42

In line with my last post, Weird Stuff, I must report the following:

I finally get the joke. Here’s the weird part. This morning, in an idle moment, I was fooling around with PCalc, my favorite calculator program on my iPad. Reading the online help (yes, I’m a nerd), I noticed it referenced a constant labeled Universal Answer. So, I looked it up on the calculator, and the Universal Answer is 42.

Later, I noticed that the icon for PCalc has the number 42 in it. And the button to invoke the constants list has 42 in it.

Okay, I thought, that’s an interesting bit of whimsy; and I went on with my day.

A few minutes ago, Fox News was playing an excerpt from “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” where the statue gives the crowd the answer to everything – and it is: 42, again. Ah ha, I thought, now I know where that came from!

But then, the announcer explained why this was on the news. Today’s date is 10/10/10. If you convert 101010 in binary to decimal, it equals 42. Today is the Ultimate Answer.

I had no idea this morning about any of this; it is truly weird that I happened to notice the constant in my calculator on this specific date. What are the odds? (insert weird music here).

– Popgun

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