My friend Andrew Hearst just launched panopticist, his new blog! It’s really excellent — he’s posting mostly about media and music, since he’s both an editor and a musician. Yesterday he wrote a funny post pointing out how incredibly gross the listening stations at music stores are — since you have to put on headphones worn by previously thousands of sweaty fellow citizens who aren’t in the habit of showering or “delicing” themselves. He came up with an elegant solution:

So here’s an idea: Record stores should retrofit their listening stations with 1/8” headphone jacks so owners of iPods and other portable music players can plug in their own headphones. A significant percentage of iPod owners probably carry their iPods with them wherever they go, and so do many owners of CD Walkmans and other portable players. I’m guessing that many of those people would be more likely to check out a few artists on a listening station if they could simply pull out their own earbuds and plug them in.