Interesting Links for 28-05-2019

[andrewducker]

A Harrowing Journey Up the World's Fifth Highest Mountain (with some amazing photos)

(tags:photos mountains climbing tibet nepal )

Where the Conservative and Labor voters went to.

(tags:voting conservatives Labour europe )

Why people voted for each of the major parties in the Euro elections

(tags:UK politics )

It's 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning

(tags:genetics thefuture inequality Intelligence )

Facebook facing most probes by Irish data regulator

(tags:ireland Facebook dataprotection )

Why Every Vehicle Should Have An Electric Motor, Even If It Doesn't Have A Plug

(tags:electricity cars )

Eating Too Much Rice Almost Doomed Japan's Imperial Navy

(tags:Japan diet history disease )

Why you shouldn't trust your food cravings

(tags:food society )

University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.

(tags:libraries books research viaSwampers )

What Republicans And Democrats Are Doing In The States Where They Have Total Power

(tags:politics usa )

Comments

[calimac]

A couple points about the university library article, from a retired university librarian:

The library from which Yale is removing the books is the undergraduate library. Not the main research library. The undergraduate library was a US fad of the 1960s. Fearful that undergraduates were being intimidated by the big research libraries, universities created simple user-friendly additional libraries geared to the freshman or junior college level.

They turned out to be fairly useless, so over the last 30 years or so almost every university that has one has been re-integrating the collections into the main library system and repurposing the building, often as study space. (At Stanford they tore the ugly thing down and planted a plaza garden.)

About usage patterns of books, two factors not discussed are of importance:

1) The percentage of new material available in the library in hard-copy form has been rapidly declining, for cost reasons. More and more books may only be found in online collections the libraries pay flat fees for. This is even more true for journals. So if users are more likely to turn to online sources, it's in part because that's the only way to get the material they need.

2) Even to the extent that new books are being bought, many libraries are running out of space, so they're storing them off-site. (Formerly, they'd ship off little-used old books to make more space. But that judgment takes time and money they no longer have. Easier to ship the new books out directly.) Browsing is no longer possible. You have to request specifically the books you want.

[andrewducker]

Thank you, that's really useful.

[momentsmusicaux]

> But many other foods we don’t crave nearly as often, including dairy products, contain higher concentrations of this molecule

The author perhaps hasn't heard of cheese cravings?

[lilysea]

I frequently crave broccoli that has been only-just-cooked until bright-green with garlic and oil.

Also sliced carrot that has only-just-been-cooked in garlic/oil.

[channelpenguin]

Series hybrid cars: pretty much like trams, diesel-electric trains or ships then? Which we have had for many many years, and the advantages are well known.

Small boat electric design has also only just caught up to this, despite that me, my ex, and no doubt many others familiar with big ships and trains, thought it was the logical way 10+ years ago ... It is even better for small boats as the mismatch between power delivery / efficency of a diesel at low revs and what is required to move a boat is particularly bad...

[luzclarita]

The Atlantic article about university libraries is right on. The young kids want paperback fiction books and nonfiction online through the databases.