Slashdot Mirror
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...'"
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
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.
That was the Question that came out of Arthur's brain, when pulling random letters from the Scrabble tile bag in pre-historic Earth. But as Ford and Arthur pointed out just before they did so, Arthur escaped from the Earth just before his planet was destroyed. So whatever comes out probably won't be the correct Question, but it should be close.
And in fact, 6 x 7 = 42, so 6 x 9 was off by 2. :-)
I thought it was meant to show that the Golgafrinchans (sp?) did, in fact, mess up the program when they crashed on prehistoric earth, and Arthur was a last generation product of that bug...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
How many squares are there on a go board?
Yeah, but that couldn't be the Ultimate Question. As it's defined in HGTTG, it's practically impossible to derive the Answer from the Question, or vice versa. (Yet the Answer is fully responsive to the Question.)
Actually, the Question is presented in the books. There's a conversation between Marvin and a mattress creature on Squornshellous Zeta in which - well, read it for yourself. It's right there, plain as day.
My geek duties for the day having been satisfied, I shall now go have breakfast... ;)
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Actually... 6 x 9 is 42. That is, if you use base 13 instead of base 10.
A much more important question: do you know where your towel is?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I don't write jokes in base 13.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.