Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy

Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy by DouglasAdams

ISBN 0345391802 The Hitchhiker's Guide is a MetaBook written by DouglasAdams about a human and his adventures with his own Hitchhiker's Guide. Very off beat humor. Very popular with programmers and mathematicians.

Surprisingly the book by this name has quite some differences between the US and the UK edition: http://web.archive.org/web/20030214214643/http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~nhughes/dna/faqs/diff.html (Actually, that's differences between the US and UK editions of the third book of the "trilogy".)

See HitchHikersGuideToTheGalaxy {sic} on SisterSites, and on http://bookshelved.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy (which so totally should be a sibling-site, too!).

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Evidently soon to be released (again) as a movie. This time with a budget. Can't wait. Oh, maybe I don't have to. I'll just nip into the future a bit and let you all know how it will be.

Let's see, just how improbable is that ... ?

2005/05/01 Just saw the movie this afternoon. Having been a huge fan for many years I was worried.. Have no fear! I feel certain Douglas would have been pleased... -- RonJandrasi

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Also have a look at the InteractiveFiction classic of the same name. It has to be one of the most hilarious InfoCom games I've ever played. -- ClemensEffHofreither

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How many before the whole system breaks down?

42

Every time I press one of these black controls, labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let me know I've done it.

A PanGalacticGargleBlaster. Once described as, "Being hit in the head with a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick."

We were 42 persons (excluding the trainers) at the XpImmersionTwo.

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DouglasAdams finally gets around to producing his "guide"...

• http://www.h2g2.com/

You can post articles, and start discussions on existing articles... But you can't edit existing articles.

The h2g2 site is like Wiki without QualityWithoutaName and without WikiEssence.

The h2g2 site is like all the WikiAccidents?. Is that your intent? (But I agree, it's not very interesting.) -- DanBarlow

See also: WikiWikiClone

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42 is the answer. The answer to life, the universe and everything.

It's not even a PrimeNumber. But it represents every philosophical question that has puzzled mankind for as long as we have been around. Very deep.

When I was a child, I played with childish things... We are but children in a playroom full of building blocks. A single atom is a block and the Universe is the room. When we are mature, many, many millennia from now, we will step outside of the playroom, put down our blocks and transcend the Universe. -- visasiv

42 is also the answer to the question: "What is 6 x 9?" (in base 13)

No. Forty-two is always forty-two. 42 is the answer to 6x9 in base 13. This is an important distinction. Otherwise, you could not say that twelve is 14 in base 8 ("Twelve is one four in base eight.")

But it's 101010 in base 2, like ...True? False? True? False? True? False? (core dump).

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More correctly, and someone with the book or a tape may correct this, forty two is an abbreviated answer to the above pseudo-question. the complete answer is something like: "A sequence of scrabble tiles pulled from a bag, which together read "six times nine is forty two"

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I think we're forgetting that the question was actually wrong (or at least, the Earth was destroyed 6 minutes before the computation of the question was completed). -- ArnoldLayne

Even the answer is suspect, as we're actually descended from all those telephone sanitizers.

Ah, but the calculation of the Answer was completely independent of the Earth, so the telephone sanitizers had nothing to do with it.

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It had to be destroyed; the entire universe would vanish and be replaced with something more bizarre and inexplicable afterward. Of course, this has already happened.

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''The voice said:

"Transtellar Cruise Lines would like to apologize to passengers for the continuing delay to this flight. We are currently awaiting the loading of our complement of small lemon-soaked paper napkins for your comfort, refreshment and hygiene during the journey. Meanwhile we thank you for your patience. The cabin crew will shortly be serving coffee and biscuits again."

(Spoiler: The ship is waiting for life on the current planet to evolve, civilizations to arise, and manufacturers to provide the lemon-scented napkins...)

...

"Nine hundred years" he breathed to himself. That was how late the ship was.''

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How could he have ever known that it was 900 years? Perhaps he could visually analyze the intergalactic dust that settled on the ship's rudder ... or ?

ANSWER: There was a reader board with a list of departures. So he simply did the math.

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You should also check http://www.galactic-guide.com/, a freely accessible, contributor-based attempt to gather up slightly tongue-in-cheek articles about all things real and imagined

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Would a GalacticWiki count as a real HitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy?

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If you reverse Zaphod saying "Thank Zark for that" in Fit the Seventeenth, he can be clearly heard saying "And I love moss."

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See also FortyTwo

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CategoryBook, CategoryScienceFiction