Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 18:16:15 -0800 From: Craig Harding <crh@outpost.co.nz> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: 42 (was Re: Microsoft go it right ;-)) Message-ID: <38851E6F.23416412@outpost.co.nz> References: <200001180432.UAA10153@implode.root.com>
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> >"42" is the answer to "What is the meaning of life?" (at least for
> >earthlings). The mice contracted to have earth built in order to
>
> Actually, it was "...life, the universe, and everything".
Deep Thought was the giant self-aware supercomputer built to discover
the Answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and
everything. The result he returned (after several millennia) was 42.
Deep Thought justified the Answer (to the astounded high priests in
attendance) by pointing out that the Answer didn't really make sense
until you fully understood what the Question was; and thus a new even
more powerful organic computer (called "Earth") was built to compute the
ultimate Question of life, the universe, and everything.
The final readout of the Question apparently popped into the head of a
woman called Fenchurch ("...sitting on her own in a small cafe in
Rickmansworth") but before she could reach a telephone to tell anyone
about it, the Earth was destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a
hyperspace bypass. Fenchurch later became romantically entangled with
Arthur Dent on the substitute Earth recovered by the dolphins.
The mice (who were genetically modified descendants of the original
question-askers, inserted into the Earth system to direct the
computation) realized they would be able to recover the result directly
from a careful scan of Arthur Dent's brain, which required only the
slight inconvenience of removing it from its traditional location (and
some dicing). Arthur successfully fled and the opportunity to obtain the
Question was lost.
Much later, after a series of unlikely adventures, Arthur Dent and Ford
Prefect ended up on prehistoric Earth with its indigenous population of
cavemen in the company of a starship-load of Golgafrincham telephone
sanitisers. Ford and Arthur realised that the Question locked in
Arthur's brain could be recovered through the unconscious direction of a
random act (pulling scrabble letters from a bag) and came up with "what
do you get if you multiply six by nine".
The incorrect Question is explained by the fact that the presence of the
Golgafrincham settlers on Earth killed off the native pre-human
population, distorting the original setup conditions for the experiment.
-- C.
(no, I don't have the books with me at work. Entirely from memory. Very
disturbing!)
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