Dataman55

A compendium of great sites, a bit of humor, and some intriguing information. Dataman is surfing the web, so you don't have to. I don't ask you to agree with what you read here. These are just my opinions. I could be wrong. This site is only meant to provoke thought and conversation. Feel free to send me your favorite articles and sites to share. (Tell your friends. Let's spread some knowledge)

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Film School Rejects


Movie news, opinions, reviews, and all things movies, movies, movies. Plus occasional reviews by my favorite reviewer. Check out her take on the latest Dr. Suess flick in her review titled, "Horton hears a pro-life protest".

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/news/horton-hears-a-pro-life-protest.php

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What's your energy IQ?

ENERGY IQ: MAN ON THE STREET INTERVIEWS - 4:14 min.
API's John Bisney recently visited the National Mall to ask tourists about their energy knowledge, on the heels of API's upcoming Energy IQ survey. Many people were suprised to learn the true facts about oil and natural gas, energy, and alternatives.

This is straight from the American Petroleum Institute. Your Green friends won't listen to a word of it, but I still think it's interesting.

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Climate Speculators


Climate Speculators have (Robin's) Egg on their Face

"The Inuit language for 10,000 years never had a word for 'robin,'" (John) McCain lamented, "and now there are robins all over their villages." The BBC even titled a program on arctic warming "No Word for 'Robin': Climate Change in the Canadian Arctic."

What a shame! Pretty little birds invading the Arctic, bringing joy with their whoop of spring!

But, of course, it’s not true. Like the tale of the endangered polar bears that happen to be at or near record population levels, the robin story is yet another climate confabulation.

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Quote of the Day

"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results." -Milton Friedman.

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Monday, April 28, 2008

An Inconvenient… Um… Er…


You may have heard that, as ABC News reported, the footage of the “collapsing Antarctic ice shelves” in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was actually made up of special-effects shots taken from the 2004 sci-fi doozy The Day After Tomorrow.

Well, it’s fake but accurate, you might say. “Just because Big Al manipulated my emotions with spectacular Hollywood fakery doesn’t mean we’re not ALL GONNA DIE FROM GLOBAL WARMING!!!” If you really believe that, there’s no point in arguing with you. But you’ll have to forgive me for laughing at the look on your face when you find out what the effects guys used to make all those “glaciers”:

Sculpted from Styrofoam and later scanned into a computer, the ice shelf “flyover” looks real.

That’s right, Styrofoam! You know, the evil, evil stuff that’s being banned all over the place because it’s destroying the environment.

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Harrison Ford Waxes Off His Man Fur for Mother Earth


Harrison Ford, whose fourth Indiana Jones movie is coming out next month, had his hairy chest waxed to make a statement about the environment. Oh, this is sad. Indiana Jones is actually an environmental tool. Sad. Sad. Sad.

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Sunday, April 27, 2008

Stairs to Nowhere

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Saturday, April 26, 2008

13 Photographs that Changed the World


Great pictures that changed how we look at the world. It's all in how you look at things.

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History, Year by Year

See what happened the year you were born, or any interesting year for that matter. Politics, Sports, Entertainment, and deaths. Neat stuff.

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Says it all



I guess this makes me a cynic.

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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Best Frasier Episode Ever



I think this just might be the funniest three minutes on television.

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Cool Street Art





Cool Street Art collected from around the world.

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New WDW Theme Park?

Current plans call for this $520 million niche park to officially throw open its doors in October of 2011, just in time for the start of Walt Disney World's 40th anniversary celebration.

"Why did you call 'Disney's Night Kingdom' a niche park?," you ask. Well, because -- just like Discovery Cove (Which only allows in a thousand visitors each day) -- DNK will be restricting the number of guests that can enter this park every afternoon. Only 2000 people will be allowed into WDW's 5th theme park at any one time.

And -- yes -- I said "afternoon." Disney's Night Kingdom's operating hours will be 4 p.m. to midnight (5 p.m. to 1 a.m. during daylight savings time).

Let's first start with the extraordinary guest service that you'll experience as you enter DNK. Current plans call for Disney's Night Kingdom to be staffed by 4000 cast members. That means that -- for every guest that visits this theme park -- there'll be two cast members to take care of their every need. So expect to receive a lot of personalized attention & pampering once you arrive on site.


Check out the rest of the article. It may just be a rumor, but it sure sounds cool, and pricey. Mickey's leaning toward charging guests $250 - $300 per person in order to gain entry to DNK.

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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Happy Earth Day!


Here is a very interesting article on how you can create a "Global Warming" type of hysteria of your very own. Following the lack of logic and rigor that characterizes the global warming debate, the author very cleverly builds a scenario around the super-volcano that lies beneath Yellowstone Park. It is a pretty good story and looks eerily like the arguments used by the global warming crowd. Just the thing to brighten up your earth day celebrations.

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Monday, April 21, 2008

Photo Sketcher Software


Free Photo Sketcher software. Turn your photos into Pen and Ink sketches. Software with this capability used to cost hundreds of dollars. Now you can have it for Free.



This and tons more free software can be found at one of my favorite software sites: the Portable Freeware Collection.

http://www.portablefreeware.com

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Climate Skeptic

Have I mentioned that I am a climate change denier? Here is a good site with lots of interesting, and thought provoking articles on the subject. Just the antidote to the onslaught of green advertising that Al Gore is subjecting us to.

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Earth Day Deluge

At the risk of repeating myself, here's another article about the link between Earth Day and Communism.

In 1955, the then Soviet Premier, Nikita Krushchev ordered that April 22nd be designated a day to celebrate Communism.

Out of all the days in the year, the founders of Earth Day chose Lenin’s birthday. Coincidence? I think not.

As a historical note, I was there for the first Earth Day. I was a hippie who believed in saving the Earth and my fellow man (and women). It took me years to grow out of it. I really care now that you hear the other side of the argument.

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Earth Day=Lenin's Birthday



Why, you might ask, would Americans celebrate the birthday of this mass murderer Marxist, the founder of the is-it-dead-or-only-sleeping Soviet Union?

But the sad fact is that our children in public schools and colleges probably are directed to celebrate Lenin’s April 22 birthday and his values, whether they know it or not.

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Ultra-Capacitors




Ultracapacitors – also called supercapacitors – are more powerful cousins of the basic capacitor. With activated carbon at their core to act as a sponge for electrons, ultracapacitors can absorb power – or send a charge – far faster than batteries. They are also far more durable.

While big Detroit automakers ponder a future plug-in car that goes 40 miles on a battery charge before its gas engine kicks in, Ian Clifford's tiny ZENN Motor, a Toronto maker of low-speed electric cars, announced in March that it will build a new highway-speed (80 m.p.h.) model that goes 250 miles on a charge – and can recharge in just five minutes using these super capacitors. Cool.

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Friday, April 18, 2008

Cell Phone Mike Used as an Eavesdropping Tool

Did you know that your cell phone microphone can be used as a listening device? Even when the cell phone is turned off? It's true. This method was used by the FBI to catch some Mafia guys in NYC. The only way to completely disable this is to remove the battery from the phone. Wild Stuff!

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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Virtual Bubble Wrap

Just the thing for a frustrated afternoon.

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Quote of the Day

"A house with no books is not a home."

Raise a Glass

Raise a glass and remember Ollie Johnston who died today at the age of 95. Ollie is the last of the nine old men, the original group of animators that made the fledgling Walt Disney Studios a big hit in the 20's through the 60's.


"Walt Disney lightheartedly dubbed his team of crack animators his "Nine Old Men," borrowing the phrase from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's description of the U.S. Supreme Court's members, who had angered the president by quashing many of his Depression-era New Deal programs.
Although most of Disney's men were in their 20s at the time, the name stuck with them for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps the two most accomplished of the nine were Johnston and his close friend Frank Thomas, who died in 2004 at age 92. The pair, who met as art students at Stanford University in the 1930s, were hired by Disney for $17 a week at a time when he was expanding the studio to produce full-length feature films. Both worked on the first of those features, 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Johnston worked as an assistant animator on "Snow White," became an animation supervisor on "Fantasia" and "Bambi" and animator on "Pinocchio."

He was especially proud of his work on "Bambi" and its classic scenes, including one depicting the heartbreaking death of Bambi's mother at the hands of a hunter. That scene has brought tears to the eyes of generations of young and old viewers.

"The mother's death showed how convincing we could be at presenting really strong emotion," he remarked in 1999.

Johnston's other credits included "Cinderella," "Alice in Wonderland," "Peter Pan" "Lady and the Tramp," "Sleeping Beauty," "101 Dalmatians," "Mary Poppins," "The Jungle Book," "The Aristocats," "Robin Hood" and "The Rescuers."

"(People) know his work. They know his characters. They've seen him act without realizing it," said film historian Leonard Maltin. "He was one of the pillars, one of the key contributors to the golden age of Disney animation."

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