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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 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
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...
But the books later reveal the reason. It's Agrajag, who has been killed by Arthur many times.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
They just picked it because it was the funniest number they could think of.
It created its own nerdy significance. :)
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.
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
A much more important question: do you know where your towel is?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
I don't write jokes in base 13.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
so, 5 is not a prime number?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
...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.
Well, 42 is the product of the 2^0th, the 2^1th and the 2^2th prime ... ...
But maybe it has nothing to do with math, but with the sound of it: "for tea, too." After all, tea plays an important role in the story
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"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
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?
In 2020, HHGTG will be 42 years old. I find it odd how much of Douglas Adams' stuff just works out neatly.
Which series?
Radio - third series (Tertiary Phase) also good; missed the 4th one, so can't comment
Books - three is good, four is short (because he was locked in a hotel room with only a Mac Plus to write it on, rather than an of his 5 Mac IIs,because the publisher had let him miss too many deadlines already, and wanted a book. any book). Pass on five, unless you like downer endings
"She's furniture with a pulse"
> Living in Belgium.
Belgium! But then, judging from your username, you seem to be a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is. (I'm an expat in NL, so quite the same unfashionable corner of the universe.)
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
This is correct. According to every official source (and written by Adams himself), he said he needed a funny number, looked out the window, and said "yeah, 42, that's an ordinary number", wrote it down and continued writing.
There was no deep hidden meaning in the selection at all.
RIP, Douglas, we miss you.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
Book 5 was quite good, in spite of (and even to some extent because of) its "downer ending". There has been speculation that Adams was to write a 6th book that resolved the ending in MH (and there's some material in Salmon of Doubt that supports this) - without giving too much away for those who haven't read it, there was really nothing in the Hitchhiker's universe that couldn't be *undone*, as evidenced by the fact that the Earth returned after being utterly destroyed.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
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
Interestingly, the Belgium joke was added to the American edition of Life, the Universe and Everything. In the original British edition the Rory was an award for the most gratuitous use of the word "fuck" in a serious screenplay. Presumably the US publishers asked Adams to change it, so in the American version it's "Belgium." This led to a whole extra passage about how offensive the word Belgium is throughout the galaxy, and how funny it is that Earthicans (that's an unrelated Futurama reference - pay no heed) named a country after it.
Since the introduction in the Hitchhikers Guide it has become the least randomly selected number between 0 and 100.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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/
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?
It has many interesting features. Namely:
42 is the product of the first three terms of Sylvester's sequence; like the first four such numbers it is also a primary pseudoperfect number.
It is the sum of the totient function for the first eleven integers.
It is a Catalan number.
It is the reciprocal of a Bernoulli number.
It is conjectured to be the scaling factor in the leading order term of the "sixth moment of the Riemann zeta function".
In base 10, this number is a Harshad number and a self number, while it is a repdigit in base 4 (as 222).
The eight digits of pi beginning from 242,422 places after the decimal point are 42424242.
The first digit (4) taken to the power of the second digit (2) is equal to the second digit (2) taken to the power of the first digit (4): 42 = 24 = 16. It follows clearly that 24 exhibits the same characteristic, and in fact 24 is the only other two-digit non-repdigit number that does. (All two-digit repdigit numbers exhibit this characteristic.)
The number 42 appears in various contexts in Christianity. There are 42 generations (names) in the Gospel of Matthew's version of the Genealogy of Jesus; it is prophesied that for 42 months the Beast will hold dominion over the Earth (Revelation 13:5); 42 men of Beth-azmaveth were counted in the census of men of Israel upon return from exile (Ezra 2:24); God sent bears to maul 42 of the youths who mock Elisha for his baldness (2 Kings 2:23), etc.
42 is the number with which God creates the Universe in Kabalistic tradition.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Interestingly, the Belgium joke was added to the American edition of Life, the Universe and Everything. In the original British edition the Rory was an award for the most gratuitous use of the word "fuck" in a serious screenplay.
Yes, but the Belgium joke actually predates that: it was in the second radio series, from which Life, The Universe And Everything was very loosely adapted. (Zaphod says it when about to fall out of the Nutrimatic cup.)
Peter
This is correct. According to every official source...
But the very fact that it appeared to him out of thin air may indicate that it has cosmic significance that DNA wasn't aware of.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
"Er, five," said the mattress.
"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"
The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind. It willomied along its entire length, sending excited little ripples through its shallow algae-covered pool. And then Eddie: When it became clear that Prak could not be stopped, that here was truth in its absolute and final form, the court was cleared.
Not only cleared, it was sealed up, with Prak still in it. Steel walls were erected around it, and, just to be on the safe side, barbed wire, electric fences, crocodile swamps and three major armies were installed, so that no one would ever have to hear Prak speak.
"That's a pity," said Arthur. "I'd like to hear what he had to say. Presumably he would know what the Ultimate Question to the Ultimate Answer is. It's always bothered me that we never found out."
"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number."
Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, and this might turn out to be it. And in this case, Eddie was responding directly to Arthur's query about the question and answer.
And it is so Douglas Adams' style to tell you something at the start of a book and bring it back for the very end. He did it again in "Mostly Harmless" wrt Stavro Mueller and his clubs. He did it in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" with the sofa. IIRC, even the computer game for THHGTTG requires that you do something very early in the game just right or else you can't finish it.
Sadly, Eddie's line, "Think of a number, any number," didn't make it in to the completion of the radio series.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?