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A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Small Web
"In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy,
the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica
as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom."
"The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" was calculated by the supercomputer Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years.
The answer is 42.
Unfortunately, no one knew what the Question was. To find the Question, an even greater computer was built: the planet Earth. It was destroyed by Vogons five minutes before completing its 10-million-year program.
The closest anyone came to discovering the Question was Arthur Dent, who pulled Scrabble tiles from a bag: "WHAT DO YOU GET IF YOU MULTIPLY SIX BY NINE"
6 × 9 = 54 in base 10. But 6 × 9 = 42 in base 13. Douglas Adams said this was a coincidence: "I don't write jokes in base 13."
42 is the product of the first three primes: 2 × 3 × 7
42 is a pronic number (6 × 7), also called an oblong number
42 is the sum of the first three odd powers of 2: 2¹ + 2³ + 2⁵ = 42
Light refracts off water at 42 degrees to create rainbows
In Japanese, 4 and 2 can be pronounced 'shi ni' meaning 'unto death'
A barrel of oil is 42 US gallons (by international standard)
There are 42 laws of cricket
In ancient Egypt, there were 42 principles of Ma'at (truth/justice)
42 is the answer Deep Thought calculated after 7.5 million years
The Gutenberg Bible has 42 lines per page
Wonderland's White Queen is 42 years old in 'Through the Looking-Glass'
Coldplay named their album 'X&Y' partly because X and Y are ASCII 88 and 89 (8+8+8+9+9 = 42)
42 is the atomic number of molybdenum
Dogs have 42 adult teeth
In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet sleeps for 42 hours
42 is the sum of the Roman numeral values: X+L+I+I = 10+50+1+1 = 62... wait, Adams made this up
There are 42 US presidents if you count Cleveland once
The angle at which light must strike water droplets to make a rainbow is 42°
42 is a Catalan number
42 is a 'self' number (not the sum of any integer plus its digits)
In Star Trek, Deck 42 appears only once, in episode 42
The Disney movie 'Into the Woods' runs exactly 2h 4m 42s
42 factorial (42!) has 51 digits
6 × 9 = 42 in base 13, which Adams said was 'beautiful but a coincidence'
42 is the number of kilometers in a marathon (rounded to 42.195)
Cell 42 is a recurring location in various Doctor Who episodes
42 is the angle of the Martian moon Phobos from its surface
The Disney Pixar movie 'Wall-E' has 42 distinct robots
There are 42 teeth in a tyrannosaurus rex skull
In Lost, 4+8+15+16+23+42 are the Numbers
Google's DeepMind project asked 'What is the answer?' and got 42 from GPT-3
42 is the wildcard in IBM's System/360 Job Control Language
The USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) was built at the Utopia Planitia shipyards, Mars, in Sector 42
42 Monkeys features in the title of Terry Gilliam's film
Route 42 in Pokémon leads to the Lake of Rage
The Impossible Project revived Polaroid with the I-1 camera at the 42nd anniversary
Adams died on May 11, 2001 at age 49 (4+2=6, 4×2=8... no wait, that's a stretch)
42 is represented as 101010 in binary - a very pleasing pattern
The sum of the opposite faces of two dice: (1+6)+(2+5)+(3+4)=21, ×2=42
In the periodic table, 42 falls in Group 6, Period 5
There are 42 spider species in the UK
ASCII code 42 is the asterisk (*), often called a 'star' or 'splat'