Abandon ship! Moderates and children first!

Interesting political news today: Arlen Specter will be running as a Dem in his re-election bid next year. I don't really see his move as a change of heart at all, but just an acknowledgment that he isn't welcome in the GOP anymore. He seems to be jumping ship in anticipation of not being rightwing enough for the next PA Republican primary. That's probably true, since the GOP is tolerating less dissension than ever.

I don't think this really changes the dynamic in the Senate; I expect Specter to vote in the same way as he has been. With a history of bucking the GOP party line, I doubt he will suddenly begin towing the Dem party line. That's why I don't understand some of the complaints I've seen that he has somehow hoodwinked the people who voted him into office. It's not like any of them thought they were voting for someone who wasn't a moderate.

I'm personally not estactic over this. I'm not a huge fan of one-party rule so I'm not interested in the dissolution of the Republican party. I would rather that the GOP was not so shitbag crazy, and so was a viable opposition party. Losing a prominent moderate has not helped that, but maybe it will promote some much needed soul-searching within the party.

Drawing Software and Gifts from Google

I've been kind of bored lately and thought that I might try to begin some sort of new creative outlet. Among other ideas, I decided to see if I can find some decent drawing software and do whatever comes to mind. So this post contains a question: does anyone know of any good, free drawing/animation software? It doesn't have to be professional quality, I'll just be fucking around.

Now, I did come up with a nice one that I wanted to share. Google once again is on top of things and has a free 3D graphical package called SketchUp. The mechanics are pretty cool. You can use some basic drawing tools (free pen, rectangle, circle) to make plane shapes, then you use another tool to "pull or push" that surface into a 3d object. This is the basic operation. So you can make a long, thin rectangle and then pull it upwards to make a wall. Then you can draw a rectangle on that wall and push it into and all the way through the wall to make a window or door. All of this is done with pretty intuitive mouse commands (for rotating objects or camera angle, etc) without having to remember a bunch of hotkeys. Another bonus is that there is great online support, as befits Google, in the form of Youtube tutorials. Anyway for an example of the output, I've posted a little thing I threw together below:



I'm pretty impressed with SketchUp althought I'm not sure if it's what I'm looking for. It occurs to me that the tight geometric control might be nice for figures for papers. It can export screencaptures to bitmap, jpeg, tif and png so there are LaTeX packages for using the output.

Unshelved

Thought I would point out to you all the comic "Unshelved." It's a daily comic about librarians and they do a Sunday edition which highlights some particular book. That brings me to this Sunday edition about the George RR Martin novel, The Game of Thrones:

http://www.unshelved.com/archive.aspx?strip=20060723