Life, the universe, and everything

Once upon a future time the wise men of the universe approached their most powerful supercomputer and asked it to determine the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. The computer finally churned out its answer, which, as a surprisingly large number of people know, was 42. 
The computer, in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was named Deep Thought. In the 1980s, when I was freshly re-established in America, I happily joined Adams...