Winter is coming. Well, not actually winter, but the end of summer break is quickly approaching, with its ominous threat of class looming in the distance. Not to worry — here are some friendly reminders (and some more here!) of why the end of summer and the start of school are far from the worst things that could happen to you.

1. August and September bring the summer heat — finally. Although May, June and July constitute most of our break from school and are therefore deemed “summer,” the beautiful weather that really should accompany summertime typically makes its appearance in Berkeley beginning in mid-August and lasts through October. While there are certainly warm parts to these earlier months, we’ve all noticed by now that the weather isn’t very sunny majority of the time. But come school time, the gorgeous and highly anticipated sun shall return.

2. School isn’t starting just yet. We understand that the start of August seems to bring with it the cloud of school and the air of urgency of the end of summer. Well, school doesn’t actually start until the very end of August, so there’s plenty of time left to fit in all those summer plans that haven’t quite become reality yet. It can be especially fun if you plan on coming back to Berkeley early and have missed all your favorite places.

3. New classes mean new opportunities. Going back to school doesn’t have to be all bad; it can also bring with it an array of new additions to your life. The start of the semester brings all new classes with some new professors and the possibilities of new friends. Class doesn’t have to be looked at as something that is taking away from the fun aspects of life; rather, they can be seen as something that can add fun opportunities as well.

4. Football! While we understand that not everyone loves football (or really even understands what’s going on), the Cal home games are pretty awesome. Whether it’s the collective excitement at the beginning of every game that results in enthusiastic cheers or the stellar halftime shows put on by the marching band, the games create a sense of school spirit and collective enjoyment that can be extremely hard to come by in a school with more than 35,000 students.

5. Midterms don’t start for a few weeks. Even once school has started again, the time to buckle down and cram before midterms doesn’t surface for at least a few weeks. The start of school can still be filled with exploration and social time after class and on the weekends. Take advantage of the slightly lighter schedule while it lasts.

So while school is drawing near and the end of summer can be seen on the horizon, it does not mean that bad things lie ahead. There is still plenty of summer to be filled and excitement of the new school year to anticipate. And, personally, we can’t wait to have a little more sun around these parts again.

Image Source: ~Wei~ under Creative Commons

Contact Mackenzie Bedford at mbedford@dailycal.org.

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Remember the days when summer signified three months of wonderful nothingness? School was over until August or September, and the warm days stretched on endlessly in front of us, promising way too much relaxation and a whole lot of free time. Alas, by the time we get to college, summers just aren’t the same. The three months become filled with internships, volunteer work, paying jobs and anything else that could be substantially useful to our resumes. So this begs the question: Why add a summer class to that lineup and remove any of the lingering signs of summer? In case you’re weighing your options for next summer (or are just wondering), we’ve come up with some pros and cons:

Pro: The class sizes are usually smaller.While the classes at Berkeley are usually pretty large — typically ranging from about 100 to 600 people, the summer classes are made to accommodate fewer people. Most classes have less than 100 people, and only the basic classes, such as Chem 1A, still fall within a few hundred. The smaller group of students can allow for more engaging discussions that involve the whole class and don’t just consist of a professor orating from the front of a lecture hall. It also means that it is significantly easier to get to know the professor and establish an academic relationship with them.

Con: It can take away that summer feeling. Adding a summer class to your repertoire can stifle even the smallest glint of summertime. Having to attend class in our months off — even if it’s just two or three days a week for a few hours — can make the school year seem never-ending and take away our one time to let our brains take a breather. Summer days don’t seem so carefree when you’re aware that you’ll have to cut activity time short so that you can get to English by 2 p.m.

Pro: It’s a productive use of your time. Just taking one class can serve to lighten the next semester’s course load or remove some of the concerns about graduating on time. It’s commonly used to help complete the requirements of a supplemental minor. It can be especially useful when the prospects of an internship or job are slim and you don’t want to go home to loaf around for three months. Taking a class can be added to a resume just like work experience can.

Con: It can be pretty pricey. Just because it’s summer doesn’t mean that tuition is any less ridiculous. Just taking one class runs typically upwards of $1,000 — not including the cost of living and eating in Berkeley for the summer.

Pro: It can allow for some intellectual exploration. While during the regular school year, most of us are entirely focused on remaining on our intended paths, the summer allows for some freedom in class choice. It seems our duty as students of a fantastic university to branch outside of our comfort zones and explore the multitude of classes offered to us — and the summer is the perfect time to seize that opportunity.

Whether you’re looking at a class out of necessity or just out of interest to fill one of your summers spent here, the classes can be quite rewarding. It can be used as a time for growth as an intellectual and for the creation useful academic relationships. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a death sentence for your fun in the sun, if you can manage your time correctly.

Image Source: Ken Colwell under Creative Commons

Contact Mackenzie Bedford at mbedford@dailycal.org.

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Uday Mehta/Staff

Situated in an area of the world that spawns many great ideas and businesses (and far more horrendous ones), UC Berkeley students can often have difficulty making their work stand out in a field of an equally bright colleagues. “Standing out” has been the mantra instilled in the vast majority of us for a long time — starting with (presumably) college applications and culminating … well, never. It’s understandably convoluted to do so when one doesn’t even have the slightest scintilla of sapience as to the work of the competition and their allies. Enter Cal student Adam Remba.

While working away at a summer internship in the far reaches of Tel Aviv, Israel, Remba met Ben Lang, a man who managed to consolidate more than 1,000 startups and their information in his website, which he appropriately titled “Mapped in Israel.” It grew from being merely a location tool to one that granted exposure to companies through agglomeration. As any startup would appreciate, exposure is the cardinal goal. Upon recognizing the practicality of such an endeavor in California, Remba began his personal creation, correspondingly titled “Mapped in Silicon Valley.”

Simple in its execution yet powerful in its purpose, the site offers a map of all the startup-type companies in the Silicon Valley — the vast majority of which are concentrated around Berkeley — and allows one to see basic information, such as tagline, address and website, with a single click. Also available is the option to add your own community. It is very much a community-driven website where registering your startup proves to be a symbiotic relationship. The current function that makes this tool so useful is its organization: It’s guaranteed to let you find others who may be in a similar space to you and open the opportunities for collaboration and the occasional friendly rivalry and to let others find you by virtue of the same process.

Following the mold of pretty much all Berkeley student innovators, Remba is not yet content with the product he has created. Alongside the co-founder and fellow golden bear Eric Katz, he hopes to make his website an outlet that can be used to drive traffic — similar to how his inspiration worked. “Although there are ones for specific communities like Berkeley, San Francisco and Palo Alto,” Remba remarks, “I couldn’t believe there wasn’t one for Silicon Valley.”

The duo hopes to reach a total of 500 startups added to the website by December of this year to match their tagline of helping unite Silicon Valley.

Contact Uday Mehta at umehta@dailycal.org.

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Of historical value we find it interesting to note that our beloved Alma Mater appears to have evolved from a bastion of innovative thought and free speech to a seemingly spineless institutution begging for funds, selling out entire departments to the likes of Novartis and beyond our wildest imagination taking on the former head of homeland security as President of the once grand and glorious University of California.

We hope beyond hope for better times.

— Jeff Corbett,

UC Berkeley 1983 alumnus

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Unless you don’t have access to the Internet, a television or old-fashioned gossipy gawkers, you know that a baby boy was born to Prince William and Duchess Catherine on Monday, to the great excitement of the entire world. It seems like an awful lot of frenzy over a baby that is third in line to the throne of one country. (Well, if we want to get technical, it’s actually the Commonwealth Realm, but the average person only recognizes England.) And it’s a throne that, even once ascended, doesn’t really wield much more than traditions and pomp and circumstance. Whether you were waiting anxiously (as we were) to hear whether it would be a prince or princess or couldn’t have cared less, the information outbreak was impossible to avoid.

So why did the birth of just one little human being make it to the front of major news outlet like the BBC and the New York Times? It’s the fantastical nature of it all. It’s a real life prince — like the ones some of us dreamed of marrying or becoming when we grew up. It was released Wednesday that he has been given the moniker His Royal Highness Prince George Alexander Louis. We can feel the class emanating from that child already.

While the obsession with celebrities still baffles us, the mania over the royals far exceeds the collective confusion as to why someone would name their child North or Cricket. William and Kate don’t seem to just be another form of entertainment for the masses but rather embody more of a fairy tale come true — in real life. People don’t watch them to feel better about their own lives (in comparison to the train wreck of some celebrities) or to gawk at their extravagance. They genuinely seem like lovely and classy people who happen to be royal.

So the world stops in wonder and awe to celebrate — on an enormous scale — the arrival of the Prince George, because it seems to be right out of a storybook. While the reality of the world and of most of its leaders is that they only time they are really discussed in the media is in relation to what they’re doing right or wrong, this child is part of a long line that brings us all back to traditions and out of politics. The closest we come to such excitement is whether the Obamas will get another dog, but we know that in three years, there will be some other family whose pet ownership we’re concerned with. Even those of us in Berkeley who couldn’t be further removed from the effects of the royal line in London can feel the wonder at the birth of a boy who, if he turns out anything like his father, will become a real life Prince Charming.

Image Source: gem_106 under Creative Commons.

Contact Mackenzie Bedford at mbedford@dailycal.org.

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With about a month left of summer, you probably feel like school is going to start too soon. But there are also some things — fun or quirky things — that you might actually miss about Berkeley. The good thing is that you can try to get those things when you’re not in Berkeley. Here’s how:

Go to Peet’s. Even if you don’t need the caffeine for an 8 a.m. discussion, enjoy a cup of coffee. You can go get an iced latte at Starbucks too, but we recommend Peet’s because it was founded in Berkeley and can be found on nearly every block in our city, including in front of Crossroads.

Scrapbook. Do you walk into Michael’s and walk out two hours later with more craft supplies than you know what to do with? Next time you crafty people do that, pick up some scrapbook paper and an album. Summer is a great time to reflect on your years at Cal, and it’s a great time to put those reflections on paper.

Don’t just go to the movies. We all appreciate a good summer flick. But it’s good to check out something a little different too. Maybe your hometown has a free concert or a Shakespeare festival you never knew about. Outdoor events that offer cheap student admission don’t just exist in Berkeley.

Read a book. We’re from Cal; a lot of us are total book nerds. But even if you love books, you might forget to read if you’re too busy. Before you know it, you’ll be out of sorts and wondering why. It’s because your brain’s probably crying out for something imaginative or thought-provoking. Whether it’s the latest thriller best seller or a Victorian-era novel, remind yourself how much you love reading.

Find a squirrel. You can find the greedy little fur balls in more than just your college town. Don’t believe us? Check out a park you haven’t visited in a while. Different varieties of the species inhabit all of North America. But if you really just cannot find a squirrel in your local park, there’s always the Berkeley Squirrels Facebook page.

Are there other things you miss about Berkeley? How do you stay connected to your adopted city when you’re not there? Let us know in the comments!

Image source: tobucil & klabs, under Creative Commons

Contact Jessica Rogness at jrogness@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @jessarogness.

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Contact Josh Escobar at jescobar@dailycal.org.

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Ah, Facebook — that ever-present part of our lives that serves to ensure us that we have access to the constantly updated information of what everyone we know is doing at all times. It’s hard to picture life without Facebook these days — it has become so ingrained in our generation’s culture. Who wouldn’t tell you that it is absolutely common practice to almost immediately virtually stalk that cute guy you talked to in class via Facebook? Or comb through an ex’s pictures to see what he or she is up to (and hope that it’s lame)? Or just get lost for some inordinate amount of time scrolling through your news feed catching up on the unimportant facets of everyone’s lives? While it’s nice to be able to see what that girl that you were kind of lunch buddies with for half of third grade is doing with her winter break, it just seems a bit unrealistic that everyone connected to you on Facebook is actually your friend. Do we all really care what the people we went to junior high and high school with are doing now that we’ve finally escaped most of them? This is both the upside and the downfall of our friendliest foe, Facebook.

Facebook has become the go-to form of social communication. Almost all party invites are sent out through it as well as invitations to important events. The element of human contact has been all but lost in the creation of events. Rather than waiting for RSVP notes or calls, you can just check how many of your friends have clicked “attending.” While this saves a ton of time and money, we can’t help but be a bit nostalgic for the rush of excitement that would accompany receiving mail that was sure to hold a beautiful invitation inside. The fanfare isn’t quite the same when you see a notification pop up.

However, these days it seems that there may be a growing realization that virtual life is not all it’s cracked up to be. More and more people are deactivating themselves and reinserting themselves into reality. Maybe people are finally fed up with the constant flow of seemingly useless information that absorbs so much of their time. Or maybe it’s an attempt by some to further their hipster cred by removing themselves from Facebook — before it’s cool. Either way, it’s too soon to tell if maybe the novelty of Facebook and all of the information that it brings are just not as interesting anymore, and we’re making our way back to the old-fashioned ways — you know, texting and tweeting and the like.

Image Source: Dave Rutt under Creative Commons

Contact Mackenzie Bedford at mbedford@dailycal.org.

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Danielle Shi/File

Electrostatic effects on nature are so ubiquitous that they commonly play tricks on us: restyling our hair like a porcupine’s, emitting “firefly” flashes while we put on clothes, dusting our computer screens, sticking book pages and even producing a painful electric shock after a handshake. These amusing experiences, however, can sometimes turn into serious danger; sparks produced by an electrostatic discharge, for example, can instantly cause fires and explosions in warehouses, gas stations or silos.

Curiously, as we strive to achieve smaller electronic components to satisfy our modern necessities, we are innocently entering electrostatic domains. Millions of dollars are lost each year due to electrostatic damage to microelectronic devices, and the scenario seems even worse with the advent of nanotechnology. Scale matters — simply because electric forces are stronger at a closer distance.

Immanuel Kant used to think that our senses are similar to a fishnet that is thrown into the universe to catch its secrets, but due to mesh size, some fish will pass through, inevitably escaping our knowledge. This way of thought could be perfectly applied to our perception of the electrostatic phenomena at small scales, because our senses are practically useless in detecting electric fields. Perhaps due to these limitations, it took a long time to see the important role electrostatics plays on the daily routines of small animals, like insects.

Surprisingly, recent experimental observations have revealed that insects have superb abilities to sense electric fields and to experience effects that we never imagined. Those discoveries definitely challenge our perception of how the natural world works. Specifically, two different studies suggest, respectively, that electrically charged bees could sense electric fields for their own benefit during foraging by detecting floral electric fields as well as for social communication by using antennae as electrical receptors. In contrast, a third study revealed an unexpected dark side: Electrically charged bees, flies and aphid can attract the sticky thread of a neutral spiderweb up to a body length, increasing their own risk of capture. What these studies show together is that electrostatics plays a major role on insect’s life and, by extension, the lives of most small animals — but with two sides of the same coin.

Those astonishing revelations, however, are just the tip of the iceberg, making us dream of an underworld waiting to be discovered. With this in mind, the relationship between electrostatics and animals seems to be a fertile ground for new interdisciplinary research.

In my case, I am curious to see whether electrostatic forces affect insects’ flight performance, as they can easily acquire a charge by the friction of their wings against the air. But first of all, I am planning to continue studying the effects of charged insects on spider webs — this time in the wild — and to explore whether electrostatics increases the deposition rates of small particles, like pollen, dust or ashes on radial silk threads and the influence, if any, on web replacement. Orb-web spiders, insects and the electrostatic phenomena surely still have many things to say, because they have been interacting for hundreds of millions of years. But we just need to be patient and stay in the right place with the correct setup, and with some luck, we may hear them express their electrical wonders — at least one more time.

Victor Ortega is a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow. Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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But this new location might not be sustainable in the long run.

For one, the new Bancroft and College location is a low-traffic area compared to Bancroft and Telegraph. Healthy Heavenly Foods owner Ann Vu has said she expects to get less business from the new location than she did at Sproul Plaza, where she saw two to three times as many people pass through the area each day. Vu cannot afford this, as she has already lost money in dislocation costs — including damaged food and the cost of parking her truck elsewhere while a new location was settled.

Because some of these food trucks are not part of the popular Off the Grid food truck event — which hosts food trucks gatherings around the Bay Area on a semiweekly basis — they rely on having a specific location in the city where they have built a following and base.

The city and the campus have known that the Lower Sproul project has been in the works for years. The city should have better prepared to support the food trucks by negotiating new locations for them before construction began. The city has not yet notified Vu or her fellow food truck owners about how long or under what the terms they will be able to stay at Bancroft and College. There is also no guarantee that the food trucks will be able to return to their original location in front of Lower Sproul once construction is completed in two years — something the food trucks were originally promised.

The past success of food trucks in the city has shown that they are wanted by students and city residents alike. But if food trucks are considered unlike other city businesses and are not provided with clear terms for and fair contracts in the event of their dislocation, we will prevent them from serving Berkeley’s community and being successful.

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