Karl Miller and Deryk Barker, on the thread started by Kevin Sutton: >>But I also want to learn something myself, which is why it aggravates >>me to hear "Planets" every other day. If public radio is just playing >>requests, it isn't really educational. > >Precisely. I wonder if you can actually specify what you want to hear >(learn) and still have it be educational? Deryk's question is absolutely fundamental. I can provide a clue to the answer, having spent more than 40 years as a research scientist finding out things that were not known beforehand. The answer is: (a) you cannot specify what you want to learn ahead of time; but (b) there are logical structures (for example that of experimental/inductive science) that facilitate the process of discovery. Conversely, there are other logical structures---for example, theological fundamentalism---which make it impossible to discover anything new, virtually by definition. Humanity moved a little way from the latter to the former in the 17th century, with the result that rather more about the world has been discovered since then than in the previous 100,000 years. So, in terms of broadcasting, the question Karl brought up reduces to the logical structure of the operation, i.e., the basis on which decisions are made about what to broadcast and what not to broadcast. In commercial broadcasting, we know what that structure is, and we know that the outcome will be 20,000 Top 40 station, with a sprinkling of "classical" stations broadcasting "The Planets", or more likely individual movements from "The Planets". NPR has been moving in this direction for 30 years, as its funding came to depend more and more heavily on business underwriting and fund-raisers. Alternative structures can be conceived. I said conceived, which does not necessarily mean (in the USA) implemented. Jon Gallant Department of Gnome Sciences University of Washington