In the early days of sign language, before they started adding 
curse words, they would improvise. "42" was a way of saying "F#*@ You",
or so I was told by a sign interpreter. So when I read that book and 
saw the movie, I couldn't help laughing and wondering, was Douglas
Adams aware of that connection when he wrote the book and by chance made it
a very inside-inside joke? 

So now that we know the answer is "42",... what's the question?

Makes you go, Hmmmmmm,....  ?~:-/


Cheers,
-Partev


==========================================================


--- PeterArmstrong@aya.yale.edu wrote:

From: PMA 
To:  csound@lists.bath.ac.uk
Subject: Re: [Csnd] Re: Xenakis
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:44:58 -0500

Hah -- I'm recalling "42" from A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Michael Gogins wrote:
> Information is merely what can be measured in some phenomenon that
> enables the discrimination of "yes" from "no" questions. Meaning is
> what the questions are about. Without the information, you don't know
> what meaning to affirm, you don't know what the meaning is. Without
> meaning, the information is meaningless.
> 
> Regards,
> Mike
> 
> On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Justin Glenn Smith  wrote:
>> My mentor, Herbert Brün, had some interesting things to say about Shannon's theory of communication - he actually used it as a *basis* for the need to experiment.
>>
>> My sloppy late night email version is that meanings are not fixed and there is an entropy in meaning - as messages are repeated, the very repetition changes, and eventually diminishes, meaning. Think of the significance of a hard backbeat today (people take for granted it should be there, and sometimes even forget whether a particular song even has a hard backbeat or not) vs. the 1950s (it was a surprise, a new aggression and violent impulse in pop music, it carried connotations of debauchery). I am sure we have all at some point as a child said a word enough times in a row that it lost all meaning. The role of the composer is to refresh our wells of meaning and retard the decay of music as the inevitable repetition and quotation from one generation to the next diminishes the significance of established forms, and increases the entropy (thus decreasing the bandwidth) of music as a medium for communication of feelings and ideas.
>>
>> Herbert always told me to use shorter sentences, but I do hope my tired attempt conveyed something regardless.
>>
>> DavidW wrote:
>>> Thanks for your sensible contribution to the topic, Richard. It was
>>> starting to sound like the professions of the faithful to the One True
>>> Church of Musical Communication. If we examine the historical record, we
>>> can see that it would be more accurate to further qualify your
>>> individual "should" to mostly "could"s, i.e most composers have heard,
>>> and often provided multiple "solutions" to musical "problems" - some
>>> times in the same work, sometime in multiple reworkings.
>>>
>>> As for the whole communication thing, I'm afraid I just don't get it. I
>>> see the intention to communicate, the need to reach out to one's fellow
>>> human beings, and unfortunately not often enough IMO to other creatures,
>>> but the idea that communication is about the sending and receiving of
>>> messages containing specific meanings is wacky, and completely
>>> misinformed about the nature of art, and even the concept of
>>> communication. Unfortunately many computer-savy people confuse
>>> communication as per Shannon's theory, with human communication, which
>>> it is not.
>>>
>>> drw
>>>
>>> On 01/02/2011, at 8:24 PM, Richard Dobson wrote:
>>>> On 01/02/2011 07:12, Jim Aikin wrote:
>>>> ..
>>>>> I'm not sure it's desirable that one let go of all of one's ideas about
>>>>> what music should be. If one truly does that, one has no basis on which
>>>>> to compose anything. Any act of music composition involves, of
>>>>> necessity, innumerable choices about what should and should not be
>>>>> included.
>>>>>
>>>> So much hangs on the choice of words, and a ready (almost invisible)
>>>> conflation of the personal with the universal. Replace "should" with
>>>> "could" and I think you have a better picture of things world-wide.
>>>> ~Of Course~, all composers are in general selective; they decide
>>>> perhaps on a piece by piece basis what idioms and styles they wish to
>>>> include/exclude. So we can say they are perhaps declaring what "music
>>>> should be" for them, at that moment. It is a very big step however to
>>>> go beyond and assert that that is what must "should" be in general. I
>>>> don't think anyone can ever say that. To that degree, I think that the
>>>> less we attach ourselves to "should" the better. Why arbitrarily
>>>> exclude anything that may one day be useful?
>>>>
>>> ________________________________________________
>>> Dr David Worrall.
>>> - Experimental Polymedia:      worrall.avatar.com.au
>>> - Sonification: www.sonification.com.au
>>> - Education for Financial Independence: www.mindthemarkets.com.au
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Send bugs reports to the Sourceforge bug tracker
>>>            https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=81968&atid=564599
>>> Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here
>>> To unsubscribe, send email sympa@lists.bath.ac.uk with body "unsubscribe
>>> csound"
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> Send bugs reports to the Sourceforge bug tracker
>>            https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=81968&atid=564599
>> Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here
>> To unsubscribe, send email sympa@lists.bath.ac.uk with body "unsubscribe csound"
>>
>>
> 
> 
> 


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_____________________________________________________________
Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.
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I wan't aware of that background.  I've just always felt
the number itself to be quintessentially mundane -- all
the more unlike its lost question.

Partev Barr Sarkissian wrote:
> In the early days of sign language, before they started adding 
> curse words, they would improvise. "42" was a way of saying "F#*@ You",
> or so I was told by a sign interpreter. So when I read that book and 
> saw the movie, I couldn't help laughing and wondering, was Douglas
> Adams aware of that connection when he wrote the book and by chance made it
> a very inside-inside joke? 
> 
> So now that we know the answer is "42",... what's the question?
> 
> Makes you go, Hmmmmmm,....  ?~:-/
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> -Partev
> 
> 
> ==========================================================
> 
> 
> --- PeterArmstrong@aya.yale.edu wrote:
> 
> From: PMA 
> To:  csound@lists.bath.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: [Csnd] Re: Xenakis
> Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:44:58 -0500
> 
> Hah -- I'm recalling "42" from A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
> 
> Michael Gogins wrote:
>> Information is merely what can be measured in some phenomenon that
>> enables the discrimination of "yes" from "no" questions. Meaning is
>> what the questions are about. Without the information, you don't know
>> what meaning to affirm, you don't know what the meaning is. Without
>> meaning, the information is meaningless.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Mike
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Justin Glenn Smith  wrote:
>>> My mentor, Herbert Brün, had some interesting things to say about Shannon's theory of communication - he actually used it as a *basis* for the need to experiment.
>>>
>>> My sloppy late night email version is that meanings are not fixed and there is an entropy in meaning - as messages are repeated, the very repetition changes, and eventually diminishes, meaning. Think of the significance of a hard backbeat today (people take for granted it should be there, and sometimes even forget whether a particular song even has a hard backbeat or not) vs. the 1950s (it was a surprise, a new aggression and violent impulse in pop music, it carried connotations of debauchery). I am sure we have all at some point as a child said a word enough times in a row that it lost all meaning. The role of the composer is to refresh our wells of meaning and retard the decay of music as the inevitable repetition and quotation from one generation to the next diminishes the significa
 nce of established forms, and increases the entropy (thus decreasing the bandwidth) of music as a medium for communication of feelings and ideas.
>>>
>>> Herbert always told me to use shorter sentences, but I do hope my tired attempt conveyed something regardless.
>>>
>>> DavidW wrote:
>>>> Thanks for your sensible contribution to the topic, Richard. It was
>>>> starting to sound like the professions of the faithful to the One True
>>>> Church of Musical Communication. If we examine the historical record, we
>>>> can see that it would be more accurate to further qualify your
>>>> individual "should" to mostly "could"s, i.e most composers have heard,
>>>> and often provided multiple "solutions" to musical "problems" - some
>>>> times in the same work, sometime in multiple reworkings.
>>>>
>>>> As for the whole communication thing, I'm afraid I just don't get it. I
>>>> see the intention to communicate, the need to reach out to one's fellow
>>>> human beings, and unfortunately not often enough IMO to other creatures,
>>>> but the idea that communication is about the sending and receiving of
>>>> messages containing specific meanings is wacky, and completely
>>>> misinformed about the nature of art, and even the concept of
>>>> communication. Unfortunately many computer-savy people confuse
>>>> communication as per Shannon's theory, with human communication, which
>>>> it is not.
>>>>
>>>> drw
>>>>
>>>> On 01/02/2011, at 8:24 PM, Richard Dobson wrote:
>>>>> On 01/02/2011 07:12, Jim Aikin wrote:
>>>>> ..
>>>>>> I'm not sure it's desirable that one let go of all of one's ideas about
>>>>>> what music should be. If one truly does that, one has no basis on which
>>>>>> to compose anything. Any act of music composition involves, of
>>>>>> necessity, innumerable choices about what should and should not be
>>>>>> included.
>>>>>>
>>>>> So much hangs on the choice of words, and a ready (almost invisible)
>>>>> conflation of the personal with the universal. Replace "should" with
>>>>> "could" and I think you have a better picture of things world-wide.
>>>>> ~Of Course~, all composers are in general selective; they decide
>>>>> perhaps on a piece by piece basis what idioms and styles they wish to
>>>>> include/exclude. So we can say they are perhaps declaring what "music
>>>>> should be" for them, at that moment. It is a very big step however to
>>>>> go beyond and assert that that is what must "should" be in general. I
>>>>> don't think anyone can ever say that. To that degree, I think that the
>>>>> less we attach ourselves to "should" the better. Why arbitrarily
>>>>> exclude anything that may one day be useful?
>>>>>
>>>> ________________________________________________
>>>> Dr David Worrall.
>>>> - Experimental Polymedia:      worrall.avatar.com.au
>>>> - Sonification: www.sonification.com.au
>>>> - Education for Financial Independence: www.mindthemarkets.com.au
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Send bugs reports to the Sourceforge bug tracker
>>>>            https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=81968&atid=564599
>>>> Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here
>>>> To unsubscribe, send email sympa@lists.bath.ac.uk with body "unsubscribe
>>>> csound"
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Send bugs reports to the Sourceforge bug tracker
>>>            https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=81968&atid=564599
>>> Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here
>>> To unsubscribe, send email sympa@lists.bath.ac.uk with body "unsubscribe csound"
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
> 
> 
> Send bugs reports to the Sourceforge bug tracker
>             https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=81968&atid=564599
> Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here
> To unsubscribe, send email sympa@lists.bath.ac.uk with body "unsubscribe csound"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _____________________________________________________________
> Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.
> Send bugs reports to the Sourceforge bug tracker
>             https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=81968&atid=564599
> Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here
> To unsubscribe, send email sympa@lists.bath.ac.uk with body "unsubscribe csound"
> 


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Actually, it is well-known that 42 was the particular flavor of Earl Grey tea that Adams, an avid drinker of tea, preferred.

//p

http://www.interdisciplina.org/00.0/

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 9:06 AM, PMA <PeterArmstrong@aya.yale.edu> wrote:

I wan't aware of that background.  I've just always felt
the number itself to be quintessentially mundane -- all
the more unlike its lost question.

Actually that's the question, the answer is blowing in the wind ;-)

P

On 4 February 2011 01:58, Patrick  wrote:
> i though the answer was
> "how many roads must a man walk down"
> Bob Dylan
>
> LOL
>
>
>
> On 02/03/2011 08:52 PM, Paulo Mouat wrote:
>
> Actually, it is well-known that 42 was the particular flavor of Earl Grey
> tea that Adams, an avid drinker of tea, preferred.
> //p
> http://www.interdisciplina.org/00.0/
>
> On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 9:06 AM, PMA  wrote:
>>
>> I wan't aware of that background.  I've just always felt
>> the number itself to be quintessentially mundane -- all
>> the more unlike its lost question.
>>
>
>


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