I always think of the building (and brutalist architecture in general) as absurdist architecture, and I find City Hall to be quite humorous in that light.
The general shape lifts up and is trying to appear as if it's floating, in contrast to the material selection. Think of an Elephant ballerina, or Douglas Adams "It hung in the air in exactly the way bricks don't".
Another example is the Holman government building a few blocks away - with these ridiculous stairways through a massive open space underneath an imposing bridge of offices.
More totalitarian than absurdist. The whole idea seems to be elevating the vision of "The Genius Architect" over the needs and wishes of the people who would actually use the space, with a borderline contempt for what non-architects and even non-Brutalist architects think.
I'm reminded of the time I ended up crossing the Empire State Plaza in Albany once in the dead of winter. Such a horrid experience. Surrounded by soulless impersonal concrete with wind and snow blowing and howling. I felt like a freaking ant. It's not the type of architecture that inspires and uplifts in person. It psychologically oppresses and beats down.
Compare that to a place like Saint Peter's, which even as a non-Catholic almost took my breath away to experience in person.
>> elevating the vision of "The Genius Architect" over the needs and wishes of the people who would actually use the space
Otherwise known as all architecture. In a past life I work in the entertainment industry: lots of late nights in venues like concert halls and occasional art galleries. All of them contain expensive architectural elements that serve no need other than to stoke the ego of their designers. Look behind the veil and you will see the rat's nest of engineering workarounds needed to keep these white elephants upright. Let the engineers draw a building's outline and it may be ugly, but at least it will have sufficient electrical connections, parking, and floor space.
Generally human beings value ornamentation quite highly. I think you make an interesting observation, but to say “no other need” is ridiculous. I also have a dim view of a lot of high profile architecture and the high ego architect, don’t get me wrong, but form and function ought to be a balance and not a battle. You’re claiming it’s a battle.
City Hall is absurd in both it's appearance outside and the impracticality of the design and interior. Rooms with giant concrete columns that cut off sight lines, rampant maintenance problems from elevating form over function , and the comfort of a supraterrestrial civil defense shelter.
My family had one of these when I was growing up (in gray - not the great blue color you linked to).
When I was 11-12 and didn't have a computer, I used it to type up BASIC programs that I either took to school to type into the Apple ][ there, or just imagined how they worked...
I would hope that there is more process in place protecting against downtime than code review - for example automated tests across several levels, burn-in testing, etc.
People are not reliable enough to leave them as the only protection against system failure...
Did you mean to reply to somebody else? I'm a huge believer in automated testing, and if I said something that can be interpreted otherwise I'd like to clarify it.
I guess the GP's issue is because automated tests (and every other kind of validation) imposes architectural constraints on your system, and thus are an exception to your rule.
I don't think that rule can be applied as universally as you stated it. But then, I have never seen anybody breaking it in a bad way that did also break it in a good way, so the people that need to hear it will have no problem with the simplified version until they grow a bit.
Anyway, that problem is very general of software development methods. Almost every one of them is contextual. And people start without the maturity to discern the context from the advice, so they tend to overgeneralize what they see.
Hm. I think maybe you're using "system" to mean a different thing than I am? I thinking of "the system" as the thing that is executing in production - it provides the business behavior we are trying to provide; there is a larger "system" surrounding it, that includes the processes and engineers, and the CI/CD pipelines - it too has an "architecture", and _that_ architecture gets (moderately) more complex when you add CI/CD. Is that where our communication is clashing?
Because the complexity of that outer system is also important, but there are a few very major differences between the two that are probably too obvious to belabor. But in general, architectural complexity in the inner system costs a lot more than it does in the outer system, because it's both higher churn (development practices change much slower than most products) and higher risk (taking production systems offline is much less permissible than freezing deployments)
> I think maybe you're using "system" to mean a different thing than I am?
No, I'm not. Are you overlooking some of the impacts of your tests and most of the impact of static verification?
Those do absolutely impact your system, not only your environment. For tests it's good to keep those impacts at a minimum (for static verification you want to maximize them), but they still have some.
I don't think I'm overlooking any major ones, but we are probably working in quite different types of systems - I'm not aware of any type of static verification I'd use in a rails application that would affect _architecture_ in a meaningful way (unless I would write quite terrifying code without the verifier I suppose).
I'm not sure about the tests - it depends on what you'd consider an impact possibly; I've been trained by my context to design code to be decomposable in a way that _is_ easily testable, but I'm not sure that is really an 'impact of the tests' (and I'm fairly confident that it makes the abstractions less complex instead of more).
Would you mind explaining what you mean in more detail?
I'd like to get a heat pump to replace my existing baseboard hot-water system (currently powered by an oil furnace) without converting to a heated air system.
From what I've read, that's not quite feasible yet, since current systems can't produce a high enough temperature.
What are the prospects of that technology becoming viable in the next few years?
It partially depends on your climate. I’m in Portland, Maine, so for us, we have a natural gas furnace with radiators, but they’re heavily supplemented by a few heat pumps. For us, the temperature frequently gets very low in the winter, sub 10°F, and this is the point when heat pumps aren’t as efficient. An ideal set up in a small home could be heat pumps running off solar and a woodstove for when it gets really really cold.
Figure out the minimum flow (supply) temperature that can meet your building heat loss on the design day. If you have enough radiation, you might be able to get by with 135°F flow.
I have baseboard in the attic and cast iron rads on the main level. I have the flow set to 126°F until the outside air temp drops below 30°F and then I increase by 2°F for every 4°F change in OAT. So at 2°F OAT, I have 140°F flow.
That’s enough to maintain temp in my fairly poorly insulated 1920s house near Boston. It’s enough to slowly recover temp as well.
140°F is a stretch for air to water heat pumps, but you could reasonably use an A2W for most of the year and supplement with a 9kW (31KBTU/hr) electric boiler as emergency supplemental heat and use that a couple days per year.
What killed it for me (and the reason I have a fairly new gas boiler installed) is the upfront cost was utterly uncompetitive.
If you have a condensing boiler, set the high-limit or flow temp to 130-135°F and see how your house handles it on the cold days. You can measure and calculate all you want, but nothing beats trying it.
This guy is a great resource if you want to understand what goes into a proper A2W system install. In Europe, it seems by law they are required to do heat loss calculations to size an install. In the US, it seems to be a little more loose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IvGe4JZLSU
I saw a video recently from a ... less sophisticated place in the US... where the HVAC installer literally held up a piece of paper from the street with different sized houses on it, and sized the HVAC based on which of the houses best "covered up" the actual house when looking through the semi-transparent paper. Just astonishing. No consideration at all for the build quality/insulation details, no adjusting for the distance from the road, just a "welp, this looks like a 3-ton job".
That's insane. Proper sizing is paramount, it's also a good way to surface that 5k in insulation improvements might be the better first step to consider vs installing a larger system just to keep up with losses.
What works for me in the northeast with an old house is a high velocity small duct air handler/distribution system (unico) coupled with a Bosch cold climate heat pump, with an oil furnace backup. This is forced air, so not exactly what you are looking for and I get that the heat from those baseboards is a better quality/less drying form of heat. I could upgrade to add a whole house humidifier to address this a bit. I use the heat pump most of the year, down to an outside temp of about 25F, although Bosch says I should be good down to 5F. The oil furnace runs basically Jan/Feb (but not as much this Feb as it's like 50F today). I've also extensively sealed/insulated the house (although there's always more of that to be done in an old house). It's a pretty good solution. I'd love for the air to water heat pump tech to work better, but I got tired of waiting.
As others comments said, it depends on the climate :
The problem is that the power/performance of the heat pumps decreases with the cold weather and the necessary increase in the temperature of the heating water, which obliges to keep the boiler for the cold weather.
This is a problem for the heat pumps without probable solution and little progress to wait.
The solution is to insulate the house very well so that its needs can be covered by the heat pump with less hot water. Divide the losses by 2 at least.
So CO2 heatpumps are starting to become available in the US which can run higher temperatures. But most likely the best option would be to switch to radiators that don't require as high of temperature to operate. Something like underfloor heating or panel radiators.
The other option that is common in New England is to keep the baseboard oil heat and get mini splits. Then run the mini splits for heat and if they cannot keep up switch to the oil heat.
Yep - exactly the issue. They've started shipping much more efficient baseboard systems which run at lower temps by adding more fins, adding CPU fans to increase heat transfer across the plates, etc. but the correct answer is to usually invest in air sealing/insulating the house which will require fewer BTUs in the first place.
I think this is possible. I will ask to a teacher of hvac-learning and come back to you asap. But basically you can heat water instead of air with a heat pump.
I particularly like how they neutrally listed all the assets and lines of credit of Voyager Digital (the loan holder) without mentioning that they add up to just $655M (< $670MM), meaning that they are now insolvent.
I don't think defaulting on a loan means you're going to pay $0.00 on that loan, just that you've missed a payment (plus whatever grace period is given).
Default means that you are or have been technically deemed incapable of making any further payments. This includes repaying the principal outstanding.
You're confusing any potential amount ultimately recoverable in insolvency with some kind of imaginary ex gratia payment by a management of a imaginary going concern which absolutely doesn't exist in Ch.12. Its chapter12 in the circumstances conceived.
> Default means that you are or have been technically deemed incapable of making any further payments
Nope, that's not correct. Loan default occurs when a borrower fails to pay back a debt according to the initial arrangement - it most assuredly does not mean that no further payments will ever come (or be extracted via judgement).
To expand a bit more. At least in the SOPs that I wrote, is a loan declared default if a repayment of (interest and/or principal) has not been received after a certain cutoff (30+, 60+, 90+) or the company has been declared bankrupt, dead, or similar (hard trigger events)
For the latter, this is why petitions like these matter: https://www.reuters.com/business/china-evergrande-faces-wind...
When I registered for Lufthansa FF, the form was just numbers. My birthdate has two single-digit numbers in it, and I ended up with Month-Date backwards (US vs. rest of the world conventions - e.g., 4/8 is either April 8, or Aug 4).
It wasn't an issue, but a minor annoyance to fix it every time I traveled, so that it matched my travel documents.
Until a couple of years ago, when I was traveling back from Germany and the flight crew thought it would be nice to surprise me with a bottle of champagne at midnight on my "birthday".
They were so proud of doing this over the top "random kindness" (it was pretty thoughtful), and couldn't figure out why I was confused and annoyed. I still feel bad for not acting more excited or grateful...
Oh it is far from nothing to be certain. And as Netflix's recent loss of subscribers and subsequent drop in stock price showed nothing is forever. But I'd still need to see the drop continue for a bit longer before I full on expect Microsoft to be in trouble.
Mind you, I would like to see them follow in Apple's footsteps on the train the M1 is creating. It certainly makes it FEEL like there is more runway down this path then Intel's, with caveats for potential hardware vulnerabilities like specter that simply haven't been found yet on Apple silicon to inhibit optimizations.
I think at this point Windows market share could go to 0, and while it'd hurt, with Office 365, Azure, Xbox, etc., I think microsoft is sufficiently diversified to survive that.
Yeah, that Civic didn't have a passenger side mirror. Visibility was so great anyways I never felt the lack. Probably would have killed me to death in a rollover since it was just a bubble of sheet metal and glass. But oh boy could I see things around me.
Father and son stand in queue behind obese man. Son says:
- Wow, what a big man!
- Shh, don't say that loudly.
Then man's cell phone got sms, son says:
- Run, he's backing up!
The general shape lifts up and is trying to appear as if it's floating, in contrast to the material selection. Think of an Elephant ballerina, or Douglas Adams "It hung in the air in exactly the way bricks don't".
Another example is the Holman government building a few blocks away - with these ridiculous stairways through a massive open space underneath an imposing bridge of offices.
Pure absurdist humor.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/KUFh9jFkERjhp7MK9