Towel Day Multi-Cache

Towel Day

Douglas Adams is best remembered as the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started as a BBC radio comedy, then developed into a "trilogy" of five books, a television series, several stage plays, comics, a computer game, and a feature film.

He died suddenly on 11 May 2001, of a heart attack, during the rest period of his regular gym workout. On an online discussion board, one fan suggested that:

“Douglas Adams will be missed by his fans worldwide. So that all his fans everywhere can pay tribute to this genius, I propose that two weeks after his passing (May 25, 2001) be marked as "Towel Day". All Douglas Adams fans are encouraged to carry a towel with them for the day.”

Towel Day has now become an annual event, as you can see from the official website.

So why a towel? Well it’s a reference to a running theme in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, about the usefulness of towels, such as the following quote:

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

Adams’ life interweaved with many other notable icons of his time. For example, he contributed to scripts for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and appears in two episodes in the fourth series. He also wrote the scripts for three episodes of Doctor Who.

He was friends with Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour and, on his 42nd birthday, made a guest appearance playing guitar at a Pink Floyd concert in London.

Adams was also an environmental activist who campaigned on behalf of a number of endangered species. This included the production of the non-fiction radio series Last Chance to See, and a book of the same name. He was also staunch supporter of science, and a close friend of Richard Dawkins.

His untimely death was a sad loss.

The Cache This cache has been set as a number of stages to sort out the froods from the strags. To prove that you really are hoopy, you must pass all stages and find the final location.

Part 1 – Sector ZZ 9 Plural Z Alpha

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

First of all, you don’t need to go to the listed coordinates. Unless, of course, you want to visit Earth before it’s demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. You might find another cache there, but that’s not necessary in order to complete this one. If you go to the listed coordinates, you have failed at the first step.

Part 2 - The Babel Fish

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

The poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

To find out where you really start your journey, locate a Babel Fish, stick it in your ear, and then use it to translate the following piece of Vogon poetry (warning: Vogon poetry is the third worst in the Universe). You should end up with the interstellar coordinates for the end of the universe. Sud trente quatre degres, vijftig twee, punkt null acht drei Este uno ciento treinta ocho grados, fyrtio ett, punto quattro otto nove

Part 3 - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering.

It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe.

This is, many would say, impossible.

Okay, so this isn’t really the end of the universe, and the restaurant is no Milliways, but unfortunately we’re on a budget and this is all we could afford. Use your imagination to envision the Universe exploding overhead.

However, this is an ideal location to perform some Bistromath, to calculate your next destination

Part 4 - Bistromath

Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that time was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that space was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.

1. Start off with the number 42.
2. How much do you think this establishment would charge for a veal schnitzel, in cents? Add this to the first number (in case you weren’t paying attention, that was 42).
3. Pick a number between 1 and 100. Add this to the total.
4. If the weather is nice, add 12. If it’s overcast, cold or rainy, add 3.
5. Pick another number between 1 and 100, and write it down on a piece of paper (a napkin is preferred, but any piece of paper will do at a pinch).
6. Draw a doodle under the number.
7. Fold the piece of paper up and forget about it.
8. Can you remember the total from 4 steps back? Good, multiply this by 9.
9. Add up all the digits in the result. If you get a number that has more than one digit, then add up the digits again. Keep adding like this until you’re left with a one digit number.
10. Subtract 8.
11. Multiply the phone number from the sign by this number.

You should now have an eight digit number, abcdefgh. You will need this for the next part.

Part 5 - The Improbability Generator

The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood - and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.

Your next destination is The Answer, which is located at one of the following four possible locations:

1. 5e.d(c-e)g 4(b-e).b(g-h)a
2. 5(c-h).(b-c)ah 4(g-h).(f+b)(e+g)(g+h)
3. 5e.ghb 3(c+d).(b+e)(c+h)e
4. 5(b-g).(b+h)a(b-c) 4g.(c+g)a(e-g)

So how do you know which is the correct location? Well your chance of picking the right one at random are 1 in 4, or 0.25. So all you need to do is to generate a finite improbability field for those chances and pick an option, and it is guaranteed to be the right one!

So brew yourself a nice hot cup of tea, fire up your Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain, and set the improbability level to 0.25

Part 6 - Life, the Universe, and Everything

"Alright," said Deep Thought. "The Answer to the Great Question ..."

"Yes ...!"

"Of Life, the Universe and Everything ..." said Deep Thought.

"Yes ...!"

"Is ..." said Deep Thought, and paused.

"Yes ...!"

"Is ..."

"Yes ...!!!...?"

"Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

You’ll know that you have chosen the correct location when you find The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Nearby, you’ll find a clue to your next destination, but unfortunately it is protected by an SEP field.

Part 7 - Someone Else’s Problem

"An SEP is something that we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That's what SEP means. Somebody Else's Problem. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."

Because you know about the SEP, then you should have no trouble defeating it, and finding the next waypoint. Be very careful to also note down the values A and B, as you’ll probably be very cross if you arrive at the vortex without them.

Part 8 - The Total Perspective Vortex

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her.

Make your way to the Total Perspective Vortex at the top. Your main enemy during this stage is gravity, which will try and keep you at the bottom. As you enter the Vortex, you’ll find a small structure that provides a little extra elevation, allowing you to look out into the universe (or at least a good portion of it) and see if you can spot the final location. If you listen very carefully, you may even hear the faint crackling of the vast energy that powers the Vortex.

Once you've gained some perspective, there's just one last task before you can find the cache. From the Vortex coordinates, project a waypoint at a distance of A metres, at a bearing of B degrees true (you did write down A and B didn't you?) Then make your way to that waypoint, and find the cache!

Part 9 - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Congratulations, you’ve completed the journey! Please feel free to take a towel and carry it with pride, to show the world that you’re a hoopy frood! Mix yourself up a Pan-galactic Gargle Blaster, and relax. As you’re obviously someone to be reckoned with, could you also please consider imparting some of your wisdom for future hitchhikers, by submitting an entry in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? The entry for Earth currently just says “Mostly Harmless”, so it really needs to be improved by some input from worthy correspondents such as yourself.

If you need to confirm your coordinates for the first part of this cache, then try the geochecker link below.