Star Trek

I have a confession to make: I really never got into Star Trek before. Further, I have tried to care about it, but just couldn't. I watched the more recent movies when I had the chance, and saw some of the television series when it happened to be on... I've kept an open mind to the whole franchise and allowed it several opportunities to reel me in, but each experience with Star Trek has left me cold and extremely apathetic, mystified as to why a dwindling handful of extremely vocal nerds* continue to invest their interest in this dead fish.

Apparently I'm not the only one that was thinking along these lines. Seven years after the release of the last worn out charade of a movie, they've finally decided to come out with a shiny new one-- a much needed new beginning rather than a sequel-- refreshingly titled Star Trek.

It was clear from the first trailer that this is the movie that people like me have been waiting for-- an entry level Star Trek movie where newbies like myself wouldn't be punished for not knowing anything. It gives a proper introduction to characters like Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Sulu-- characters that feel just vaguely familiar, though I've previously only come to know them by reputation through their catchphrases, cliches, and pop culture references.

The story involves some time travel, a convenient device to free this new series (and it will become a new series, no doubt) from the constraints of continuity with the old Star Trek stories. Time travel is something I'd usually prefer to be used as an absolute last resort in a story, since it has the potential to make everything ridiculous. The dimension of time, far more than mere space, becomes the final frontier once it is introduced. That's why it's so irritating that the time travel concept is introduced in the third Harry Potter book and never used again. But in this case it's absolutely appropriate and necessary to give the series the big sweep it needs while technically staying in the same universe (multiverse?).

While watching it I came to realize that this is the kind of movie I would have wanted the Star Wars prequels to be. Much more energy, much more fun, and not reliant on past glory to lift it to importance. Intentional or not, a few scenes felt like a direct homage to Star Wars, like the medal awarding ceremony at the end, or Kirk lost in the snows of the ice planet.

The movie is not without it's flaws: My mind tuned out a few times during some moments of impenetrable spaceflight jargon, and the romance angle between Uhura and Spock is one of the most tacked-on love stories of anything ever. I have heard some other complaints, especially from Star Trek fans, nitpicking about this or that or whatever little plot points that no one gives a crap about, but don't listen to them. This was a good movie and if you don't think so you must be daft.

As I made my way out of the theater after the screening, I overheard a foreigner guy telling his girlfriend about how the movie changed things from the originals. Of course, I have no memory or emotional investment in the old stuff so I couldn't know what he was talking about-- but then I realized that whatever the hell this dude is talking about no longer matters, and that this glorious series reboot has sufficiently served its purpose.

* Don't be offended, you know it's true

The man with no arms

Today I saw a man with no arms on the jeep.


Well, he was missing his whole left arm and half of his right arm.

There was a cell phone tied to a rope wrapped around what's left of his right arm. And a pencil was tucked into the part where the rope wrapped around, so he could rest the phone on his leg and use the pencil to push the keys.

I don't even know how he paid the fare for the jeep.

Or put on his pants.

:(

How to build a time machine

I know now how a time machine will be invented.

The first element is technology like Microsoft's Photosynth, an application that takes multiple digital photographs, then analyzes and combines them to create a three dimensional model of a scene that you can immerse yourself and move around in. With enough photographs you should theoretically be able to create a complete encapsulation of an entire scene, where you can seamlessly view anything you want from any angle.

A good example of this is the inauguration of Barack Obama last January, where CNN asked viewers at the scene to contribute photographs of the moment Obama was sworn in as president. The hundreds of photos were fed into Photosynth to create a complete snapshot of the inauguration, allowing immersion into the scene so you can view the event from thousands of angles.

CNN's Photosynth model of the inauguration of Barack Obama

Now, combine this technology with another element: Google Street View. As you may or may not know, Google's been going crazy putting cameras on top of cars, driving through the roads of the world's major cities, taking 360-degree photographs of our whole world, and two years later I'm still frickin' astounded by it-- I can view anything I want in the streets of Atlanta, New York, Sydney, Paris, Tokyo, London, and hundreds of other cities on our Earth.

Google Street View in a residential neighborhood

Another element is the recent introduction of historical satellite data on Google Earth. Not only is it possible to view satellite data of all the world's major cities, but you can now move through time to see what the looked like in the past (depending on the availability of data, of course). With a few clicks of a mouse you can view the transition of a barren plot of land to a construction site to the glittering Mall of Asia. As time goes on, historical data will only become more available and frequent.

Historical views of the SM Mall of Asia in Google Earth

Expand that idea to Street View. It's only a matter of time before it will become necessary for Google to update the snapshots of street views, leaving them with historical data that will inevitably be available to allow us to see cities change and develop over time.

Why not take this concept further and predict that a time will come that public photography and data storage will become so inexpensive that we will have video cameras constantly running with overlapping coverage available in city streets. Is the idea so far fetched? London already has hundreds of thousands of video cameras watching their streets as a potential deterrent to crime. We may eventually reach the point that people realize that making the video coverage available is no more invasive to privacy than what we currently have with street view.

A street in downtown Atlanta

And if widespread public video camera footage can be combined with the image analysis technology of Photosynth, we can create an immersive three dimensional world that encapsulates not only a moment in time but a span of time in history, allowing us to practically travel through time to the moment in history of our choosing.

Whenever I'm showing off Google Street View to people, I like to amaze them my checking the views of houses I've been to in the US, and then I zoom in on the door and say "Ok, so now let's take a look inside the house..."

For a second they gasp and actually believe that such a thing is possible.

We'll get there...