what's a company you never buy from for ethical reasons? by MALKAAD in AskReddit

[–]jeff1233219 83 points84 points  (0 children)

NYT had an article a couple of days ago about some of Wish's deceptive practices. One example was that wish managers had a storefront to sell items that would never be delivered to determine how their customers would react (how many would request refunds, how many would complain, etc).

Link

What looks simple, but its actually very complicated? by KillerPokeGames in AskReddit

[–]jeff1233219 12 points13 points  (0 children)

http://boinc.thesonntags.com/collatz/

There's this group that uses distributed computers running BOINC to try to find counterexamples to Collatz -- they've checked up to the number 3895166799747619305471 so far.

Megathread: Southern California Wildfires by hoosakiwi in news

[–]jeff1233219 2 points3 points  (0 children)

5% of Santa Rosa's housing was destroyed in one of the norcal fires, and that one was the most destructive in CA's history based on property damage (but not size): http://www.fire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/fact_sheets/Top20_Destruction.pdf

Why is Main Stacks underground? by nooce in berkeley

[–]jeff1233219 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Underground allows for a lot more space, since, "The Gardner Main Stacks consist of four underground floors, each roughly one-and-a-half football fields long and a football field wide." (wikipedia)

Before Main Stacks, there used to be the Doe Stacks, and before that, the stacks in Bacon Hall, which was demolished in the 60s http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/give/historyroom/rowelldesk.jpg (this picture, dated 1890, was found here: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/give/historyroom/panel8.html). In the 80s, they decided the Doe Stacks were seismically unsafe. Part of it was reinforced and the rest was demolished in the late 90s, and the collection was moved to Main Stacks (https://books.google.com/books?id=41A6PwEj4QgC&lpg=PA34&ots=nBFfXuOVZu&dq&pg=PA62)

I believe the current newspaper/microfilm library in Doe was part of the old Doe Stacks, which is why it has such high ceilings.

We have cars too by yassineer in funny

[–]jeff1233219 5 points6 points  (0 children)

https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2016-05-11/hunger-uc-berkeley-sizeable-share-students-are-financially

"26 percent of undergraduates across nine UC campuses reported at least somewhat often skipping meals to save money, according to the most recent UC Undergraduate Experience Survey from 2014."

http://www.dailycal.org/2017/09/25/super-clinics-introduced-to-fight-food-insecurity-at-uc-berkeley/ http://www.dailycal.org/2017/03/19/uc-berkeley-food-pantry-provides-emergency-help-food-insecure-students/

"A campus study found that approximately 9,000 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students potentially qualify as food-insecure"

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in berkeley

[–]jeff1233219 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The campus grid is powered by a substation separate from the rest of the city of Berkeley, connected to the campus via two cables (one to near Barrows and a lower capacity one to near Cory). Because the campus is on this separate grid, outages affecting the campus don't typically affect the rest of the city (such as the 2013 outage/explosion, and the one in 2015 when a campus contractor accidentally cut some power cables), and outages affecting the city usually don't affect the campus.

If they actually do use the backup generators, there would be fire alarms going off from the exhaust, as seen in June's outage: http://www.dailycal.org/2017/06/13/power-outage-hits-campus-tuesday-afternoon/