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Hitchhiker's Guide Turns 30
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sat Mar 08, 2008 09:12 AM
from the hah-i'm-still-older dept.
from the hah-i'm-still-older dept.
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...'"
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Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:5, Informative)
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. :-)
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Re:Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [geocities.com]. It's right there, plain as day.
My geek duties for the day having been satisfied, I shall now go have breakfast... ;)
- David Stein
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Douglas Adams spells it all out, in various places (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"I gave a speech once," he said suddenly, and apparently unconnectedly. "You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."
"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 somet
Re:Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:4, Informative)
It's base 10, and intended to be wrong, to allow the punchline of "I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong about the universe".
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Re:Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The answer.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The proper way to celibrate (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The proper way to celibrate (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk"
"Ask a glass of water"
Re:The proper way to celibrate (Score:5, Insightful)
Adams didn't just poke fun at his characters, he wrote with a real sympathy for them. Well, just look at the man, he was a person who cared about things like the extinction of bizarre species that the vast majority of humanity has never heard of, much less seen for themselves. Empathy. That's the secret of reaching the apex of funniness. When the reader in his imagination steps into a character's shoes, he takes the metaphorical pies in the face personally.
Adams wrote as if the way the universe is mattered.
He also wrote as if the way the universe is happens to be funny.
The fact that the way things are both matters and is funny isn't exactly funny itself. Or rather it's very funny, and it's very something else, which there isn't a perfect word for. To capture that something else, you'd have to write a bunch of books.
Which is just what Douglas Adams did.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The proper way to celibrate (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:The proper way to celibrate (Score:5, Interesting)
Much fun!
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Rubbish article (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Rubbish article (Score:5, Informative)
In fact if you read much of his stuff, including interviews (I have everything its possible to get in audio form), you learn that he definitely did not want the movie to be a copy of either the book or the radio series. Actually it never could be a copy of the radio series, because there were all sorts of problems over what Douglas had the right to use.
It's not fashionable to like the H2G2 movie, but I enjoyed it hugely. Had it been an exact rehash of the same old stuff I'd have been annoyed. I wanted to not know what was going on for as much of the film as possible. Casting Mos Def as Ford Prefect was an inspired move, he performed the role really well. I'm not so sure about Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, but we can't have everything.
And Marvin? Well he was amazing. I never did understand why such an advanced robot should look like the one in the tv series. The one in the movie was much closer to my mental image of the robot then I expected.
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Re:Rubbish article (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that atheists are automatically funny, quite the opposite. Most are drearily dull as any priest. If you want to be a bore, be deeply and earnestly concerned that other people might commit, speak, or think an error.
For Adams, life consists of a series of wrong turns that lead you to places you never intended to be. In that he's not too far from the most interesting religious thinkers; the Buddha once compared his teaching to a raft you might throw together to cross a river. Once you're over, you have no use for it, so you throw it away. In Adams books, you might say the characters are constantly struggling with the question of "why am I here?" because they're never quite where they expected to go.
Given the perverse randomness of the universe, it's rather quixotic to be obsessed with the errors of thought other people make. Somehow, it all feels like a big mistake, at least if you're paying attention.
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This book will live forever (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you know where your towel is?
Re:This book will live forever (Score:4, Informative)
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The meaning of the answer is obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Flame away
Re:The meaning of the answer is obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
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And the question is: (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually... (Score:3, Funny)
42nd Post ! (Score:3, Funny)
only 30? (Score:3, Funny)
My theory... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
DNA actually said (Score:3, Interesting)
Other news (Score:3, Funny)
2020 Anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Adams *did* reveal the "secret" behind 42 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:if we knew (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.)
Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:4, Informative)
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
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Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:4, Informative)
There was no deep hidden meaning in the selection at all.
RIP, Douglas, we miss you.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:5, Funny)
And no, it's not part of my ATM PIN.
*Note: I said "random" not random. I know there's a difference.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)