The phrase 'meaning of life' appears twice in the first five Hitchhiker's Guide books. The first time, it appears in the following context:

Many many millions of years ago a race of hyperintelligent pan- dimensional beings (whose physical manifestation in their own pan-dimensional universe is not dissimilar to our own) got so fed up with the constant bickering about the meaning of life which used to interrupt their favourite pastime of Brockian Ultra Cricket (a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away) that they decided to sit down and solve their problems once and for all.

However, what Fook and Lunkwill ask of Deep Thought is more specific:

"Can we get on and ask the question?" he said.

Lunkwill motioned him to wait.

"What computer is this of which you speak?" he asked.

"I will speak of it no further in this present time," said Deep Thought. "Now. Ask what else of me you will that I may function. Speak."

They shrugged at each other. Fook composed himself.

"O Deep Thought Computer," he said, "the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us ..." he paused, "... the Answer!"

"The answer?" said Deep Thought. "The answer to what?"

"Life!" urged Fook.

"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.

"Everything!" they said in chorus.

Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.

"Tricky," he said finally.

"But can you do it?"

Again, a significant pause.

"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."

"There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement."

"A simple answer?" added Lunkwill.

"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about it."

They don't ask about the meaning of life. They want an answer to 'Life, the Universe, and Everything', and Fook 'wants to get on and ask the question'.

"All I wanted to say," bellowed the computer, "is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything -" he paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone's attention, before continuing more quietly, "but the programme will take me a little while to run."

So, please, shut your face. And don't bring up that shitty movie.

So, please, shut your face. And don't bring up that shitty movie.

It has a redeeming quality. Zooey Deschanel. In the shower.

worse. judeo-christina centric..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar#Currently_used_calendars [wikipedia.org]

Currently used calendars
Calendars in widespread use today include the Gregorian calendar, which is the de facto international standard, and is used almost everywhere in the world for civil purposes, including in the People's Republic of China and India (along with the Indian national calendar). Due to the Gregorian calendar's obvious connotations of Western Christianity, non-Christians and even some Christians sometimes justify its use by replacing the traditional era notations "AD" and "BC" ("Anno Domini" and "Before Christ") with "CE" and "BCE" ("Common Era" and "Before Common Era"). The Hindu calendars are some of the most ancient calendars of the world. Eastern Christians of eastern Europe and western Asia used for a long time the Julian Calendar, that of the old Orthodox church, in countries like Russia. For over 1500 years, Westerners used the Julian Calendar also.

While the Gregorian calendar is widely used in Israel's business and day-to-day affairs, the Hebrew calendar, used by Jews worldwide for religious and cultural affairs, also influences civil matters in Israel (such as national holidays) and can be used there for business dealings (such as for the dating of checks).

The Iranian (Persian) calendar is used in Iran and Afghanistan. The Islamic calendar is used by most non-Iranian Muslims worldwide. The Chinese, Hebrew, Hindu, and Julian calendars are widely used for religious and/or social purposes. The Ethiopian calendar or Ethiopic calendar is the principal calendar used in Ethiopia and Eritrea. In Thailand, where the Thai solar calendar is used, the months and days have adopted the western standard, although the years are still based on the traditional Buddhist calendar. Bahá'ís worldwide use the Bahá'í calendar.

Even where there is a commonly used calendar such as the Gregorian calendar, alternate calendars may also be used, such as a fiscal calendar or the astronomical year numbering system[6].

1 in 365.25 I suppose.

      Not exactly true. Statistically there are a greater number of births in the month of September, probably thanks to the end of year festivities 9 months earlier. Considering that pregnant women can't get pregnant again unless she loses the baby, and the duration of term is the same whether conceived in Jan or Nov, this necessarily decreases the number of women "available" to give birth any other time of year. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to confirm what OB/GYN's and midwives have known for a long time...

I thought most places used 2010/10/20. Isn't that some kind of ISO standard? I try to use it everywhere I can due to its easy sorting.

Just looked it up actually it's ISO 8601
YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD

PS: Why can't we all just switch to UTC and big-endian times with 24 hours in a day not 12am + 12pm? It would make maintaining computers so much easier and we wouldn't have to keep updating those timezone parts in various things. We could also finally kill off Daylight Saving Time.

Pardon my blog-whoring, but I've posted a short history of powers of 10 media [ideonexus.com], which goes:

• 1957 book Cosmic View, The Universe in 40 Jumps [vendian.org]
• 1968 film Cosmic Zoom [www.nfb.ca]
• 1977 film Powers of Ten [youtube.com]
• 1996 film Cosmic Voyage [youtube.com]
• 1997 film Contact [youtube.com]
• Most Recent flash interactive Scale of the Universe [htwins.net]

Just another way to celebrate an exponentially awesome day. : )

Hah, yes. I always just use the gregorian date and so far noone has complained. But birth dates do seem to be always in the year of the emperor.

You just need to wait a while for 11/11/11111.

No need to compile anything, GNU date command does it:

$ date +%s -d '10/10/10 00:00 GMT'
1286668800

In Lithuania it's yyyy mm dd or yyyy-mm-dd. Makes the most sense, slowest changing number is the first and fastest changing number is last, like in regular numbers: 100 -> 101 -> 102 ...