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...'"

Comments

The proper way to celibrate

[edwardpickman]

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

Re:It's not the ultimate meaning...

[maxwell demon]

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 ...

Re:It's not the ultimate meaning...

[tverbeek]

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.