Over the years I have subscribed to Scientific American magazine on a couple of occasions, most recently since January 2016. I enjoy reading about a broad range of scientific endeavours and see it as part of my effort to keep generally up-to-date with what is going on in the world of science.
I like to treat reading Scientific American as a discipline, reading each month’s edition from cover to cover and making sure that I do not skip articles or news items just because they are not about something I am obviously interested in. The trouble with this approach is that on occasion I find myself getting behind and then I start to wonder whether it is worth the money for the subscription and whether the fact that I am behind is an indication that I am not really as interested in the content as I would like to think I am (or, as a scientist, should be). I ended up in this position in late summer last year when I somehow managed to be at least three months behind and it was in response to this that I tried to get into the habit of reading about six pages each day to catch up. Six pages is about the length of most of the more substantial articles, or a half to a third of the front part of the magazine (letters and smaller news items) or the entire back part (book reviews, pieces from the archive and a couple of one-page columns). This approach worked fairly well although I never quite got caught up.
More recently, over the Christmas/New Year break I turned scientific reading into one of my ‘dailies’ and, as a result, I swept through the December 2017 edition and, yesterday, completed the January 2018 edition. This meant that FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MONTHS I had caught up. I had read the last part of the January 2018 edition on 12th January and had no Scientific American reading in place to do (but I do have articles from two recent copies of the Royal Meteorological Society magazine, Weather, to get through).
What do you think turned up in the post today, making a big thump as it hit the hall floor? Yes, you’ve guessed it, the February 2018 edition…
Tim O'Hare 