After 151 years, Popular Science will no longer offer a magazine
theverge.com
theverge.com
And one of the top places selling some of the cooler stuff was an outfit called "Information Unlimited". They, sadly, went the way of the dodo recently themselves. Apparently due to the death of the owner. :-(
I don't think many people save ads these days, I guess the equivalent is banner ads caught in screenshots, that kind of thing.
Loved the slogan.
Vintage tech ads can be fun.
It sucked until I upgraded it with a hydraulic cylinder from an old d4. Now it can split granite I think.
https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2023/08/the-homemade...
Some guy talked to me, happily for 20 minutes about their products. I suspect it was the owner, seemed like a nice sort, and seemed to like spreading enthusiastic joy about science.
I too was a pre-teen in the early 80's and I remember how neat it was to have these "secret" catalogs and/or ads in the back of magazines like Popular Science where I could place some cash (or ask mom for a check while I gave her my cash) in an envelope, put it in the mail and in a few weeks I would have these cool sci-fi gadgets in my hand to play with. I was the only one in my friends group who really knew about this stuff apparently (or was the only one geeky enough to think it was cool.)
It wasn't just Tesla Coils either. Mail order was in it's golden-years in the 80's and early 90's before the internet. I remember ordering everything from electronic components like caps/breadboards, to magic/card tricks, meters, oscilloscopes etc - all in the many different catalogs I had. I used to even order all kinds of fireworks for the 4th of July through the mail as well back then. Not just snakes and smoke-bombs either, but full on Black Cat (the best) firecrackers, bottle rockets and fountains. Literally send in the money and few weeks later I'd have them dropped off at my front door.
Nowadays it is even more amazing as all this stuff is now available in a day or two with free shipping. Heck, I ordered two board games on Amazon the evening of the 19th for with the family the upcoming holiday week and the doorbell rang about 10a the next DAY with them!
But nothing beats that feel of a pre-teen and his secret catalogs ordering with his own saved up cash in an envelope and anxiously waiting for two weeks for some off-the-wall gadget to arrive.
"Our favorite cannabis vaporizer is $90 off for Cyber Monday"
"2024 BMW G 310 R review: A starter bike you won’t outgrow"
"You can still get the best Apple products at the best prices … if you act fast"
"20+ luxury items that are less pricey for Cyber Monday"
"This is your last chance to save $100 on an Xbox Series X during Cyber Monday"
I really just think there is no consumer market left that would support well written, long-form science journalism. So the choice is either to close up shop, or act as a front for retail outlets.
Nautilus is trying to be that. It's honestly not very good writing or editing, but I still enjoy the experience of getting a science magazine in the mail every once in a while and skimming through it.
https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/scientific-american-go...
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-shameful-decline...
Even the sections that talked about cool (and futuristic) stuff were great.
This and Popular Mechanics, I’m not sure how we got them in our house in India growing up but I fondly remember both of them.
Have we lost something? Where will future hackers get their inspiration from? Maybe a million different YouTube channels and proliferation of cheap ways to learn and tinker are fueling the next generation. Let’s hope so.
Indie hackers (as well as anyone else) can now cheaply publish their own magazines to the globe.
I don’t think we lost something other than paper and postage.
Pretty soon (in the scheme of things) they’ll stop printing books and paper money too.
(I say this as a vinyl and book collector. It’s just facts. Our great grandchildren will not use physical books.)
You don’t need to tell me that people deliberately choose dead trees; I am one of them: I collect books and have more than most collectors. Same goes for vinyl.
The writing is on the wall, however. In 100 years it won’t be a thing, just as fountain pens and wax seals aren’t today.
Yes, they will still exist, and yes, people into whatever type of historical reenactment that is will still have them, but there will be no industry around them like there is now.
I mean, of all the things you mentioned, it's by far the most likely to still be usable in the future. Even in a post-apocalyptic world people might figure out how to play vinyl. MP3s? Not a chance.
Full disclosure: I never liked cassettes. Oh, and I made the mistake of choosing Beta over VHS....
And yet, the longevity of a humble cassette tape far exceeds that of the average website. Websites ("digital products" if we must) change, they delete old/offtopic articles for SEO reasons, they change designs to fit in more ads, their owner ship changes hands, the image links break...the list is endless.
There are Gizmodo articles from < 10yrs filled with blank blocks with an "image not found" message in them. At least the cassette's changes are due to physical degradation only.
Popular Science was nostalgic. It was a callback to an earlier time, and it tracked within its pages the series of changes led to today. It's like losing a species to extinction, albeit not quite as drastic or irrecoverable.
I remember the magazine fondly. Once I got into my later teens, it felt a little too general audience for my taste. But it always made me wonder about the possibilities of science and engineering. Jetpack futures, cloud cities, and millennium ships.
> Indie hackers (as well as anyone else) can now cheaply publish their own magazines to the globe.
It won't be long and even blogs and news websites will see the margin set to zero. LLMs will ingest and rephrase (with accuracy) all kinds of content. There will be no money in running CNN or the New York Times.
> Our great grandchildren will not use physical books.
It's sad to think that the libraries will get garbage collected, but the books they store will be little more than anachronisms. Perhaps they can be turned into public internet cafes.
I am happy for my tax dollars to support the system, but the bottom line is that branch libraries exist as a free, under-resourced Internet cafe for the indigent. That might be a good use for the public fisc, but the librarians and books are completely ignored.
We have three children the youngest of whom just finished high school and we were forced to admit none of us has been in our neighborhood branch in more than 8 years.
At the same time I haves seen two exhibits at the main reading room in the past 18 months.
That seems unlikely to me. E-books have really terrible UX. Paper books aren't going anywhere until that is fixed.
(I also have a large physical book library.)
I appreciate that might not be true for everyone, use cases vary. For me its essentially being better at a feature i dont use.
E-readers being a better interface for people who dont have time to read is not exactly a steller endorsement.
* Can't flick between two points in non-fiction books easily
* Can't show them off on a bookshelf
In a way i can't really explain, paper books are more relaxing to read.
I have mixed feelings about tablets. I do like that I can have a nightmode colorscheme for night reading. I don't think reading on a phone is a great experience generally.
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...
The problems with internet overuse are orthogonal.
I remember that most of the things I read about never even came close to reality, and that was pretty disappointing. It seemed like they were more interested in writing speculative sci-fi than reporting on the current state of scientific research. It just wasn't interesting. The only thing that really caught my attention was coverage of the X Prize and Spaceship One. That stuff was cool because it existed in real life, it wasn't just a bunch of artist renderings about what the year 2030 might look like.
Can't speak for Popular Mechanics. I probably should have been reading that all along.
I remember realizing it was mostly bull and weak articles when I was about 13…around 1977. Didn’t stop me from reading it but I felt it was more SF speculation from some current science news rather than actual science. That was OK.
I still remember thinking how cool it would be if the Lockheed Venturestar came to fruition. Like, Wow! Would that have been cool or what?
Maybe it's ok that it's a lot of speculative stuff after all? Maybe there's something to be said for reading about the wild-ass ventures that are high-risk and high reward. Incremental progress gets you a long ways, but the occasional moonshot can really move the needle. Watching the two Falcon Heavy boosters land simultaneously was the kind of thing you feel like you'd have read about 10 years previously in Popular Science
Well buckle up:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/worlds-largest-a...
Now I have GPT-4 and finally my curiosity can be satisfied quickly. The world got so small again. I feel like I can _build_ again.
I finally have a patient, infallible teacher without a direct agenda to game SEO to sell ads or a product.
It feels like the earliest days of the web when I consumed every page of howstuffworks.com and surfed webrings out of curiosity.
I am a member of that group. This was one of my favorite magazines growing up. And I do have to say I felt a twinge of sadness to see this article on HN just now.
I can watch rocket launches live streamed on a handheld device, then consume expert or very well informed layman analysis shortly afterwards. There’s probably 10 substacks for every scientific and engineering specialization written by experts. I can look up primary sources, even preprints, and aggregate a range of expert opinions on them. I can watch a million impeccably animated explainer videos on any topic. It’s harder to choose sources due to the plethora of choices, and the printed medium is tactile and nice, but in practically every other way now is vastly better!
That's sort of why print magazines are/were helpful and approachable - they're an easy entry point with curation, discoverability, and an editorial staff. They're also somewhat self-contained rather than being an endless rabbit hole of attention-grabbing links (those generally being limited to the cover.)
Arguably the best thing about HN and good aggregation blogs is that they provide curation and discoverability as well as some degree of editorial commentary. And hopefully they're not managed by attention-maximizing algorithms.
The abundance of options and content - even if you were to limit yourself to a specific category, such as peer-reviewed articles in a particular field, or a particular medium, such as youtube videos - from online ources can be completely overwhelming.
Unfortunately the future kind of caught up with it.
Or maybe as an adult when I became an engineer some of the mystique of tech evaporated when it became my job five days a week?
But in the 70's and 80's when I was perhaps of a more impressionable age (or when maybe the future itself was more measurable) it fueled my curiosity and did impart a kind of optimism that will be missed.
Surely the mystique evaporates for “popular” publications targeted at people with less experience, but that just means you need to level up what you consume. Physics Today is something to look into today.
The media i want to consume is mostly of the “this was written for people on the level of graduate students, but ones in a different field”. I can’t find a lot of it
The result is a long slow decline which is profitable until you’re dying and can’t climb back out. This is, I am sure, an explicit strategy of some. The whole business model of taking something good and lowering quality while relying on the good will from the past until it’s all out and you’re bankrupt… except you’ve been doing whatever you could to extract profit from the whole process and just leaving the business bankrupt.
I wish there were still some decent magazines like these I remember reading through in my youth, but one big challenge for the publishers is the "maker" / "mechanic" these days is much more limited to hobbyists.
In my Dad's generation, you kinda had to have a certain level of mechanical ability if you ever wanted to own a house and car/bike and not live in squalor.
Nowadays, if you even have the money for a home, it seems like 99% of things are made to be replaced, and for anything that needs fixing, it's impossible to fix it yourself without some pretty strong technical abilities (and a lot of time/patience).
There's also a lot more emphasis on practicality, and less on sci-fi-type aspirational content in general.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/magazine
watch for it on sale at https://www.discountmags.com/magazine/bbc-focus
it’s also free with an Apple News or Bundle subscription. https://apple.news/TUNNn0U24SRC5LF2bxqxDNA
https://books.google.com/books/about/Popular_Science.html?id...
I can't be the only one who noticed "151" and it definitely sounds like the author was alluding to it (pokemon) as well. Coincidentally Popsci and Nintendo Power were the only magazines I ever read and owned physical copies of.
My dad’s been gone a long time now, seeing this thread disappear is very sad.
I guess just another step toward the inevitable future in which we ourselves belong only to the past.
> putting content online is much more scalable, cheaper, faster, etc.
But it's a much worse format (in my opinion) for reading something like PS. When they moved online, I stopped reading them because the media itself removed too much value for me.
And putting magazines online in PDF is just miserable. The Economist does a not bad job of putting magazines in the app in readable format.
If the only thing they curate is print ads, then all the value is already gone.
Electronic form brings unique advantages, of course, but also removes advantages of printed form. It's a trade-off. That trade-off works very well for certain types of publications, and works terribly for others. I argue that magazines is one of the things it works terribly for.
Does this mean they no longer have any writers? Or are they saying that the editorial staff has been cut to five? Do they just oversee freelance journalists?
Popular Science was never the bastion of journalistic integrity, and yet this leaves me worried about print publishing in general. If a periodical can’t make it, what happens to print news?
UK newspapers are dropping 10-20% in circulation in 2023 -alone-. Most of our magazines are already dead or extremely low quality.
Japan is doing well though. The Yomiuri Shimbun is published twice daily and has a morning circulation of 7 million. Magazines and periodicals are very much alive, including 500+ page manga magazines and the weekly Famitsu gaming magazine.
I think the covers of Popular Science were the main thing I remember about it. It seems only a couple were by Norman Rockwell, but a lot of them had a similar vibe, which I enjoy.
So they’ll still publish, just not in “magazine format”. Freakin clickbait. God I hate the Verge.
RIP.
This is obvious, of course, but rarely do socially valuable innovations require captive media to substantiate them to the body public. When the body public actually wants to hear about them, there's money to be made by educating them.
Real "are we the baddies" energy here.
We lost magazines, and gained YouTube channels that are WAY better.