I remember reading Scientific American magazines in my local library in the third world as a kid.
I was blown away by the ads.
From useless gadgets that will probably be fun for an hour or two only to very expensive ones aimed at people with clearly a ton of disposable income.
Lawnmowers you can ride on?! A thing just to detect rings in the sand? How rich are these people? A watch that sets itself to an atomic clock? An astronaut pen that writes underwater? Telescopes in your back yard?!
The sheer volume and variety of ads told me that the economy of that place was in a totally different league from my own.
I think the other reply is referring to folks who collect and sell old magazines. I can only speak from second-hand experience, though, as I knew a person who used to do this. When eBay was just getting started, she was collecting old magazines and trimming the ads from them, then selling them as a lower bulk collection (she also took jeans with holes in them, patched them with colorful fabric and resold them on early eBay but different story).
I don't know why this was a thing, but I remember her telling me she got the idea from a local library that preserved its periodicals, so maybe it started at libraries. Personally, were I to collect magazines, I would want the ads intact. Not because I love adverts (quite the opposite, actually), but my collector brain's notion of preserving a thing in its original state is at odds with the idea of removing the ads.
In libraries we don't get the ads cut out. But yeah most of the physical periodicals will be bound in yearly volumes. Much easier to deal with. It's disappearing now though, with most periodicals only being published digitally.
I assume he means things like the Strand Magazine, that Sherlock Holmes was first published in, it's not unusual to find copies bound into hardback books like that.
Anyone know why the Russian Formalists got the sparkling repressive power of the state? I had thought they were expressly apolitical, but maybe Stalin was paranoid?
tldr: young authoritarian states need enemies. Both internal and external. Repression of any form of dissent is a way to unite (or scare into submission) the masses. See also: "degenerative art" in Germany. Also being apolitical is a political statement.
You and your smarter friends could share bookmarks with each other and comment on them, via email.
This would have an incredibly high barrier to entry, because out of 8-9b people on the planet, which hundred are going to be (and remain) a smarter friend (or fof) of leafy?
Ha, not looking for friends but just people to talk about tech and ideas with and hobbies. Just want to get away from the general idiocy of social media. I think it shouldn’t be an open door, but an invite only thing. Also I’m really, really against the idea of under 18 year olds having social media. They should have their own separate social media at worst.
The Miss Manners approach to dating served me well:
All dates have three elements: food, entertainment, and affection. A first date should have plenty of entertainment and only a hint of affection. At some point, the affection becomes the entertainment, but under no circumstances may the food be omitted.
Aka the "hungry judge effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect. But it's not like you can only fill your stomach up at a fancy restaurant (neither that you claim that nor that I find it being something bad).
FWIW, the hungry judge effect is almost certainly nonsense.
The original research assumed the case were randomly ordered, and so everyone should have an equal shot at parole—-but they weren’t! Instead, all the cases from one particular prison were heard together, with breaks usually occurring between prisons. Within a prison, cases were arranged by lawyer, with prisoners representing themselves going last. If people without professional representation fare worse (and they do), then…that’s the whole effect. PNAS published a “rebuttal” article where someone actually interviewed court staff who reported this, but it’s been cited like…70 times vs thousands for the original article.
There are other reasons to think the original result wasn’t true too. The “effect” didn’t occur when considering wall-time (i.e., judges were similarly severe at 9:30 and 11:30), only order (first vs last), but you’d expect hunger, blood sugar, etc to track time elapsed.
Sorry for the aside, but the fact that people still cite this drives me nuts.
Now historians realize that often the ads may be more interesting than the articles.