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Preamble....
When I first got on the net in 1996, and some web sites, thought that it was cool to create html sites which were effectively convoluted with hidden pages I started to think that there is a distiction between the medium and the message, although the two are intertwined. "The medium is the message." Sort of addresses this.
So after exporing this web one site, I though of this distiction and HHGTTG came to mine. I pulled it off the shelf and thought that if the QUESTION was there, it might be in-the-book, not the story. So I looked at the first two pages, nothing there. Then I went to the last chapter, #35 I thing, its 1.5 pages long at best. And there it is. In the last quotation from 'the book' with big friendly letters "don't panic", there are three questions, nor a single QUESTION. If you count up the [A-z] characters in the three questions, don't cound spaces or '?' characters, you get 42. So the question really involves:
How can we eat? Why do we eat? Where shall we have lunch?
$ echo 'How can we eat? Why do we eat? Where shall we have lunch?' |tr -d ' \012?' |wc -c
42
$
(tr -d deletes stuff in the following quoted field, spaces and the <new line> character added by the echo command. wc -c counts the characters, this took less that 7 million years to execute)
pardon my unix!
Another unlikey probability, well probabilities are at the core of the story, hence the improbability drive.
So the last question in the book is 'the question'. The answer is in the book, not in the story. Its just a writer's trick. The answer in the story must remain unknown, but the temptation to hide something in the book, not the story, would be hard to resist.
So it took 7 million years to figure out that lunch was the meaning of life? Perhaps not. But the 42 characters are a simple trick in the book, not in the story.
I told you that you would not like it. Now how about another 7,000,000 year to figure out beer?
Now those three questions, are spaced out with some unnecessary bable. I seem to want to recall that earlier publications of the book did not have that and there was just the three questions without the added fluff. I will have to find an old printing someday and find out. If that recollection is true, perhaps there was an attempt to obscure this improbable question.
I still think that digital watches are pretty neat.
posted by 207.43.195...
, Wed, 18 Sep 2002 11:35:22, Tue, 17 Sep 2002 15:44:38
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