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.