Jim Medding’s Blog

Recently, a date encoding in an auto-generated e-mail subject heading caught my eye. It was an interesting pattern. Being the type of person to see the street number of a house and think “I like that number” before realizing that it’s my birth date, I decided to treat myself and ruminate on the pattern. The curious date encoding was almost a binary number; next year it would be a binary number. But there’s a date code next year which is binary and it has a repeating pattern – 101010. Repeating patterns are even better.

“Nice to look at, but is there anything else about this date pattern which is interesting?” I thought.

“Hmm, I wonder what that is in decimal.”

The Answer is – 42.

So, we don’t have to wait 7.5 million years for a supercomputer to calculate the meaning of life. It has its own date which comes around every 100 years. Spread the word.

10/10/10 is the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything Day. Don’t miss it.