Remember Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? In it a race of vast pan-dimensional hyper-intelligent beings constructed the second greatest computer in all of time and space to calculate The Ultimate Answer to The Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After seven and a half million years of computing cycles, the computer's answer is: forty two."Forty two?!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
From trusty Wikipedia (which sounds like a character from Adams but isn't) I learn that Adams created a puzzle for his cover picture of forty two colored balls (above), which, however, nobody noticed was a puzzle. "Everybody was looking for hidden meanings and puzzles and significances in what I had written (like 'is it significant that 6 * 9 is 42 in base 13?'. As if.) So I thought that just for a change I would actually construct a puzzle and see how many people solved it. Of course, nobody paid it any attention. I think that's terribly significant."