Berkeley, California

Berkeley is across the bay from San Francisco. It is an excellent school for nearly any subject one could wish study. Perhaps two of the best known things to come out of Berkeley are LSD and BSD Unix. They have a long standing rivalry with Stanford down the bay, and both are very good at what they do. The diversity at Berkeley, however, is much more fun than Stanford's silly trees.

Home of the several "revolutions" in the 1960s, Berkeley is a small city in the East Bay, north of Oakland. It is well known for the various riots which have occurred there over various issues.

Berkeley is also the home of the University of California at Berkelely, which is usually regarded as the best public university in the United States. It has about a zillion different academic departments, but its bureaucracy can be rather overwhelming at times. Advice from this noder: Stick to your guns! Nothing is impossible, even though the bureaucrats might think so.

There is a large homeless population in Berkeley, especially around Telegraph Avenue. While the exact causes for this cause violent debate, it is true that the city provides much more in the way of services to this population than other cities.

Berkeley, like much of the Bay Area, is losing its eclectic flavor as the yuppies move in. There is now a Gap on Telegraph Avenue, and the area around Fourth Street is totally lost, a de-militarized zone of full-on yuppiedom. Similarly, the student population at the University has homogenized, especially after the passage of California's Proposition 209, which repealed Affirmative Action and race-based preferences for admission.