osborne I, a 64kb CP/M based system with a 5" screen that shipped in 1981. He also gave the Valley a verb that I haven't heard used in a while: to be 'Osborned' (or to 'Osborne' oneself), is to promise a follow-on product that is then delayed, but kills demand for the current product and sinks the company. The promised Osborne II computer did not come out on time, and that plus the advent of the IBM PC and DOS alternatives to CP/M sank Osborne Computer into bankruptcy. Nonetheless, Osborne was one of the more flamboyant characters of the days of Fire in the Valley, and the Osborne I was the first in the line of portable machines that have evolved into the equivalent of the supercomputers of his day. The name lives on in the Osborne/McGraw-Hill label of computer books, the ironic survivor of his business adventures.
10:32:52 AM