diverse distinctive dave

Really Disturbing Thought

2014-05-28T19:32:00.000-07:00

This comic from Abstruse Goose scared the hell out of me. For those who do not know,

GoPro is a company that sells sturdy high definition digital cameras that many people have been using to capture extreme sports.
Occulus Rift is a company that sells virtual reality goggles. The company has recently been bought by Facebook.
Drones or quadcopters are very stable VTOL capable helicopters powered by 4 rotors. There are many companies that sell these drones.

It occurred to me that combining these three readily available off the shelf products and you can essentially build a small and quiet, remotely driven aircraft that military organizations all over the world has been using for remote surveillance or worse, as a remotely operated weapons platform.

Which means that anyone with two to three thousand dollars to spare can now easily purchase the parts necessary to build a remotely controlled, highly stable VTOL capable craft that can be equipped with some kind of weapon. This is a really, really bad idea that's just turned in to a practical reality.

小籠包 (Extra Little Buns)

2013-07-29T22:14:00.001-07:00

I was trying to describe a chinese delicacy, called 小籠包, to an american friend but I didn't know its English name. So I went and searched around and I discovered people just call it steamed pork dumplings, What an unsexy name for one of the yummiest things on this Earth. I feel that the name Steamed pork dumplings just don't do justice to the dish.

It then occurred. The romanized name for 小籠包 is Xiao Long Bao. What if we retained the acronym, XLB, and instead called them eXtra Little Buns? Just one of my spur of the moment crazy ideas. ha ha.

Big Data, Large Scale Machine Learning

2013-06-11T19:24:00.004-07:00

I only just learnt that John Langford and Yann LeCun has recently just gave a class on Big Data and Large Scale Machine Learning at NYU. Not only that, they have opened the entire course to the web, for free. I have seen a couple of the lectures and I think they're very interesting.

The Growth of Amy Whitcomb as a Singer

2013-03-13T21:19:00.000-07:00

I just found out that one of my favorite undiscovered singer, Amy Whitcomb, has auditioned for The Voice Season 4 and from the promos it seems she has done very well. Congratulations, Amy. I hope you'll be the winner of The Voice season 4! Befitting the occasion, I thought I will showcase her growth as a singer over the years.

2009

This is earliest Youtube video I can find of Amy. Back then she was part of Brigham Young University's all female A Capella group, Noteworthy.

This is her with spikey hair singing Think as lead-singer for Noteworthy when they participated in season 1 of The Sing-Off.

2011

Fast forward 2 years. This is her singing her version of Bruno Mar's Grenade. I have also included her group, Delilah's version of the same song which they sung in The Sing-Off season 3.

2012

Here are two of my favorite songs she has uploaded to Youtube in 2012, Bruno Mar's It Will Rain and Beyonce's Love On Top.

Pentatonix - Just Keeps Getting Better and Better

2012-02-27T17:23:00.001-08:00

By now, you know I'm a hard core fan of the up and coming a capella group, Pentatonix. Up till now, I thought their cover of Dog Days Are Over by Florence and the Machines was their best work. Not anymore. Early this month the group went to the Los Angeles Acapella Festival (LAAF) and met up with Ben Brams. Ben is an arranger for The Sing-Off and he has helped many Sing-Off groups polish up their competition pieces. Anyway in just a few days Ben Brams and Pentatonix came up with a cover of Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know.

This has quickly became my new favorite song from Pentatonix.

2012: The Year A Cappella Goes Mainstream?

2011-12-14T18:50:00.000-08:00

This is just a sneaking suspicion of mine, but I get this feeling that mainstream musicians will start mixing in a cappella influences in their musical creations in the coming year or years. By influences, I mean vocal bass and vocal percussion (aka beatboxing). Sure, this is not new stuff and I have heard beatboxing done since the 1980s. However, right now I do not think there is a single mainstream album out there that uses beatboxing nor vocal basses.

Thanks to groups like Pentatonix and Urban Method from The Sing-Off, I believe there will be a resurgence in employing vocal basses and percussion as these techniques allow musicians to put emotion into the low end of their sound, something that may not be easily accomplished with musical instruments. This is especially true in live performances and concerts where a human bass and beatboxer (ahem, vocal percussionist) can freestyle and easily adapt to any changes in the music.

Adding to that is Pentatonix. This group has certainly proved that it is possible for an a cappella group to create an authentic hip-hop/club/techno sound. Not only that, their Sing-Off performances have routinely broken into iTunes's top 100 list, and if this blog article is not wrong (no guarantees) they even had a song in the top 10 list on iTunes. So there is a strong possibility that Pentatonix may become the first a cappella group to go mainstream in this century. If this really happens, then 2012 may be the year that a cappella goes mainstream.

I Can't Believe This Is Acapella!

2011-12-08T05:20:00.000-08:00

This video features The Sing-Off 2nd Runner-up Urban Method, The Sing-Off Champion Pentatonix and Flo Rida. Not a single musical instrument is used. That's right, other than microphones, there are no drums, no guitars, no electronic synth. It is done purely using human voices.

Just compare it with the original.

I'm really looking forward to a Pentatonix album.

Pentatonix - No Longer A Black Horse

2011-11-18T05:46:00.000-08:00

A month ago, I rated the Sing-Off group Pentatonix as a black horse after hearing them sing three songs on the show. It has been a month and the group has skyrocketed to front runner by a mile. The group is so talented, creative and versatile that they have been able to deliver top notch performances despite having every genre of music being thrown at all the groups. Rock and Roll, Country, R&B, Pop, you name it, Pentatonix has nailed them all. Heck, in the recent week some of the groups have taken to blatantly imitating Pentatonix's signature style in a bid to stay in the competition. That is probably the ultimate compliment any competitor can give to Pentatonix.

If you don't follow The Sing-Off, here's what you have been missing out.

The Sing-Off Season 3

2011-10-17T14:57:00.000-07:00

The Sing-Off is an acapella contest/tv show that has been airing in the states over the past two christmas. This year, the show has returned bigger than ever and features a much more varied teams. Out of this season's contestants the teams that are most likely to win this season's competition are Delilah, Vocal Point and Urban Method. Pentatonix also deserves a mention as they're a black horse that could easily rock the boat by being totally unique and talented.

Similar to last season's Backbeats, Delilah took some of the best female singers from past seasons of The Sing-Off to form this all female acapella group. Even though this performance comes from the very first episode of the season, many are already hailing Delilah's performance as the best one of the season.

The boys from Vocal Point are not the first acapella group from Brigham Young University to participate in The Sing-Off. Noteworthy from season one was also from BYU and like Noteworthy, Youtube have a collection of their past performances. And from their performance of this Frank Sinatra song, it is clear that these boys are strong at singing oldies.

Urban Method's call themselves a rappapella group who incorporate rap in their performance. Thus far, Urban Method have mostly been featuring two or three of their members with the rest mainly singing backup so it is hard to judge if they have the versatility or talent to win the competition. So far, they are ahead in the competition because they are seasoned musicians who are good at arranging their performance to showcase their strengths.

Finally, we come to Pentatonix. They come off as a young and possibly one of the least experienced groups remaining in the competition, but each of the five members that make up Pentatonix compensates with having insane talent for making club and techno style acapella. It is impressive that they are able to reproduce the music of the genre with no musical instruments or electronic equipment.

Bad Sci-Fi

2011-08-27T22:59:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to note down something Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, recently said at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.

"Trust me - if you gave people at Google free rein to produce TV you'd end up with a lot of bad sci-fi,"

I lol'ed a bit at the amount of truth in that statement.

Singapore Presidential Election 2011 - Analysis of Search Trends

2011-08-27T05:53:00.000-07:00

I took a snapshot of search trends on all four Singapore Presidential Election candidates using Google Search Trends and Yahoo! Clues Trend Analysis on Saturday, 27 August, 2011 at roughly 8pm, when the polling stations close.

Google Search Trends
Historically, Google search tends to be used by the more technologically savvy web users such as young working professionals.

Google only reported search trends up to 25 August. Dr. Tony Tan leads the pack with the most number of searches, closely followed by Dr. Tan Cheng Bock. Tan Kin Lian's sudden peak on 23 August seems to be an outlier, possibly due to some controversial report on him, and the number of searchers seem to return to their original level roughly two days later. Tan Jee Say's searchers have consistently been lower than the other three presidential candidates thru-out the campaign period.

My analysis is that young, working professional voters were originally inclined towards Dr. Tony Tan but Dr. Tan Cheng Bock's electoral campaign strategy has managed to wrest the momentum away from Dr. Tony Tan.

Yahoo! Clues Trends Analysis
Users of Yahoo! tend to come from a wider range of the population so it tends to reflect the search trend of the general Singapore population. Yahoo's search report is more detailed and includes gender and age breakdown.

Yahoo! searchers present a totally different perspective with Tan Jee Say getting the largest percentage of searches, followed by Dr. Tan Cheng Bock. Tan Kin Lian comes in third. Dr. Tony Tan came in last with the fewest number of searches, presumably because the Singapore population is familiar with Dr. Tony Tan as he has been a Member of Parliament for many years.

What I find noteworthy are the twin peaks on 11 August and 19 August. All four presidential candidates were awarded certificate of eligibility on 11 August, resulting in a rush by the population to find out more about Tan Jee Say, Dr. Tan Cheng Bock and Tan Kin Lian.

The first speeches by all four presidential candidates was broadcast on the night of 18 August. The very next day, all searches on four candidates peaked with Tan Jee Say yet again getting the most searches, closely followed by Dr. Tan Cheng Bock and Tan Kin Lian. Once again Dr. Tony Ton received the least number of searches.

Why the password "this is fun" is NOT 10 times more secure than "J4fS!2"

2011-04-20T19:13:00.000-07:00

Recently I read a blog that claims using long phrase-like passwords such as "this is fun" is much more secure than using cryptic but short passwords like "J4fS!2". And on the surface, it seems true. The tried and true method for cracking passwords is the brute-force method of trying every single possible combination of passwords. So it seems to make sense that a long 11 character password such as "this is fun" would naturally require a longer time to crack than a short 6 character password of "J4fS!2".

This is so not true.

The blogger makes an faulty assumption that brute-force crackers treat passwords as if it were a number combination lock. A number combination lock can be unlocked by trying every single possible number combination starting from 1, 2, 3, 4, .... 995, 996, 997, 998, 999 and so on.

In reality, a smart password cracking program would first try the most commonly used passwords first before resorting to every possible sequence of characters. And as a computational linguist, I know there are lots of open and publicly accessible databases/corpora for most commonly used phrases in all languages. These corpora are usually used for language-based applications such as speech recognition, text summarization and question answering, but an evil person can also use the same database to crack commonly used password phrases.

Sweet Transvestite

2010-10-30T10:51:00.001-07:00

Which musical was transformed into a movie that has been screening in theaters non-stop since 1975 and has a box office revenue of well over $140 million dollars?

Answer: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

It was fresher week in Manchester University when I was first introduced to The Rocky Horror Picture Show complete with live props and impromptu singing. My new English friends could not believe that I had never seen this show before and really "encouraged" me to watch it. I must say, my jaws must have dropped to the floor but the show was indeed an eye opener and I had never, ever seen anything like it in my life. And this was made in 1975, when Susan Sarandon is a young hot babe! It was a side of western culture that I had never even imagine existed, and yet once I saw it so many things about western culture clicked into place. Benny Hill, Monty Python, Black Adder, Mr. Bean, Little Britain, oh my!

For me, I'm comfortable enough in my sexuality that I can watch it for what it is, a fun and tongue firmly in cheek show that's meant to be laughed with and at. Just enjoy the ride and be entertained. My first impressions of Rocky Horror was that its quirky, wierd, strangely interesting, and that if my mum ever saw it, she would decry it as a prime example of depravity in western society and immediately suffer a heart attack.

Indeed, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a western world cultural icon that most Asians probably have never heard or even seen. Or, maybe not...

Anyway, with Glee's special "Rocky Horror" Halloween episode, I'm sure many young Asian kids will go out to the web and discover "RHPS" for themselves. I have to wonder, what would they make of it?

Browser Wars 2010

2010-09-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has been trying very hard to restore its status as king of browsers. So has it worked? Would I switch to using Internet Explorer 9?

Not at this moment. Even today I still suffer from what I call IE-itis. Whenever I create a webpage, I need to test it on four browsers.

Firefox (or Google Chrome or Apple's Safari or Opera)
Internet Explorer 8
Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 6

99% of the time, if my webpage renders correctly on Firefox, it also renders correctly on Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera. I can be sure that most of the time, it all works even without strenuous testing.

99% of the time, my webpage still DOES NOT render correctly on ANY version of Internet Explorer. Worse still, my webpage appears different on IE6, IE7 and IE8. I essentially have to treat each version of Internet Explorer as a different browser and test against every single version. It slows down my work.

Until Internet Explorer fixes all its rendering bugs and most of the world stops using IE6, IE7 and IE8, I won't ever trust IE enough to use it for my daily web surfing.

Coolest Product Tie-in. Ever.

2010-03-23T18:08:00.000-07:00

These days it is common to see a video game based on a Hollywood movie or find novels based on popular television series. Except for teenagers and the most ardent of fans, I doubt many people actually pay much attention to such tie-ins and gimmickry.

One television show, however, has taken this gimmick to a whole new level. And its actually attracted my interest. The television show is non other than Castle. Castle is a comedy-crime series starring Nathon Fillion (Firefly, Doctor Horrible's Singalong Blog) as Richard Castle, a famous mystery novelist who has found inspiration for his next great book in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, played by Stana Katic. In the television series, we follow Richard Castle and Kate Beckett as they jointly solve murders while Castle writes his next book, "Heat Wave" with Beckett as the inspiration behind lead character, "Nikki Heat".

During the hiatus between seasons 1 and 2, Richard Castle's the mystery thriller novel, Heat Wave has been published in the real world. Yes, you can actually get the novel from Amazon, Borders or any local bookstore. Yes, the author is supposedly Richard Castle and according to book reviews I have read, Heat Wave feels very much as if it had been written by Richard Castle. While the novel's plot is new, it incorporates many elements from in the television series, as if Richard Castle had really drawn inspiration from his time with detective Beckett.

This is all nice and fine, but the producers of Castle went one step further. Season 2 of Castle starts with the launch of Heat Wave. In one episode, Castle's character mentioned that the novel has a sex scene on page 105. There really is a sex scene starting on page 105 in Heat Wave. In the latest episode, a serial killer obsessed with Heat Wave's lead character Nikki Heat and her muse Kate Beckett, used a number code that had to be decoded using words in the novel itself. I'm pretty sure that some avid watcher will soon verify that the numbers on the television screen will actually match words in the novel.

All this has piqued my interest in Heat Wave and I will probably be dropping by a bookstore sometime soon. I am sure Castle fans would be pouring over the book too, what a great way to get people reading again!

iPad Points to the Future

2010-01-28T20:27:00.000-08:00

Unless you've been bunkered down in a hole without an internet connection, you've probably heard that Apple has announced its latest revolutionary product, the iPad tablet.

Personally, I think this product is indeed revolutionary and that many businesses would quickly adopt the iPad. The key reason isn't the iPad itself. Its because Apple re-wrote their iWork productivity suite to work on the iPad. iPad and iWork together makes a very compelling combination for businesses who have lots of traveling white collar workforce.

I can see lots of salesmen giving slick presentations using iWork's Keynote app with just a flick of their finger. Likewise, insurance agents will be easily filling in customer data using Number's data form on the iPad. Such businesses will be buying hundreds if not thousands of iPads. Needless to say, I think Apple has created another hot product that will be flying off the shelves.

Hurray for Apple, but that is not the point of this blog post. The reason is that I see the future of computers in the iPad. More specifically, the future of how we interact with computers. Apple has taken the simplified user interface developed for the iPhone and shown that it can not only works on a much bigger screen, but also showed that it enhances applications by making them much easier to use than conventional window-based applications. This can clearly be seen in the re-written iPad iWork suite, which is much easier to use and is still able to incorporate a lot of the same functionality contained in the full fledged Mac OS X iWork suite.

Apple has brought the old WYSIWYG paradigm to a whole new level of simplicity.

I foresee the end of applications being housed in resizable windows. Instead, applications will now fill the entire screen. You will directly touch and alter things on the screen with your fingers instead of having to plow through multiple levels of menu bars. Indeed, the simplicity over complexity and rich features that few people use would be the key to future applications.

I would not be surprised if Apple brought not only touch sensitive screens, but also this new user interface to their Macbooks and their Mac software in the near future.

New Theory of Gravity?

2010-01-11T17:03:00.000-08:00

A recently published paper on arXiv has caused a slight commotion within the Physics community. Let me first say that Physicists have to do a lot more in-depth study to confirm this, but we could potentially be seeing Gravity from a totally new perspective.

Let me take a step back and give a brief overview of our current understanding of Gravity - Einsten's Theory of General Relativity. General Relativity is incredibly accurate and it tells us that space-time is warped by the attraction of masses. This warping of space-time is what we call Gravity. While Einstein's theory is incredibly accurate in calculating the degree of warping, it does not explain why the warping of space-time occurs in the first place.

All that has changed with this paper, which if I understand correctly, suggests that what we know as Gravity is really the physical manifestation of Entropy in the universe. Entropy tells us that everything in the universe goes from an high energy state to a lower energy state. Iron rusts, fuel gets burnt, cars slow down due to friction, suns burn out. The whole universe is slowly descending into chaotic randomness.

Another way to look at Entropy is through Shannon's Information Theory, which allow Computer Scientists and Electronics Engineers to calculate the absolute minimum amount of data (bits) that needs to be transmitted in order to overcome Entropy. That's right, everything in Information Theory is measured in Entropy.

This brings us back to the arXiv paper. If I understood it correctly, it is saying that in order for Entropy to work in the universe, the universe needs to "transmit" the mass information of every object to every other object. And Information Theory allows us to calculate the minimum amount of bits required in this "transmission". The author of this paper did this derivation and discovered that the minimum amount of data resolves to a short formula, and that formula is exactly Newton's law of Gravity. The author has not had time to take relativity into consideration in his derivation, but it is anticipated that the solution would indeed be Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.

I'm probably not explaining it clearly, but if you're interested in knowing more please visit The Hammock Physicist's blog on the paper.

The Master Race : New Internet Meme

2009-12-27T10:24:00.000-08:00

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.

Carey Mulligan, An Education

2009-12-14T03:58:00.000-08:00

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.

Being Erica

2009-12-13T19:17:00.000-08:00

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?

Monkey Talk

2009-12-07T23:51:00.000-08:00

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.

Halloween Special

2009-11-01T03:50:00.000-08:00

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.

Hello Google Wave!

2009-10-24T03:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Google Wave

2009-05-30T03:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Star Trek

2009-05-18T08:31:00.001-07:00

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.