DEEP THOUGHTs about 42
Swimmin' with Forty-Two thankful fish eating dolphins on my Blue-Green planet thinking my digital watch is pretty neat and wondering what is a Hyperspatial Express Route, anyway?
LIFE Is .... Paradoxically Coincidental To The Ironical Tyrrany Applicable To The Unparalleled Definition Of Reverse Entropy
Background Information
As any digital hardware engineer, or software engineer, can tell you, the number '42' in base ten is equal to '101010' in base two. This alternating pattern of ones and zeros illustrates DEEP Thought's indecision about the Ultimate Question.
Of course, in the original Hitchhiker's Guide radio scripts, when Arthur has the "cave man" put out Scrabble stones and the sentence "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?" emerges, and then Arthur says "Six by nine? Forty-two? You know, I've always felt that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Universe." -- it is at this point that a faint and distant voice says "base thirteen!".
42 (base 13) is equal to 54
(base 10). (Of Course -- Douglas Adams has been quoted as saying " You
just don't write jokes in base 13!" )
To dispel any myths about 42 (and to make Douglas Adams Happy!), Douglas
Adams also wrote on USENET: The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke.
It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary
representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat
at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it
out. End of story
The following is a list of the places where DEEP Thought has accumulated the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything throughout the world.
Natural Phenomenon and Mathematical Sightings
Computer/Electronics Related Sightings
ultimate_answer_t deep_thought(void)
{
sleep(years2secs(7500000));
return 42;
}
06420
Lebendorf (Leben = life),
06542 Allstedt (All =
universe) and
88422 Alleshausen (Alles
= everything).
Now what do these postcodes have in common? And these 3 cities are located on a straight
line and do not form a triangle as you would expect!
This Page shows excerpts
of a website which is originally compiled, maintained and Copyrighted © 1995,
1996 by:
Rod Kent and Dave
Jones