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I was equating personal choice with free will (hence why I criticised you for reducing the concept to it's New-Labour-apologetic sense. But I see now that you understand 'personal choice' in the latter sense so I'll treat it that way.) I was raising the possibility that free will may be a myth...

Sorry, I did move too quickly between the different scenarios. The first one was purely theoretical. I have never been in a group situation in which a solitary smoker demanded to go to a smoking bar when there was a non-smoking bar nearby. Before the ban they were few and far between, as you...

Wow, quick response HMLT. 'Personal choice' may technically be a myth but it's far from ludicrous: it's the foundation of most Western moral/philosophical systems and you'd be hard pressed to even think without the concept. Questions are always going to remain about where the line between the...

Why necessarily so? If you look at it another way, you could say that we do see health as a collective societal responsibility, which is why we no longer allow some people's personal choices to negatively affect others' health in public places. I would see the idea (recently voiced in some...

Don't really understand why the 'punters can drink where they like' argument gets trotted out again and again. There are two very big holes in it. 1) The decision about whether you go to a smoking establishment or not would not be, and never has been, one made by the individual alone, but one...

Seconded. There have been some amazing RA podcasts recently. The Samim one (did someone mention that upthread?) is fantastic, as is the Efdemin from a month or so back.

Yeah. There was a feature on Berlin beaches in the Guardian a few weeks ago that mentioned it. http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/jul/14/saturday.berlin Went to Bar 25 a couple of months ago and one of the guys who worked (and lived) there told us that developers wanted to move in. Rising...

Dunno how it works for other Berlin clubs (cheap Polish labour?), but Bar 25 is more like a commune, so the staff all live on site round the back of the bar in these wooden summer houses and gypsy caravans. I doubt they have their working hours written into their contract. I doubt they even...

I see what you mean, but that depends on what you take as a 'documents of a performance'. If you want to be purist about it (and some people in the classical world are, believe me) then only a recording done in one complete take, i.e. a 'live' performance will do. But the vast majority of...

You're going to hate me for this but I don't think that's as bad as it gets, far from it. I mean, ok, the video's irredeemably shite and the blonde one looks like he should be operating a photocopier instead of camply fondling rocks in a mock star trek landscape, but well, it sounds a lot like...

Thanks v much everyone! :) Will go and check out some of these things...

I heard a lot of this in Berlin in cafes/coming out of people's cars etc. and on the whole, it sounds fantastic. But I know absolutely nothing about Turkish music of any kind - pop, traditional or whatever. Does anyone have any recommendations? Thanks.

Sorry to harp on, but also this: "copyright facilitates sampling" No it doesn't. If I had a pound (ho ho!) for every time I heard a track sample another track (and you can bet your bottom dollar they didn't pay a copyright fee, tee hee!), I'd be a very rich woman. Like Mick Hucknall.

Hehe. And when he reshuffles the piece for the Telegraph or whoever, it'll be "copyright is a tool for the liberation of the individual creator that allows market forces to do their good work, honest!"

'Labour values - old or new'... And there I was thinking they were two fundamentally opposed things. :)

Some incredibly bone-headed responses being posted here in reaction to a very interesting piece of research – one, nonetheless, that probably doesn’t tell us anything about dubstep. Still interested? Good. Re. Gek: your view of musical performance as being a choice between ‘robotic...

Well, as dogger said, it's not about whether you are the 'right' kind of person: it is, as far as I can make out anyway, completely random. And if you didn't get in, then you'd just go to one of the other two world-class clubs down the road: Watergate (complete with scenic floating...

just spotted on bier.de Ein Mann ohne Bier ist wie ein Rasenmäher ohne Gras. (A man without beer is like a lawnmower without grass) And with mottos like that, it's no wonder the stuff is so bloody good. :)

The best beers are German, oder? Nice ones include Krombacher (think someone already mentioned this one), Berliner Kindl and weissbiers like Erdinger and Schöfferhofer (v nice with banana syrup). You can also get a wonderful beer in Berlin called Berliner Weisse which is served in a kind of...

Ah but when you're planning on carrying on until 3pm the next day, you've got to keep some energy in reserve. Cos you can do that out there. Berghain in Berlin regularly stays open from 12 on Sat eve/Sun morning until late Sunday *evening* and in my experience they don't start dancing even...