I suspect that when Douglas Adams famously said the answer was 42, he F’ed up and meant to say 43. I have good grounds for this suspicion. You see, in hexadecimal notation, 42 is expressed as 2a.
(The reasoning is a trivial base conversion. Hexadecimal is base 16, and 42=2*16+11*1, and 11 expressed as the character ‘a’.)
On the other hand, 43 is 2b. This makes it so the obvious hex joke about the answer to everything is the famous Hamlet line.
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