5 Thoughts for November 19, 2015

1. SketchUp: SketchUp 2016 is here, and it's got some really awesome changes! If you extensively use SU, you know about inferencing; SU 2016 dramatically adds to inferencing to slash your time spent on creating reference planes or lines. In Windows, the trays are now very similar to how Adobe uses panels, and can be locked to the application window, instead of floating on your desktop, but best of all, is that the tray section is a flyout -- more space on your screen to use for drawing; you can create trays to separate sections, so for instance in my "Main" tray I have Materials, Components, Layers, Soften Edges and Entity Info, while my "Scenes+Styles" tray has Scenes, Styles, Shadows and Outliner. In LayOut, you can now group objects on different layers, and shared layer objects are highlighted in a different color from non-shared layer objects -- no more accidentally drawing on the wrong layer! Finally, there's a public API available for LayOut, which means that like SU extensions, soon we'll be seeing a lot of third-party tools for LayOut. AutoCAD has officially been deprecated.
2. Racism: It's hard to believe that the Democratic mayor of Roanoke, VA penned an open letter to Roanoke government workers, suggesting that, like the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW-II, America should protect itself against foreign threats by blocking Syrian refugees from settling in the US. He wasn't just logically wrong, but he directly offended Americans -- Japanese Americans. He was promptly dropped from Hillary Clinton's team; Roanoke should drop him, too.
3. Political Cowards: The America SAFE bill which House Republicans passed (with support from 47 House Democrats), should not satisfy anyone, regardless of their opinion on the issue of Syrian refugees. This bill does not add additional screening requirements on top of what was already being done; in fact, they're merely reiterating what the FBI already does. The only new requirement in this bill, is to have the heads of the agencies in charge of refugee screenings, to certify that these people aren't terrorists. You should be cynical of Congress, as this bill's real intention is to alleviate political responsibility of Congress, were an attack to occur on American soil -- they'd blame the agencies who signed off. In fact, if you watch the NewsHour's interview of Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA), he essentially tells us that this bill does nothing to constrict refugees from Syria. If Congress really wanted to make America safer, they'd re-examine the visa waiver program in light of how many EU citizens have traveled to the Middle East to fight in Syria, and have returned to Europe.
4. USC Trojans football: A reminder to the football players, that if you want Clay Helton (#Helton2016) to remain the head coach next year, you have to outperform your recent work by starting and finishing games on both sides of the ball and especially in special teams. If you need an incentive, by winning out, you'll be able to have a redo with Stanford for all the Roses.
5. USC Trojans football, part II: Two of USC's most important middle linebackers are out (Lamar Dawson and Cameron Smith), so it appears that they're going with a five linebacker rotation (Anthony Sarao, Osa Masina, Michael Hutchings, Olajuwon Tucker, Uchenna Nwosu). The way I see it, one of the guys in the middle should be Su'a Cravens. He's a junior who knows the system, and with his speed and toughness could easily handle the job in the middle. Sure, it means the loss of a great edge rusher, but on the other hand it means that he'll be able to run the green dog blitz -- Cravens has the knack for getting around blocks -- since you already know that they'll be playing a lot of cover-1 to defend the edge run.