Somebody on Substack showed a 2005 online issue of The Onion, done entirely in FLV and SWF. The issue was a prophecy of 2025. They missed the basic point that Flash itself would be “outlawed” by the tech lords.
I’ve never understood why Flash needed to be “outlawed.” Allegedly it was “vulnerable”, but we know that cybersecurity is a fraud akin to the old loyalty oaths. Keep the yokels busy with magic spells to ward off fake spies so the real spies can work without hindrance.
FLV was a movie format, adequately replaced by MP4. No big loss.
SWF was interactive and POWERFUL. Everything you need in one package. I used SWF often in the first few years of this blog, from 2005 to 2013. This seems to be the last time I used it. The text says “Here’s the diagram” but there’s nothing visible.
In 2014 I started switching my courseware from Windows executable to online. I intended to use SWF for the interactive parts. It was “outlawed” around the same time when I was making the transition, so I had to learn the MUCH LESS POWERFUL and much clumsier methods of HTML/SVG/CSS/JS.
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Just for fun here’s the last SWF item redone with a GIF.
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It’s clear that steep roofs are better in snowy places.
One reason is obvious but not very important. When snow is ‘shed-able’, steep roofs will shed it faster. Powdery snow is inclined to fall or blow off, and it falls faster from a steep roof. However, most snow doesn’t blow or slide easily. It sticks equally on all roofs. (This year’s Spokane snow is especially glue-like, presumably because the temperature has been especially steady at 20 degrees.)
The other reason is more general, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around it properly: Steep roofs can hold the load better. This is usually described in terms of pounds per square foot, but that doesn’t hit the mark. The important variable for breaking or weakening a roof is the bending force applied at the middle of the rafters. I could sense that the bending force was different for a steep roof, but I needed a diagram to pin it down.
Here’s the diagram. The animation varies the roof from steep to nearly flat. Three vector arrows represent the relevant forces felt by the middle of a rafter.
The black arrow, always pointing straight down and always the same strength, is the pull of gravity on the snow.
The green arrow represents the component of gravity along the rafter. This force tends to pull the house apart, and it is actually worse for the steep roof. If you take the green along-rafter force and vectorize its effects on the top of the wall, you see that it comes out roughly the same for all roofs. The force along the rafter is strongest for a steep roof, but most of it goes into downward compression, which is the safest kind of force. For a low roof the along-rafter force goes mainly into sideways pull-apart, but it’s a weak force.
Most important is the red arrow, the component that tries to bend the rafters. This force is weak on a steep roof, strong on a flat roof.
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Later realized that this ties in with the next item, because the two houses in that picture helped me to clarify the effect of roof slope back in 2013. They’re the same size facing the same way on the same street, and one is steeper than the other.
Polistra's Mill 