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Hitchhiker's Guide Turns 30
XaN-ASMoDi writes "Yesterday saw the 30th anniversary of the very first broadcast of Douglas Adam's seminal work, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", to mark this, Mark Vernon has written an article for the BBC News Magazine on the answer to The Question.
'It's 30 years since Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made its debut on BBC radio, but its most famous mystery is still waiting to be resolved...'"
... but actually why the hell 42?!?
Onda Technology Institute
...but wasn't the Ultimate Question "What is six times nine?" - thus proving that something is fundamentally broken with the universe? I remember these from the radio scripts, which were the first incarnation of HHGTTG.
wasn't 6*9, its that it is impossible to know the question and answer in the same universe, and doing so will cause the universe to be replaced by one infinitely more strange, and that this has possibly already happened.
meh
Raise a pan galactic gargle blaster to the late Douglas Adams for 30 years of bizarre geek humor.
The guy seems to miss the point entirely, make vague spiritual overtones and I wonder if has even read the books. Was he one of the scriptwriters for the hitchikers movie?
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
why the bowl of petunias though "oh, no, not again." we would understand a lot more about the nature of our universe.
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
Just look at the posts. People asking why 42, 6*9 is the answer, knowing both the question and answer will destroy the universe. It is obvious that Douglas Adams work will live forever. I only recently read the books, but I gave them to a friend's kid(12ish) and he loved it, his 15 year old brother loved it and the younger 7 year old loved it. It is just one of those books that is fun to read, fun to talk about and fun to celebrate the culture that it has created.
Do you know where your towel is?
Its the average IQ of a creationist.
:P
Flame away
Jesus was an invention of the Romans - watch "The Pharmacractic Inquisition" for something more credible...
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
It's always funny to find some Vogon poetry commented in a piece of ancient code.
Privacy is terrorism.
Forty Second Post!
How many squares are there on a go board?
Call me when the series turns 42.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
Is that how to get Quake 3 running in Linux?!
I tried to post the answer, but the lameness filter won't allow it.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
TIHSLLUB ERUP
Wow, now THAT was freaky
http://www.vansid.org/slashdot42.jpg
The copyrights should expire just after dinner.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
now a real fan would be holding out for the year, 2020. that's when it turns 42.
I should finish the series, I really liked the first two.
...is that Adams was referring to the pivotal clause #42 of the official rules for the game Mornington Crescent (using the pre-Livingstone concordance, obviously, since Adams was writing in 1978) - which also explains the significance of Fenchurch Street Station in the later books. Regular listeners to BBC Radio 4 (on which the original radio versions of HHGTTG were broadcast) will immediately grasp how following this philosophy allows the follower to confidently navigate the complexities and contradictions of life - but slashdotters from the USA and elsewhere may need to look it up.
Of course, it could be that Adams was merely satirising humanity's strange obsession with seeking simplistic answers without actually understanding the question - but that seems unlikely considering the masses of evidence for a deeper numerological significance.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
"The 30th anniversary celebrations were accompanied by Vogon poetry readings over BBC radio. In other news, the suicide rate rose sharply across London and surrounding areas..."
That he just made it up as a suitably non-sequitur answer. In fact, there are 42 Laws of Cricket, and cricket features heavily as a key plot mover in HHGG. Fenchurch is easily explained. It's a joke about people who name their offspring after where they think they were conceived (e.g. Brooklyn?). Fenchurch Street was the grubbiest and most dismal of the London railway termini at the time, and that was saying a lot. To have a particularly beautiful (and randy) woman conceived by her parents at Fenchurch St. Station in a moment of boredom is pure Adams.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Correct.
The ultimate question is "Think of a number, any number" to which the correct answer is "42".
Which immediately suggests such as penultimate questions: "Why is that the ultimate question?" "Why does it have a correct answer?" and "Why is 42 the correct answer?"
Which D.A. explained quite succinctly by saying "The road to wisdom is infinitely long. It doesn't matter which end you start at." --MarkusQ
The key thing to remember on the 30th birthday is...DON'T PANIC :)
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
If you've never listened to the radio show, I would highly recommend it. The cast is truly stellar and does a terrific job reading the phases. The most interesting thing about the radio series is that the first two phases were produced back in the last 70's and then they brought just about the entire cast back together ~25 years later to do the last three phases.
I loved the radio series so much that I was pumped when I got to see Simon Jones (Arthur Dent in both the radio and TV series) perform in Minneapolis in a play last year.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
In 2020, HHGTG will be 42 years old. I find it odd how much of Douglas Adams' stuff just works out neatly.
Harrods has a brand of Earl Grey known as No. 42. (Review here ). Given that DNA was very particular about his tea, it's not that much of a stretch that the number was floating around in the back of his mind for that very reason.
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
No award for you!
ceci n'est pas un sig.
If there were a whole in the Earth and you jumped in it, then 42 minutes later you'd appear momentarily still at the other side of the planet. AFAIK, that's where Douglas Adams got the number 42.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Why all this hubbub about the question? I'm still waiting for the REAL suspense to be resolved... who sustained a minor injury on their forearm?
Too bad "Think of a number, any number" isn't a question, otherwise this solution would've been fairly elegant.
Personally, I agree with the idea that 42 is God's phone number, since one of the scientists complained that all their arguing about His existence would be pointless if Deep Thought turned out to give that to them the next day. Dramatic irony, as it were.
Rob
Doesn't the part where "Think of a number, any number" is not a question dissuade you from thinking it's the Ultimate Question?
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
Couldn't 42 just be the error code on this build of Life, The Universe and Everything?
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
In addition, Marvin says the same thing during Restaurant and the end of the universe when they are trapped in the stunt ship. He reads the question right out of Arthur's brain.
Marvin knew: "Think of a number, any number..."
reads like a Vogon poetry. Death is too good for this guy.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
"How old is HHttG, in base 14?"
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Please Press this button.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
It's been a while since I read the books, but wasnt 42 the address of the bar that they all died in when they went back to earth and it was destroyed? Thus them just discovering the answer to the question seconds before the earth was destroyed?
Well, I'm glad that someone got it before I had to get all curmudgeonly.
"Think of a number. Any number at all."
"Three" - this being the highest number that mattresses could count to.
"Wrong. See?"
(Apologies for typos - quoted entirely from 10 years on memory).
Marvin reveals all! How could you not get that?!
And, yes, it's a lame Question to the Answer. What, you were expecting maybe Gödel?
|>
Here be Dragons
From here:
"Also, Eddie the shipboard computer in one part of the books mentions, 'Pick a number, guys!' when Arthur wonders aloud what the Question is, but is ignored by the human inhabitants of the Heart of Gold."
It depends on how you define "question"; on rather narrow syntactic grounds (it doesn't end with a question mark) it isn't, but it sure fits the semantic definition of a question (a grammatical utterance calling for a response providing a specific piece of information) it certainly is.
Note that not all semantic questions end with a question mark and not everything that ends in a question mark fits the semantic definition of a question. For example, "What's you name?" and "Please state you name." are very close semantically (and both are questions) while "What did I do to deserve this?" is not generally intended as a semantic question, but rather as another way of saying "Oh, whoa is me."
--MarkusQ
http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1389&category=Environment
.JPG of 'alien' symbols for Ludovico Granchi in Rio, 1988: http://www.earthfiles.com/Images/news/T/TexasSymbols1988GranchiLo.jpg )
(The section about halfway down, the
This is the smoking gun. It's only a matter of time, folks, before the hyper-dimensional mice are dissecting our brains.
Watch the skies! And the cheese.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Those relate only to the combination of the symbols '3' & '7' - i.e. the representation. They do not relate (interestingly) to the *number* 37.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
43 GOTO 42
You're right.
but where do work, home & sleep return you to? Could be one of a number (42?) different places
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant