Friday August 12, 2005 
Friday August 12, 2005 If you've ever read Your Money or Your Life by Joe Domingues and Viki Robin (which is an interesting and thought-provoking book, although I didn't find all of it completely convincing) you may remember the concept of the gazingus pin. This is a discretionary item you frequently spend money on, but that you don't get much satisfaction from. Like a collectible where you keep buying until you have the set, but when you get it home, it goes in a drawer and is never seen again. For me, magazines are it. Every time I go to the bookstore, I spend as much on magazines as on books, and many of them barely get glanced at. So I've been trying to whittle down what I buy, and to subscribe to the ones I genuinely enjoy and read cover-to-cover. At least here in the USA, if you pay for a subscription up front, you save 40-80% of the newstand price.
Yesterday I subscribed to New Scientist. It's a British weekly science-news publication that I remember with affection from "the old country". I mentioned this in an online forum I participate in, and got quite a hostile response. Apparently the old rag has gone downhill and lacks fact-checking these days. I tried to get recommendations for something better, but the only thing anyone would vouch for was Scientific American. I read that regularly, but I think that's gone downhill recently. In the end, the consensus was that the news and articles part of Nature was about as good as it gets. So I subscribed to that too. That's the most money I've ever spent on a journal subscription, but it is one of the top two or three science publications in the world. I suppose the peer-reviewed papers in Nature might be a bit too technical for me, but it will be interesting to compare the news between Nature and New Scientist.
( Aug 12 2005, 06:41:18 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]
I used to subscribe to the New Scientist years ago and saw a recent copy the other month. Like a lot of paper based periodicals it has been dummed down too. Shame as it used to be a good read even if I did not understand most of what was going on.
Posted by Paul Humphreys on August 12, 2005 at 08:22 AM PDT #