Common Paradox Tech Blog

It’s been a big year for the Star Trek franchise, thanks in large part to J.J. Abrams’s fantastic reboot. Of course, not even the hotness that is Baby Kirk (a.k.a., actor Chris Pine) could prepare us for this bit of awesome: Tweet in Klingon. We’ll give you a moment to calm down from the overload of awesome.

Yes, that language that was created for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (and has somehow managed to become something that people actually speak) is now available to all in a Twitter translator. Want to share something with the world that only five people can understand? Tweet in Klingon is for you!

OK, it’s easy to make fun of this concept — but pure brilliance of this campaign is that this is all a promotional tool for the Star Trek Online MMOG that hits stores in February.

Cryptic Studios worked with Friend2Friend to create the site, which offers English to Klingon translations. Tweets are automatically hash-tagged and linked to an English-conversion URL. This is a very cool social media marketing campaign because it manages to capture the essence of the Star Trek brand and it also offers up a viral and instantly shareable way for people to promote Star Trek Online, without ever mentioning STO.

majQa’! (Well done!)

Reviews: Power Twitter

Tags: klingon, Star Trek, star trek online, tweet in klingon, twitter

It’s good to know that quotes like this—by Dr Paul Jackson, a particle physicist looking for the Higgs boson on the LHC Atlas experiment—come with a context:

For me, it’s nonsense to say that there are forces coming back from the future to stop the machine from working. It really is just ridiculous to think that is the case. If people could travel forward or back in time, why wouldn’t they have done something better or worse for humanity than coming and twiddling around with the LHC?

If it does destroy the world, there’s no-one in the future to travel back in time to do anything about it. It’s all a bit Back to the Future really. It’s part of this whole mystery about the machine — people are willing to believe anything. Physicists sometimes shoot themselves in the foot by not saying, ‘We won’t destroy the world with black holes,’ because they work on probability. Saying, ‘This won’t happen,’ is just not ingrained into them.

Good. But that doesn’t explain this. Or the fact that an LHC scientist confused Star Trek with Star Wars. That last thing, my dear friends, is what really has me worried. [Crave UK]

At last, here’s the droid we were all looking for. In this frame you can clearly see R2-D2’s cameo in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek. This time there’s absolutely no doubt about it: It’s been confirmed by ILM.

Click on the image to see the high resolution version

Can you see him floating there, on the left, right below the huge arrow that I also missed when I saw the movie? That’s obviously him, a fact that has been confirmed to me by one of the movie’s sequence supervisors at Industrial Light & Magic—the same guy who said this previous sighting was just the shuttle.

I don’t know about you but, right now, I feel like what I imagine my dog Jones feels every time I take his collar off to scratch his neck. Oh yesyeyeyeyes. YES. Harf. Woof. [Image capture from Science Fiction Stuff—Thanks ILM tipster]