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Why did you choose your username?
Mar 19, 2011 at 7:25 PM Post #196 of 376
I just used my initials.  I don't have much belief in being a person of mystery - or having to use some mysterious name. 
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Mar 21, 2011 at 6:45 AM Post #199 of 376
A friend of mine, when we were first introduced, decided that I looked more like an 'Elliot' and decided to call me that in stead of my real name: Owen. That was at least 7 years ago and Elliot kind of stuck, and I like it. '42' is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
 
Mar 21, 2011 at 7:00 AM Post #200 of 376
 
Quote:
'42' is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
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Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (42)


The Answer to Life


In the first novel and radio series, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Ultimate 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. Unfortunately, The Ultimate Question itself is unknown.
When asked to produce The Ultimate Question, the computer says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer, the Earth, that can. The programmers then embark on a further ten-million-year program to discover The Ultimate Question. This new computer will incorporate living beings in the "computational matrix", with the pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of mice. 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. This is later 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 meaning of life became known.[1]
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 protest song "Blowin' in the Wind".
At the end of the first radio series (and television series, as well as 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[2] suggested by Marvin the Paranoid Android, 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"[1]
”​
Six times nine is, of course, fifty-four. 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.[1]
Quoting Fit the Seventh of the radio series, on Christmas Eve, 1978:
“​
 Narrator: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.[3]
”​
Some readers subsequently noticed that 613 × 913 = 4213 (using base 13). Douglas Adams later joked about this observation, saying, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13."[4]
In Life, the Universe and Everything, Prak, a man who knows all that is true, confirms that 42 is indeed The Ultimate Answer, and confirms that it is impossible for both The Ultimate Answer and The Ultimate Question to be known about in the same universe (compare the uncertainty principle) as they will cancel each other out and take the Universe with them to be replaced by something even more bizarre (as described in the first theory) and that it may have already happened (as described in the second).[5] Though the question is never found, it is notable that 42 is the table number at which Arthur and his friends sit when they arrive at Milliways at the end of the radio series. Likewise, Mostly Harmless, and the book series proper, ends when Arthur stops at a street address identified by his cry of "There, number 42!" and enters the club Beta, owned by Stavro Mueller, who is apparently the incarnation of Agrajag located at Stavromula Beta. Shortly after, the earth is destroyed in all existing incarnations.

[edit] The number 42

Douglas Adams was asked many times during his career why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed,[6] but he rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer[7] on alt.fan.douglas-adams:
“​
 The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story.
”​
Adams described his choice as 'a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents'.[3]
While 42 was a number with no hidden meaning, Adams explained in more detail in an interview with Iain Johnstone of BBC Radio 4 (recorded in 1998 though never broadcast)[8] to celebrate the first radio broadcast's 20th anniversary. Having decided it should be a number, he tried to think what an "ordinary number" should be. He ruled out non-integers, then he remembered having worked as a "prop-borrower" for John Cleese on his Video Arts training videos. Cleese needed a funny number for the punchline to a sketch involving a bank teller (himself) and a customer (Tim Brooke-Taylor). Adams believed that the number that Cleese came up with was 42 and he decided to use it.[9]
Adams also had written a sketch for The Burkiss Way called "42 Logical Positivism Avenue", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 January 1977[10] – 14 months before the Hitchhiker's Guide first broadcast "42" in fit the fourth, 29 March 1978.[3]
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Burkiss Way, "Logical Positivism" sketch excerpt

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An excerpt from Douglas Adam's The Burkiss Way sketch, "Logical Positivism" excerpt

[size=smaller]Problems listening to this file? See media help.[/size]
In January 2000, in response to a panelist's "Where does the number 42 come from?" on the radio show "Book Club" Adams explained that he was "on his way to work one morning, whilst still writing the scene, and was thinking about what the actual answer should be. He eventually decided that it should be something that made no sense whatsoever- a number, and a mundane one at that. And that is how he arrived at the number 42, completely at random."
Stephen Fry, a friend of Adams, claims that Adams told him "exactly why 42", and that the reason is "fascinating, extraordinary and, when you think hard about it, completely obvious."[11] However, Fry says that he has vowed not to tell anyone the secret, and that it must go with him to the grave. John Lloyd, Adams' collaborator on The Meaning of Liff and two Hitchhiker's fits, said that Douglas has called 42 "the funniest of the two-digit numbers."[12]
The number 42 also appears frequently in the work of Lewis Carroll, and some critics have suggested that this was an influence.[13][14] Other purported Carroll influences include that Adams named the episodes of the original radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "fits", the word Carroll used to name the chapters of The Hunting of the Snark.
There is the persistent tale that forty-two is actually Adams' tribute to the indefatigable paperback book, and is really the average number of lines on an average page of an average paperback book.[15]

[edit] 42 Puzzle


The 42 puzzle. Note that the land in the background spells out 42, and that there are 42 colored balls


The 42 Puzzle is a game devised by Douglas Adams in 1994 for the United States series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. The puzzle is an illustration consisting of 42 multi-coloured balls, in 7 columns and 6 rows. Douglas Adams has said,
“​
 Everybody was looking for hidden meanings and puzzles and significances in what I had written (like 'is it significant that 6×9 = 42 in base 13?'. As if.) So I thought that just for a change I would actually construct a puzzle and see how many people solved it. Of course, nobody paid it any attention. I think that's terribly significant.[16]
”​
In the puzzle the question is unknown, but the answer is already known to be 42.
The puzzle first appeared in The Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was later incorporated into the covers of all five reprinted "Hitchhiker's" novels in the United States.
Six of the solutions are:[17]
 
Mar 21, 2011 at 7:50 PM Post #202 of 376
in all honesty i chose my user name cause it was the same as my email so i would remember easier. though i wish i chose something more creative.
 
Mar 23, 2011 at 4:21 PM Post #204 of 376


Quote:
wink said:
 

Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (42)

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False, 23 is the answer 
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Mar 29, 2011 at 10:17 PM Post #206 of 376
I used to be goth... Some people called me vampire, but I thought that would be pretentious, so I used the Japanese version... And now... Several years later... It still works because, to my disdain, I look like the evil dude from Twilight (and it annoys me immensely... I hate Twilight, but admit, had I known that I looked like him, I would have applied for a stuntman position).... If I had a good picture of myself that is recent showing this, I would... I do not take good pictures for some reason...
 
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