"Good luck surviving seasonal depression or maintaining your slowly failing eyesight, especially during a pandemic and you should not be spending long periods in common spaces, when 95% of the rooms in Munger have NO WINDOW"
"It can be a huge problem for people to live in because normally people would feel very uncomfortable living in a room without windows, and you don't even have a safe place to recover yourself when you feel down."
"Having building controlled heat/cooling is definitely not ideal and living with 5-6 other grad students may not be your ideal option (weigh this heavily). I happened to luck out with 6 complete strangers"
"The apartments have 6-7 bedrooms (and each has it's own bathroom) which is great when you want to socialize but also a challenge if you need quiet."
And of course, there's real selection bias here. These are grad students, and grad students in Ann Arbor have a fair bit of choice. Any problems at UCSB will be magnified, as it's an undergrad dorm where the students have less life experience and less choice.
What I'd really love to see is a study on the mental health of people moving into this. People generally have a very poor understanding of how lighting affects mental health. I know I did until I took it seriously.
This is going to be a bigger issue than you might think at first. No windows means that if you're too hot you can't open the window to let in cool and fresh air. You're stuck with whatever the building decides on.
Not being able to vent their living space is a major red flag.
"[The building] will provide built-in social distancing as required by COVID. Fresh air, the architect insisted, will be vented into all rooms at twice the rate mandated by existing building codes and will be off-gassed directly to the atmosphere without any transfer to other rooms in the dorm."
Somehow I have a feeling, that prices for these dorms are adjusted to property rental prices(and income from renting square meter here is larger, than what you might get from flat) and those who have friends might share some place and rent together to have place with more breathing room...
PS If there are no windows - why it had to be built as tall building and not some underground hole, from where those students - lesser humans can crawl out for the time to study...
Of course you're entitled to your preferences, but we can safely say that the vast majority want windows in their living space.
North campus has better 1/2 bed options, but only engineering and art students would be there.
That the choices are ones you don't like doesn't mean they aren't choices. The people who live in Munger all did so voluntarily, meaning that they're going to be the people who were most likely to be ok with Munger's limitations.
Similarly, they can read whole books very quickly, but they do so by reading just the first sentence on every page. This is what gives them the superpower of reading large technical emails, and responding to them in seconds about a completely unrelated topic.
Lesson learned: MBA's seem to value incomplete communication, and email headers over a condensed explanation of what's actually relevant.
Does this mean Munger is great or that every other sizeable offering in the area is even worse?
“All virtual windows will have a fully programmed circadian rhythm control system to substantially reflect the lighting levels and color temperature of natural daylight,” according to the statement. All common areas, the statement added, “have significant access to natural light.”
We're just realizing we shouldn't breathe contaminated air, and we're just realizing that we need to make infrastructure investments.
CO2 is a good proxy for infectious disease transmission risk. We breathe out CO2 as we spread pathogens. Outside air is just above 400ppm (higher with auto exhaust) and architects aimed for 600ppm before the pandemic. As one approaches CO2 levels closer to outside air, infectious disease transmission plummets.
To balance ventilation with energy costs (and avoid accelerating global warming) one needs heat exchangers that can't easily be retrofitted into an existing building. Munger Hall could dodge all the bad publicity about fake windows if it sports a "next pandemic ready" ventilation system out of the blocks.
In my experience sitting on building committees, architects are better at original visuals than original engineering. When a Spanish village restores ancient stone huts for tourists, they run DC wiring for LED lights. When I ask if our new building will have DC wiring for LED lights, rather than a cheap, inefficient transformer in every bulb, architects just stare back at me, deer in the headlights. So I'm not hopeful that a radical reworking of our infrastructure will originate with architects.
Our building wasn't going to have windows that opened, till I suggested the building would be usable parts of the year even if the central air failed. I was assured it would never fail. The central air in the previous building failed the next week; I was never implicated. Then our administration overruled the architects and put in office windows. People teased me that I cost us a "this building pees spring water" green certification. Then the pandemic, and I was a hero.
In 2015 it was, sure. We'll probably hit a seasonal peak of 420ppm next year. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
RCP8.5 has us at 1000ppm by the end of the century. By then outside air ventilation will mostly be needed to keep people in meeting rooms from putting themselves into a coma.
Well....
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curio...
This is exactly the type of information that gets lost between generations that makes past decisions make sense. It's why I ferverently collect older academic/engineering literature. Not necessarily for the equations, but for some of the context around the problems and challenges of the time we no longer think about because they are "already solved".
Everyone moans about radiators once you start sealing up windows to be more green. Surprise! They were designed with the inefficiency of having an open window in mind for health and ventilation purposes since the turn of the century! Of course you end up with problems when you violate a functional invariant!
Apparently it will:
"[The building] will provide built-in social distancing as required by COVID. Fresh air, the architect insisted, will be vented into all rooms at twice the rate mandated by existing building codes and will be off-gassed directly to the atmosphere without any transfer to other rooms in the dorm."
This blows my mind too. I expect it's coming, though: the cables would be cheaper, and if there's one driver of change in construction, it's cost.
Another question is, would it be a straight improvement? I think transformers are typically very efficient, and I could imagine the losses from running a lower voltage through a long line might be greater.
You could make it to ~30ft on existing wiring as long as you kept draw under 5A. That’s ~60W and enough to power all of 5 pretty anemic 12V bulbs.
If you actually need something like a 60ft run from your transformer and 15A to play with, you’re going to be looking more towards something like 6AWG. If you want to keep under 3% voltage drop you’d be looking towards 2AWG.
14AWG 2-wire is something like $0.35/ft. 6AWG 2-wire is like $0.75/ft. 2AWG 2-wire is coming up on $3/ft.
There’s a reason we use AC for power distribution rather than DC.
While I think 12V would be too low, I think there's also a happier medium than 120/220V. Something like 50V is nice because you're very unlikely to get an electric shock, while taking advantage of the fact the average LED current draw is like 1 fifth of an incandescent.
You could get the current 1800W of energy out of a branch circuit with 15A at 120VDC and all the limitations/massive wires I described.
If you wanted to run 1800W DC as we run current power (14/2, hundred foot+ runs, etc) you'd be looking at something like 720VDC at a couple amps.
There's three main things I see as limitations to really pushing DC up to those levels:
1. Safety, plain and simple. 2. Switching. You generally require larger contacts and bigger gaps to switch DC because you don't get the benefit of it crossing over a 0 point several times a second. This gets worse the higher the voltage goes. This requires much more involved switching equipment. E.g., it's common to see a relay rated for switching 120VAC/30VDC. 3. Economies of scale. This one isn't some law of physics, but most current equipment you can find is 12/24/48VDC outside of very expensive industrial stuff. Also you're gonna need some pretty big transformers to step this stuff back down to usable voltages since everything we need it for is generally running at single-digit voltages. (Efficient, but just another big thing on the BOM for every single device.)
That said, I'm just a hobbyist so I may be missing something fundamental here.
1. Safety is relative. 10-20mA is enough to kill a person. In AC voltage we measure it as root mean square, the actual peak to peak voltage is greater than Double that.
2. There are such things as solid state switching. Solid state relays and field effect transistors come to mind. This is also how we down convert DC power to lower voltages, very fast switching giving an average voltage that is the target (see buck converters).
3. DC power is everywhere and it is easy to do DC to DC conversion. Single chip solutions exist. Hell your car is entirely 12V (if ice powered, EV's are a different matter)
Hope that helps :)
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15A at 120VDC wouldn't require massive wires. I'm not sure why you think it's drastically different from 120VAC for wire sizing. If dropping 10% of the AC voltage is OK, dropping 10% of DC is presumably OK, too, and either is I * R. About 96 meters to drop 12V, or 48 meters out and back.
It's not a good idea for plenty of other reasons, but...
How can they miss the problem when the worst case scenario for some idiotic design like this happened last year!
I think fire safety, lack of entrances, lack of windows and fresh air are bigger concerns.
With catastrophic climate change on the horizon, the theory is that pandemics will become significantly more frequent.
What theory is this? I've heard of globalization and rapid transportation speeding up pandemics, but never climate change.
There are also studies implying that animals like rodents and bats that spread the most diseases to humans are also adapting the best to climate change and human environments, which implies increased risk of new diseases: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.273...
There's also the idea of frozen pathogens thawing and infecting animals, which has happened recently: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/4884009...
In general it's not that climate change makes pandemics worse, but it makes the chance of a new disease infecting a human more likely.
The models depend on predicting an uncertain future, and for this kind of stuff using past data has little meaning. It's not lottery numbers where probability really gives you some hard insights. We also have a lot more people, climate change and with it likely more movement from affected areas and a lot of other stuff going on that makes it hard to use data older than this century to gain insights into what will be.
Next, you interpret said probability as nicely equally distributed over time. I don't know what to say to such an interpretation.
Also, a pandemic is a kind of event that even if it indeed only appears rarely (which we hope but don't know) each time has a huge impact.
Further reading: https://www.govtech.com/em/emergency-blogs/disaster-zone/cov...
Your info needs updating. The vaccines wane, and breakthroughs aren’t harmless.
Swedish study found efficacy decline basically to nothing at 7 months and severe disease efficacy did too: https://mobile.twitter.com/x2IndSpeculator/status/1454126453...
Separate study found no reduction in risk of long covid in the event of a breakthrough: https://mobile.twitter.com/ahandvanish/status/14534083120667...
Designing buildings around 1.5 years of isolation because of covid is silly. We will never react to a future pandemic this way again. History will consider this whole mess as one of the most disastrous public health policies ever created and people trying it again will be laughed out of the room.
That being said… designing rooms with no windows is just awful. Bathrooms and stuff, sure. But primary living spaces like bedrooms or living rooms? That is a ticket for depression!
Mankind has been designing and living in buildings for far longer than 50 years. Supposedly the US has a lot of experience designing and building prisons, which have far more stringent requirements than university dorms, and clearly these lessons have been learned long ago.
But just not by Munger, who apparently is militantly against any feedback from any architect.
We can't feign ignorance. Bad design is bad design.
The Michigan building has separate, private baths. Looking at the UCSB rendering, single toilet, single shower for eight.
The plan view OTOH, shows two baths.
One or the other is wrong.
Update: from another comment, Munger designed a similar building in Michigan. It has great reviews!
But, one of the top ones was “great until pandemic”. Adding this to clarify that, contra other comments, I don’t necessarily think Munger was mistaken. But events have made the idea unfortunate.
https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...