Life? Don’t talk to me about life…
Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and with a terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.
Yes, it was a joke, but some inner voice tells me that it has something to do with the Judeo-Christian idea that 6= imperfection (or man) and 7=perfection (or God). 6x7, you get the rest.
This is of course utter bullshit and Douglas Adams would probably slap me for stating it. Or maybe give me a high-five. Hard to tell.
I think Dex has something there. Carroll does use 42 a lot and Carroll’s works once read (and often read again and again) have a tendency to stay with you and you’ll find odd scraps and lines floating up to your conscious mind for the rest of your life.
This thread had 42 replies listed on the main page when I first looked at it. I’m sure that means something.
Something important.
Something very important.
Gonna a build a mountain
In your living room
Gonna build a mountain
And it’s gonna be keen!
Saw you posted this at 10:42
Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän means “Danube steamship company captain” and has 42 letters, Arthur Dent likes tea which is best served for two. Or maybe not, an idiom for confusion is to be ‘at 6s and 7s’.
42 is also how many dead hookers fit in the trunks of these fabulous used cars!
[QUOTE=Critical]
I saw one recently that was a twist on this, it said
“Math is the meaning of life…”
{snip}
[/QUOTE]
There’s a tiny problem with that theory/joke. Adams, being British, would have called it “maths”, not “math”. Which kinda throws the sum outta whack.
Part of the joke is the meaning of life is so complex and massive that if you don’t understand “42,” that just means you are too stupid to understand the answer. Therefore, people who think they are “smart” just say, “of course, 42! It’s obvious!”
Because 43 wouldn’t have been funny, c’mon.
It’s the sort of thing that took Deep Thought a few million years to calculate, you think you can explain it in a little message board post?
Excellent. Did anyone ever come up with the answer to that one? I missed a couple of years of The Dope.
Funnier, maybe.
Most definitely not. Closed, in frustration, by SkipMagic. If mittu is not a board pariah, he should be.
Actually, that was just a coincidence.
“What do you get when you multiply 6 by N” is 42 in some base for every odd N greater than 4.
6 x 5 = 42 in base 7
6 x 7 = 42 in base 10
6 x 9 = 42 in base 13
6 x 11 = 42 in base 16
and so on
Proof:
6 x (2n+1) = 12n + 6 = 4 x (3n + 1) + 2 = 42 in base (3n + 1).
Note that 6 x 3 does not equal 42 in base 4 as the digits 4 and 6 do not exist in base 4.
Remember…The question is supposed to be wrong. The correct question is supposed to be based on humans being descended from cavemen, but instead humans descended from Golgafrinchams (and “useless” Golgafrinchams at that).
Skip Magic never did show up again, either.
Coincidence?
Yes. Chessic Sense did. At least it makes sense to me, although there’s still some debate.
You’re falling for the same trap as those that thought they had found satanic messages in heavy metal played backwards. The trap is, you can find things that appear to be satanic messages in *any *songs played backwards, if you try hard enough.
Find me any catchy, memorable number that you can’t find heavily referenced in something.
I’m pretty sure Chessic Sense’s answer was a joke, like many others offered. Part of the setup for those games is that the result is a familiar phrase or saying.