For the flick The Abyss James Cameron wanted it to look as authentic as possible, and CGI was still a new thing, so it was decided to shoot underwater. Their were not tanks anywhere big enough to film in, so after some scouting, the crew came across an abandoned nuclear power plant on which construction was never competed. The studio bought up the property and converted it into a movie set, using the outbuildings as the interiors for the Deepcore station, but they also built a 1/8 scale exterior of the Deepcore set inside of the containment building of the reactor! Inside the reactor they were able to pump in 7 million gallons of water, to a depth of 40 feet, and completely submerge the set. After the movie was completed, it was pretty much abandoned. Over time, people have trashed the interiors, but exterior of Deepcore still exists. Check out links to some pictures and more after clicking Read more »

Several weeks ago I was poking around Wil Wheaton’s blog and found a link to RFJason.com who had taken an image of the Enterprise, NCC-1701 D from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and overlaid it onto real world images using Google Maps. Well, I just got my blueprints for my favorite ship, Serenity, so I thought I would give it a try with some Earth that was locations. I’m using some of the locals from RFJason for comparison, as well as some of my own places, starting with a few from Wisconsin.

Wisconsin State Capital in Madison. I know the building quite well and was really surprised on how closely Serenity matches up to it on width and length. The Capital is about twice as high.

Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, home to the University of Wisconsin Badgers Football team. Something tells me the crew of Serenity are not Badger fans…

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I was playing around with ancestry.com and found myself, which was quite cool in itself I thought. Playing around I found a line going back 24 generations to a grandfather born in 1229, before that the farthest I was aware of was 16 generations back to 1524. Then I noticed a little button to find famous people related to you. So of course, I couldn’t resist. Some of the highlights:

Lyndon B Johnson, 36th President of the United States of America, 6th Cousin 2 times removed
Dwight D Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States, 7th Cousin 4 times removed
Elizabeth Virginia Wallace Truman, First Lady, wife of Harry S. Truman, 8th Cousin 3 times removed
Walt Whitman, Poet, 7th Cousin 5 times removed
George Orwell, Author, 9th Cousin 5 times removed
William Avery “Billy” Bishop, Canada’s first combat ace, more WWI victories than any other British pilot

Thats as close as I will ever get to being famous or important :p

Chernobyl, Ukraine, Ocober 1995.
I have always been fascinated by the aftermath of the events that took place over 21 at the power plant outside of town Pripyat known as Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986 at 1:23 am a series of design flaws, human error and lack of communication merged resulting in the worst nuclear disaster of all time. The aftermath has caused the death of thousands of people, the abandoning of entire towns within 20 miles of reactor 4 and billions of dollars in clean up costs. Some people have been able to get into the exclusion zone with their cameras to show the rest of the world their results.

The first site I encountered years ago, Kidd of Speed was one of the first internet sites to show images of the area today. Their is controversy over the some of the details of her story, but her pictures speak for themselves.

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http://www.richard-seaman.com/Aircraft/AirShows/Edwards2005/Highlights/index.html
Goto the bottom of the page.

C-12 Huron, B-2 Spirit, KC-135 Stratotanker, MC-130 Hercules, C-17 Globemaster III, B-52 Stratofortress, F-117 Nighthawk, F-16 Fighting Falcon, T-38 Talon, F-16 Fighting Falcon and a F-22 Raptor. All in the air. All together.

Damn. Just damn.

Only thing missing is an SR-71 :p

This guy has tons of other great pictures at his site, check out
http://www.richard-seaman.com/index.html