If you have surfed the web since Christmas day, you might have noticed a certain face appearing in Facebook profiles, websites and just about everywhere. Do not to panic, you're not going mad. Perhaps this video clip may help explain things a little.



On Christmas Day, BBC aired the first part of the most watched sci fi show in Britain's history, Doctor Who: The End of Time. And the above video was the cliffhanger ending, where The Doctor's arch-nemesis, The Master, turned all human beings into, well..., The Master. No one expected that and from what I can tell it has really polarized the fanbase. The side who loved this cliffhanger has gone all out to literally turn the world into The Master, hence all the sudden changes in Facebook profile pictures and photoshopping The Master's face on everybody's pictures.

The first time I took notice of Carey Mulligan was in the acclaimed Doctor Who episode, "Blink". For those who do not know, Doctor Who is a critically acclaimed and wildly popular ratings hit British science fiction series. For this particular episode, the regular lead actors David Tennant and Freema Agyeman were busy shooting the season finale and so the lead character fell on to guest actor Carey Mulligan.

Initially, I thought the producers were taking a very risky move of letting a young and unknown guest actress to fill the lead role in a multi-award winning television series, even if it was only for one episode. However, by the end of the episode I had been won over. The unique story of "Blink" combined with Mulligan's portrayal of Sally Sparrow was simply brilliant. This particular episode has gone on to win multiple awards including BAFTA Best Writing Award and the Hugo Awards. The episode is also considered by fans to be a classic, must see episode of Doctor Who.

So when I learned that Carey Mulligan is starring in An Education, I simply had to watch it. Here in Singapore, the movie is only aired at one cinema (GV's Cinema Europa), at one time every day (4:50pm). Despite the lack of accessibility and strange time, the theater was half full when I caught it today. The subject matter of An Education was pretty tame, mundane, boring and in no way climatic. Yet, it wasn't a boring movie because the stellar cast carried the movie very well. I know I sound like a fan boy now, but Carey Mulligan really pulled off a very nuanced, well beyond her age performance.

The rumor mills have it that An Education would get a nomination for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And that Carey Mulligan would not only get a nomination for Best Actress, but that she stands a high chance of winning the award itself. Only time will tell, but I wish all the best of luck to her.

Recently, I have stumbled upon a little gem of a show, "Being Erica". The show is a strange mix of two completely different genres. On one hand, "Being Erica" is similar to "Sex and the City", looking at the love and life of a single 30 year old woman and on the other hand it has the time traveling aspects of "Quantum Leap". Sounds weird, but somehow the show creates television magic with this premise.

The show revolves around, Erica Strange, an intelligent 32 year old woman who is in a rut. Although she has a Masters degree in English Literature, she holds a job as a call center operator (and was fired right in the first episode). She is also single, living alone and pitied by friends and family. After a particularly disastrous day she meets an enigmatic therapist, Dr. Tom, who claims he can turn her life around, fix her past mistakes if Erica is willing to commit to changing her life for the better.

Erica takes up the commitment and she suddenly discovers herself transported back in time, where she can literally fix her past mistakes. Here is a short clip of Erica traveling back to her university days to face an abrasive poetry professor who made her terrified of confronting assertive people.

Here's the season finale promo. Erica is given a chance to go back in time to say goodbye to her brother before he dies in a barn fire. Can she resist the temptation to play god and save her brother's life instead?

Wired Magazine has a layman's article about the discovery that monkeys do speak to each other. (See http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/monkey-talk/)

While the speech syntax and semantics used by the monkeys are rudimentary, it nevertheless IS language. This may be news to some people, but as a computational linguist and a dog owner I am not surprised by this news. My dog, Polo (female), can definitely learn from repeated examples and rewards.

For example, she love car rides. She also knows that I typically use the car in the evenings to fetch mum from the MRT station. As a result, she would not even budge when I call her to the car in the mornings or afternoons. The same cannot be said about evenings, as she would get very excited, jumping about and even bark at me for a car ride.

Of course, she understands all the standard dog commands such as sit, stand, roll over. So if a dog is able to discern human noises, monkeys can surely recognize monkey noises.

Since its sort of Halloween season, and I haven't really posted a blog in quite a while... here's a little something just to keep this place updated.

My invitation to beta test Google Wave has finally arrived in my inbox and I am pretty excited about this. As I may have mentioned before, I believe Google Wave is going to be the Next Big Thing in the web in coming years and it gives me great pleasure to be able to test it out and try and develop some cool applications for it.

For those of you who are in the Google Wave beta program, you should be able to see my first attempt at embedding a Wave within this blog post. Lets hope it works!

Unfortunately you'll need a Google Wave account to view the Wave. So if you are not in the beta test program, I'm sorry for all you will see is a blank space.

In short, I think Google Wave will take over emails and IMs as the communications platform of choice. Wave was announced just a two days ago, at the Google I/O Developer's Conference and the presentation is targeted at software developers. However the video below, especially the first 30 minutes, should showcase what Google Wave is and how it would change the way we communicate on the web.

For those who don't know, I am a die-hard Trekkie. I have seen every single episode of every single Star Trek series as well as every movie. I own two shelves full of Star Trek novels, the entire Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series on DVD. I also have all collector's edition DVD of all ten prior Star Trek movies. So do not expect this to be an unbiased review of the 11th Star Trek movie.

The aliens, spaceships, lasers and explosions are exciting but that is not what I liked most about Trek. After all Star Wars has all these but I do not like Star Wars. The best of Star Trek is its roots in Science Fiction. Science Fiction that talks about the human condition. The best Trek stories reflect issues we humans face as civilization and Star Trek movies tend to be the largest mirrors of society at large. For example, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was a look at Life, Death and how we Live. In 1986 movie, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, was a story about environmental conservation 20 years before Al Gore sounded the alarm about Mother Earth in 2006. Stories like these get me excited.

The new Star Trek movie is certainly a blockbuster, guaranteed to make at least 200 million for Paramount Pictures. And as a blockbuster, it has its share of spiffy starships, computer graphics and action sequences that make it a spectacular to watch on the big screen (and as a Trekkie I have duly watched it twice). Sadly, the new Star Trek movie is missing the most critical aspect of Star Trek, it did not hold up a mirror to the human condition.

The review by Christopher Orr of The New Republic sums it up well:

Yet, for all the amusement Star Trek provides, it's hard to shake the sense that something has been lost in translation. Abrams's film is in some ways a throwback not to the original series, but further still to the pulpy exploits of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, in which sneering villains were forever threatening to blow up the heroes' home planets. Gene Roddenberry's original "Trek" aimed higher than such space opera, toward the moral, political, and technological sophistication of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. It didn't always succeed--and, when it did, it wasn't always terribly exciting--but it was something new, and important, in the pop-cultural universe. For his rookie outing at least, Abrams has focused on simpler cinematic diversions. There's no question that his Star Trek radically revitalizes the franchise; but it does so in part by setting aside what distinguished the show in the first place.

This one won't be as hot as Susan Boyle, but it will probably still be around in a decade.



For those who don't get it, the person saying "You Suck" is none other than the new Battlestar Galactica's Executive Producer Ronald D. Moore. This short video comes from an episode of CSI, where Moore made a cameo as a rabid scifi fan at a convention. In the episode, a producer is showing fans a brand new, grittier "revamped" version of a 1960s scifi show "Alpha Quest" (fictional). The exact same thing happened to Mister Moore several years ago when he presented his new, grittier version of 1960s scifi show "Battlestar Galactica". At that time, Battlestar fans booed him off the stage and called his version of the show GINO - Galactica In Name Only. So its really funny that on CSI, he's the person actually booing off the producer!

There were several BSG/Scifi cameos including Grace Park (First humanoid Cylon to be revealed in BSG) and Kate Vernon (Final humanoid Cylon to be revealed in BSG). The episode was directed by long time BSG director, Michael Nankin, and the episode was written by BSG writers Bradley Thomson and David Weddle as well as Star Trek veteran writer Naren Shankar.

Just a few days ago, a new Internet Phenomena has been born. This phenomena has the potential of being bigger than Rickrolling. And the name of this new phenomena is called Susan Boyle. Susan is a 47 year old woman living near Glasgow. She rocked Britain when she appeared on television show, "Britain's Got Talent" just last weekend.

Naturally, web-savvy brits immediately uploaded the video to YouTube. This video alone has caused the name of Susan Boyle to spread like wildfire all across the world. Just last night, Susan's video had been viewed roughly 5.5 million times on YouTube. 20 hours later, that figure has grown to 11,382,020 views. Folks, that's an exponential growth rate.


I have seen her name mentioned on Twitter, Slashdot, Digg and even in Second Life. And as you can see in the figure above, the name is "Susan Boyle" mentioned in TEN PERCENT of all new blog posts in the past few days.

I have even heard rumors that Simon Cowell has signed on Susan. *shrugs* No idea if its true, but that is another indicator of how hot Susan is.

This month, the United Nations has organized a panel with the creators and stars of Battlestar Galactica in New York. Here is one short and very interesting clip of the proceedings.

If you are interested.. No scratch that. I strongly encourage you to view the full discussion. The panel talks about issues such as the rule of law, justice, the war on terrorism, politics, religion and more. I personally feel these are topics most people rarely think about and in truth everyone should at least spend a few days thinking about them. I am really glad that Science Fiction, especially Battlestar Galactica has brought to the world a platform on which to look at these issues not only in a very visceral manner, but also from very different angles. How often do you get to see the point of view of a terrorist and realize that he or she is not some crazy nutjob who just wants to kill people, but that they are people in desperate situations who have decided that the only solution is to do a deed they know is evil and causes harm to other human beings?

Please click here for a link to full video of the BSG Panel at United Nations. PS: You will need RealPlayer to view this.

Can I just end by saying that this kind of speculative fiction on the human condition is why I love science fiction so much. If you have not watched Battlestar Galactica, please do watch it. To my friends, I can loan you my BSG DVDs (Just promise you'll return them).

Here's an interesting little acapella by mathematicians.

SPOILER ALERT. If you have not watched Battlestar Galactica episode 4x14 - "Sometimes a Great Notion", do not continue any further as this post is chock full of shocking development.




So Kara Thrace aka Starbuck crashed and died on Earth several months ago. This brings up the question of the identity of Starbuck 2.0. Exactly what is Starbuck 2.0? Here's my theory.

2,000 years ago, Earth Cylons created immortality in the form of a primitive resurrection machine. This technology can clone many copies of the Cylon body, and allow the mind to be "downloaded" from a dying body to a new body. Perhaps it is an experimental machine. It makes sense because only 5 Earth Cylons were resurrected. Also, it explains the resurrection machine's flaw. While the download of the mind (or soul) works, old memories are not accessible. Thus the five newly resurrected Earth Cylons can't remember their past lives.

Since Earth is nuked, the five resurrected Cylons obviously need to find a new home. They take one of their resurrection machines, and travelled all the way to the twelve colonies where they lived anonymous lives for most of the next 2,000 years. However some time during the past century, the Colonial Humans stumbled upon the resurrection machine and managed to decipher some of the technology. They used the machine to create artificial intelligent beings who choose to call themselves Cylons. Thus was born the Colonial Cylons.

Fast forward a few decades. There's a war between Colonial Humans and Colonial Cylons. The Colonial Cylons somehow gained possession of the primitive resurrection machine and recognized it for what it is. They not only mastered the resurrection technology, but also perfected it and eliminated the memory loss issue.

So what has all of the above has to do with who Starbuck 2.0 is? Well, here is my theory. Starbuck 2.0 was resurrected using the primitive Earth resurrection machine. This is why she cannot remember the past. Yup, I believe Starbuck 2.0 is a brand new 13th Cylon!

My guess of Ellen Tigh as the Final Cylon came from way back in October 2007. I officially stuck with my prediction by publicly announcing it in November 2007. Today, vindication! Ellen is indeed the Final Cylon.

There were clues all the way from season one's episode, "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down". Many people somehow misunderstood that episode, thinking that Baltar and his Cylon Detector has confirmed Ellen as a Human. In reality, Baltar never ever revealed Ellen as Human nor Cylon. Since her appearance in the fleet, she has been playing the fool but at the same time she has also been manipulating events in the background. She was meddling with Tom Zarek and the presidential election in "Colonial Day". She also encouraged Saul Tigh to enforce martial law in Season Two.

Still, none of these events really screamed out to me that she's the Final Cylon. What convinced me was Ronald D. Moore's statement that the Final Cylon has a choice to make, Cylons or Humans. Sorry, I can't remember when or where RDM made that statement. I think its in one of the podcasts but I could be wrong. Wherever I got that statement from, it stuck with me as a significant clue. You see, in order for the Final Cylon to make an informed choice for or against Humanity, he/she has to have significant interaction with both factions, but yet isn't biased towards either party.

Most of the cast of Battlestar Galactica are already heavily biased to either Humans (most of the Galactica crew and pilots) or Cylons (most of the Cylons). So, it is relatively easy to figure out the ones who are still on the fence. Namely civilians like Gaius Baltar, Doc Cottle, Billy, and of course Ellen Tigh. I also briefly considered Athena too, but she seem to have an alternate destiny so I ruled her out.

"And the fifth, still in shadow, will claw toward the light, hungering for redemption that will only come in the howl of terrible suffering. " -- Hybrid's Prediction from Razor

That was my final clue. Not only is the Final Cylon to judge for or against humanity, the Final Cylon comes with a huge bundle of suffering. Gaius Baltar is the obvious fit here, having been the person who killed off most of Humanity. However, he doesn't seem to be suffering that much especially on New Caprica. Ellen on the other hand, was caught in a grinder between humans and cylons. She forced herself to sleep with Cavil-the-cylon just to save her husband. And Ellen paid the final indignity of having her husband being forced to kill her.

Since I made that prediction all the way in 2007, several events that unfolded in 2008 only served to solidify my prediction. There's the Last Supper picture which confirmed who wasn't the Final Cylon. The biggest event was Saul Tigh being revealed as a Cylon! That really ups the personal stakes. Boy oh boy, what a grinder Ellen is in now. If she chooses against the Cylons, does it mean Saul has to die?

At any rate, it is quite obvious now that Ellen possesses her own regeneration technology from 2000 years ago. She regenerated herself, Saul, Tyrol, Anders and Tory. She regenerated herself on New Caprica, and she regenerated Starbuck on Earth. Does that mean Kara Thrace the new 13th Cylon model? O.o

Its time for another piece of speculation on my part. You see,, one day I read about some non-BSG news, but something clicked in my head. News came along that Alessandro Toreson was cast in the role of Zoe Greystone in the BSG spin-off series, Caprica. I looked for her pictures on the web and what I found is shown on the right. Doesn't she bear a strong resemblance to Ellen Tigh (Kate Vernon)? What if Ellen Tigh isn't just the Final Cylon but actually the First Cylon - Zoe Greystone? This idea resonates so strongly with Battlestar Galactica's theme, "Its all happened before and will all happen again", that I can't help but feel that Ellen Tigh IS Zoe Greystone.

And with that little bit of speculation, I shall end this post.

Today, my daily news network brought me to a blog post titled Automatic Game Design. The idea is novel and interesting from a researcher's perspective. It examines the theories of Ralph Koster and Juergen Schmidhuber, that one of the main contribution to the fun factor of games is the learnability factor. That is, fun games that those that are easy to learn but hard to master.

The theory is put to test by conducting an experiment with a game that is set up as a sequential series of possible moves an agent (player) can make. At the end of the game, the agent is given a score. Pacman is an example of a game that fits this scenario. The experiment pits a random agent that make random choices against a learning agent (eg, neural net, SVM, reinforcement learner) that tries to improve its score over time. If the learning agent consistently gets a better score compared to the random agent, the game is said to be learnable and therefore fun.

The idea is interesting, however neither the blog nor the paper has given any concrete evidence that learnable games areindeed fun games. For example, chess is a game that is eminentably learnable, but it is not necessarily a universally fun game for everyone. Thus, it ends up being a test of whether a game is learnable but there is much doubt as to whether said game is fun.