Sunday, October 10, 2010

How Does 10/10/10 Equal 42?

If you pop open your calculator, put it into Programmer mode, click the Binary button, and then type in 101010, you’ll see that flipping to Decimal mode shows you 42 instead.
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And of course, if you actually learn how the Binary numeral system works, you’ll earn some geek points.

Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything    image

In the science fiction novel (and movie) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there’s a giant computer that’s trying to figure out the ultimate answer to the ultimate questions in the universe—here’s the quote from Wikipedia:
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.
In fact, if you search Google for “answer to life the universe and everything”, it will spit out 42, in a lot less than 7.5 million years, of course.

Isn’t Pointless Geek Knowledge Fun?

Of course, this is all quite silly, but it’s fun to learn the background behind some of these things.
And don’t forget, this morning at 10:10 and 10 seconds, it will be 10/10/10 – 10:10:10, the only time that will happen for another 100 years.

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