The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything

Deep Thought
http://www.nordic-brains.de/html/c_home_42.html

In the 1978 BBC Radio series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was followed by a 1979 novel, 1981 BBC Television series and 2005 movie, humorist Douglas Adams tells of a supercomputer named "Deep Thought" that is programmed to determine the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

After seven-and-a-half million years, Deep Thought determines the answer:  42.

The priests who are present for the answer are incredulous, of course, given the length of time that it took to determine a seemingly elementary answer.  Deep Thought goes on to explain "You have to know what the question is in order to know what the answer means."

Another supercomputer - the rather dully named Earth - is designed to determine the question, but it is destroyed five minutes before completing its ten million-year calculation.

http://thesecondguess.blogspot.com/2011/05/one-year-later.html
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After a great deal of hijinks, including meeting the two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox and a man named Slartibartfast, a human named Ford Prefect determines the "Ultimate Question" by pulling random Scrabble^® tiles out of a bag:  What do you get if you multiply six by nine?

In spite of the fact that Mister Prefect "always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe," and that there may be many days that I may be inclined to agree with him, that is not the case today, as it is my birthday - my 42nd birthday, in fact.

I hope it is an absolutely fantastic day for you.  It definitely promises to be one for me.

Some of the content of this entry was obtained from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy page on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy.