The OFFICIAL Countdown To Lockn 2017 Thread

By 196mumblemumble when I bought my first album, Beatles "Revolver", you could no longer find 78's. They were all LPs or Long Play and we're 33 1/3 rpm. Long play because the slower they spun the longer a side of music. Typically up to about 20 minutes per side vs 10 minutes or less for the old 78s.

Ah, yes. The answer to life, the universe, and everything.

I thought this was going to be today's reference. I love these books, and the movie is one of my favorites.

Yes, so in fact it WAS today's reference.

It's from the books, radio shows and movie concerning Douglas Adam's "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" and "Restaurant at the End of the Universe". 42 is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The problem is that no one knows what the question is. One version of the Ultimate Question is "What is 6 x 9?" It's like a Holy Grail thing.

In the radio series and the first novel, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. Deep Thought points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never actually knew what the Question was.[1]

When asked to produce The Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer that can. This new computer will incorporate living beings into the "computational matrix" and will run for ten million years. It is revealed as being the planet Earth, with its pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of white lab mice to observe its running. The process is hindered after eight million years by the unexpected arrival on Earth of the Golgafrinchans and then is ruined completely, five minutes before completion, when the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a new Hyperspace Bypass. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, this is revealed to have been a ruse: the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of psychiatrists, led by Gag Halfrunt, who feared for the loss of their careers when the ultimate question became known.[2]

Lacking a real question, the mice decide not to go through the whole thing again and settle for the out-of-thin-air suggestion "How many roads must a man walk down?" from Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind".

At the end of the radio series, the television series and the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent, having escaped the Earth's destruction, potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain. He attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively[3] suggested by Ford Prefect, when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells out forty two. Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"

"Six by nine. Forty two."

"That's it. That's all there is."

"I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe"[2]

Six times nine is, of course, fifty-four. The answer is deliberately wrong. The program on the "Earth computer" should have run correctly, but the unexpected arrival of the Golgafrinchans on prehistoric Earth caused input errors into the system—computing (because of the garbage in, garbage out rule) the wrong question—the question in Arthur's subconscious being invalid all along.[2]

Kind of like a train wreck. you don't want to watch yet you can't look away. I find it pleasantly disturbing...