May 2005 — Monthly Archive
The Compleat Beethoven
From 9am on Sunday 5 June to midnight on Friday 10 June, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast every single note of Ludwig van Beethoven. Every symphony, every quartet, every sonata
Like most of the BBC’s programmes, this will be available to internet listeners as an audio stream, and the Evening Standard says that the BBC will make it easy for listeners around the world to catch up with what they’ve missed:
These concerts will be [...] “streamed” for a week on the website … Anyone from here to Hong Kong can slip a disk into the drive and download a set for keeps. Allow five minutes on broadband for Symphonies One to Eight, 10 minutes for the momentous Ninth.
I’m guessing this means mp3 downloads will not be available, which is a pity, but those who don’t mind listening to the lo-fi streams can try out Total Recorder.
Updated 8 June: It looks like they really meant it when they said ‘download for keeps’ — you can snarf the MP3s from Radio 3’s website now.
The Moderator as Firewall
I read both the Instapundit and Scripting News regularly and so I’ve been following the little spat they’ve been having with some trepidation: how would Dave’s unique social skills fare against the John Kerry of the blogosphere?
On the other hand, this post from Matt Deatherage (linked from Scripting News) seems to capture the essence of why Dave doesn’t get why the Respectful Disagreement session went as badly as it did:
Dave’s [...] never going to back down just because someone says so. Prove him wrong or sit down. People like Glenn Reynolds are quite unused to this concept.
Ad hominems aside, the “Prove him wrong or sit down” school thought of though works well in science and engineering, it works less well in policy where the ultimate proof of right and wrong may come generations later, if at all.
It works especially poorly when applied to a facilitator of debate, and this seems to be the crux of the problem which Dave blissfully ignores.
The impression I get from the blogs covering the session is that Dave brought this very same quality into a forum in which he was the moderator (or discussion leader). Now moderators can and do have partisan agendas, but the skilled ones steer the conversation and try to give views they support more play — not firewall ideas they don’t like.
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