Is it Real, or is it CloudCalc?  Only the Spider Knows for Sure

Well it’s Halloween (and how appropriate — this is my 13th blog post!), so I’ve been trying to think of a seasonally appropriate structural engineering topic for this week’s CloudCalc blog.  In order to get inspiration, I walked down my street looking at the decorations on the neighborhood houses.  A Jack o’ Lantern?  No, that’s not a good representative, since after a few days they typically become so mushy that they can’t even support themselves.  There’s a ghost – or actually a sheet of white plastic hanging from a tree.  The best engineering analogy that brought to mind was Tyvek wrap covering a half-built structure.  Over there, a couple of witches…probably not, a blog on aerospace engineering might be a better place to discuss women who manage to get broomsticks to fly.
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