The newspapers in New England have been filled with stories of roofs (rooves?) collapsing under their accumulated snow loads this winter; it’s become grimly routine.  So I was somewhat heartened to see a less catastrophic version of the phenomenon in a photo Chris Hosford (one of my architectural collaborators) sent me today:     We’ve gotten used to stories of decks collapsing under the weight of large numbers of drunken party guests, so perhaps the snow did these homeowners a favor. To the forensics, though!  What happened to this little side deck?  As we’ve seen before, carpentry can be (crudely) reduced to a battle between building materials and gravity.  For decks, there are usually two anti-gravitational systems:  the posts which rest on some kind…