Day: March 11, 2002

Returning from lunch today I had to do a double take walking out of the student union. There, near the entrance, was a huge newspaper rack containing 50 to 60 copies of the local newspaper, The Kalamazoo Gazette (which, full disclosure, I have worked for in the past). The rack had just been put there — it wasn’t installed when I went in for my lunch.

Here’s the interesting part, though. The newspaper rack was not staffed by anyone and it did not use any sort of mechanism where you have to put coins in a slot. Anyone can simply take as many of the papers as he or she wants.

The catch? They are using the tip jar concept that has been widely advocated for funding independent web sites. A sign at the top says to take a copy, and donate whatever you think the paper is worth. It adds, of course, that the level of donations will determine just how long the rack stays. There is a coin slot (which wasn’t labeled very well) to deposit money.

I took one and put in a couple quarters (which is what the paper actually sells for). Not a bad idea, but one that I think will never work.

It’s not a bad idea because few students read the local paper, especially students living in dorms who make up probably 75 percent of the traffic through the student union. So they’re losing those people anyway. If they can sell them papers at near or slightly above cost, they gain by telling advertisers they are doing a better job of reaching college aged people.

On the other hand the system will likely fail for a number of reasons. Leave something out there for free for very long and the incentive to pay for it diminishes. The student newspaper is already free (being supported almost entirely by advertisements) so it’s not like the Gazette is the only place in town to get a newspaper.

Regardless, I hope they come out and say at the end of their trial period just how much money this generated. It would be interesting to know (though I’m probably dreaming — they’ll never make the results public for fear that it might prove useful their competitors).

Back in January I wrote about the small town of Inglis, Florida, that had put up signs near the entrance of town forbidding Satan from entering. The American Civil Liberties Union was considering a lawsuit against the town (demonic profiling anyone?)

Now it appears that Satan — or at least his minions — have struck back. Somebody swiped the four signs.

Rather than give up her quixotic quest to rid her town of Satan, Inglis Mayor Carolyn Risher vows to escalate the conflict. According to ABCNews.Com,

Inglis says she plans to replace the posts with new ones twice the height that will be anchored in concrete. She also plans to put up a giant cross.

While she’s at it, she might as well string up garlic to prevent any vampires or other creatures of the night from stalking poor Inglis.

Source:

Thieves Swipe Anti-Satan Posts. ABCNews, March 2002.

Via a long chain of blogs comes this post claiming that an upcoming biography of science fiction author Isaac Asimov – – written by his wife Janet — reveals that Asimov died of AIDS. At the time of his death in 1992, the cause was given as heart and kidney failure.

Asimov apparently contracted the disease during open heart surgery in 1992. It is odd that Asimov and then his wife kept that fact secret for so long, especially given Asimov’s humanist views. Certainly keeping his disease a secret was his right and his business, but it seems very incongruous with his other views.

Finally, the person who posted this wonders,

How many other cases like this are going to come out of the closet, proving that it’s not just the gay community that’s affected?

After AIDS was finally understood, no one doubted that heterosexuals could contract the disease but at the same time the various campaigns (at least in the United States) to tell people that AIDS could strike anyone were misguided and almost certainly cost lives (since they wasted so much money targeting populations that were at relatively low risks).

Through 1998, for example, the Centers for Disease Control reported that less than 10 percent of all reported AIDS cases up to that point were from heterosexual sexual contact. This despite the fact that heterosexuals make up in excess of 90 percent of the U.S. population.

The interesting thing about this statistic is why it is apparently almost the reverse in Africa’s epidemic. There is a lot of controversy about the accuracy of AIDS figures in African countries, but even if the estimates are wildly off, there is far more of a problem with heterosexual AIDS in Africa than there ever was in the United States. Why is that?