I've just realised (late to the party) that I need to add Brian Nitz (aka bnitz) to my BlogRoll; Brian clearly has a real eye for photos (more please, the ones posted so far are beautiful) and I loved his post "This is a Windows town".

The engineer in me is never satisfied to simply respond to beauty or (very occasionally) to create it, but instead wants to be able to explain it; that's why there's something innately appealing about the attempt to tie phi and Fibonacii to beauty, such that music, architecture, nature (also here), or even cosmology respects it's dictates on proportion. Fascinating idea, and it is also possible to explore why it occurs at all. There's beauty even in the possibility of this explanation, which is why I think beauty is ultimately an effective resolution of a set of mathematical forces which the mind can perceive; truly in the mind's eye of the beholder.

It is with sadness that I read now that the British hostage Ken Bigley has died at the hands of his captors; only those who have experienced loss through violence can really share the grief of his family and friends.

When I saw this tragedy reported on the BBC web-site, I wondered how this single event was reported internationally, for example by CNN.

• The BBC reported this as a death after an 'escape bid' (their parentheses), while CNN reported that the victim "fled"
• The BBC reported the statement of Ken's brother who recalled the UN's declaration that the war on Iraq was "illegal" and without foundation, whereas CNN positioned this within it's "Struggle for Iraq" theme

There are other obvious differences between the two reports.

So to my tongue-in-cheek suggestions about how to limit the impact of positioning statements, I add one serious thought: read from multiple sources because the truth usually is out there, you just need to triangulate on it's position.

Simon Phipps makes a valid point about the effectiveness of framing, which is the subtle positioning of a concept so as to make it easy to surreptitiously implant it. It is often used as a propoganda technique, by emitting an eminently repeatable and memorable tagline that negatively labels an enemy. Some political examples include "Kerry flip-flops on key issues" or "axis of evil".

It's rather scary that primitive techniques like this are effective on us rational beings (ha!), but you only have to look at advertising to see that it is astonishingly effective - the only requirement is that the statement is sufficiently provocative or sensational or even ludicrous to grab attention in the first place, and then the steady drip-drip feed will integrate that thought into your forebrain and the primacy effect will cause it to impact your behaviour even if you could remember plenty of counter-evidence if you tried. Oooh, cue Twilight Zone intro ;)

These framing statements are memes, contagious ideas that spread like viruses from person to person. Unfortunately Norton or Kaspersky can't protect you from these viruses.

So what can you do to protect yourself? ;) The advice below is 100%-pure tongue-in-cheek ;)

• Active reading - permanently engaging your critical faculty can help you toss these framing memes on their heads; reject dud (or fud) memes as mental spam (but it's sadly more fun to consume ideas than to really think about them)
• Look for the motive - if you think about the interests of the parties involved, you can usually filter or ignore statements that are clearly propogandist (a pretty effective technique as you just have to think who would benefit from having you believe any given idea rather than actually trying to assess the ideas's veracity)
• Fuzzy logic - life is not black or white, so try to think of all ideas you come across as being possessed of only a certain degree of truth
• Wait for the technology - anti-spam software today can stop rogue messages from jamming up your input queue; when we finally implement AI like Hal, we can have it filter out propoganda (in the meantime, a pretty good approximation is to recycle your newspaper before you read it or send all of your e-mail to /dev/null ;)

Another analogy: idea-framing is not evidence of any conspiracy; people emit ideas with the same goals and effects as pheromones, except that ideas compete for control of your cerebrum, not your hypothalamus.

Ah blogging; where else could you read such sheer random-ness ;)

I want to believe that blogging has an impact, but when the El Reg vulture's beady eye spotted Ged Carrol's blog and wrote an article that claims that Microsoft has executed a public u-turn, I had to ask myself if this really was a win for blogistan. The reality could not be further from the truth. Here's why:

• The "apology" comes from MS Customer Service, not from Ballmer or a recognised PR person
• It apologizes for the lateness of the response, not for Ballmer's remarks
• It goes on to explain how MS is really trying to help the industry to secure online content (and by implication that iPod and iTunes has not succeeded in doing so even though they are "popular")

So is this a success for blogging? Well, it's certainly a personal victory for Ged, but I don't think it adequately addresses the slur; I guess it's ok for companies to knock each other around a bit in the media, but going after a competitor's user base is crass, not to say stupid.

But to get a rounded view on this, you've got to read the Register's other article on the subject.