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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...'"

6 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. The proper way to celibrate by edwardpickman · · Score: 5, Funny

    Raise a pan galactic gargle blaster to the late Douglas Adams for 30 years of bizarre geek humor.

  2. Rubbish article by hairykrishna · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  3. The meaning of the answer is obvious by LecheryJesus · · Score: 4, Funny

    Its the average IQ of a creationist.

    Flame away :P

    --
    Jesus was an invention of the Romans - watch "The Pharmacractic Inquisition" for something more credible...
  4. Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Apparently not. In a BBC article celebrating 30 years of Hitchhikers, they report that Adams apparently refuted that suggestion:

    I don't write jokes in base 13. Well, maybe the true meaning of that sentence wasn't that he didn't use base 13, but that he didn't mean it as joke ...
    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  5. Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 4, Funny

    Belgium, man!

    Disconcertingly, the person who many years ago thought it would be a laugh to choose the username 'Ford Prefect' for this new 'Slashdot' thing is now, erm...

    Living in Belgium.

    Having a disgustingly rude swear-word as part of my address is great, of course. It's just that hardly anyone recognises it as such. :-(

    --
    Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
  6. Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... by tverbeek · · Score: 5, Funny

    When I was in middle school I devised a rule set for determining the most "random"* number between 0 and 100. The guiding principle was that it had to be a number with no obvious significance. Any number with a strong popular "meaning" was out, so no 13, 52, 69. It couldn't be particularly large or small, so anything less than 10 or greater than 90 was out. Multiples of 10 were out, as were their immediate neighbors. So were numbers halfway between multiples of 10. Or numbers in the 50s or 60s (too close to the overall midpoint). Even numbers (and digits) were insufficiently odd, and composite numbers in general seemed a little too derivative. This left only two qualifying numbers, and 73 was too close to 3/4 for my tastes. So I concluded that 37 is the most "random" number.

    And no, it's not part of my ATM PIN. :)

    *Note: I said "random" not random. I know there's a difference.

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/