Welcome to October 10th, 2010, 10/10/10, unless you are in Europe, where they will write it 10/10/10 just to be different.  If you are a fan of binary counting, 101010 translated to decimal is...42.   If you are a fan of Douglas Adams, you know that the "answer to life, the universe, and everything" arrived at by the Deep Thought supercomputer was "42" ... after 7+ million years of analysis(1).

Obviously, an answer like '42' was a perfect example of understated British humor and Adams was a master of the craft.    But before his death in 2001 and since, people have attempted to subscribe any number of meanings because he refused to do so - was it an average of 42 lines per page in a paperback book, Rule 42 in "Alice in Wonderland" or even 42 laws in cricket?   Numerologists have gotten more elaborate, like numerologists do about everything.   There are even speculations about base 13 (2).




Is there anything to the date the rest of us are missing?  Wedding chapels are apparently packed but it is unlikely all those people are smarter than us.  More likely they are just lazy and 10/10/10 is a pretty easy anniversary date to remember.

Oh, and just so you know, Oceanic flight 815, the plane that went down at the beginning of the "Lost" television series, was scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles at 10:42 P.M. - so perhaps creator J.J. Abrams is an Adams fan also.   

If you are looking for more significance, my timestamp on this article is 10:10 on 10/10/10.  1010101010 in binary equals 682 which means ... nothing.   But some numerologist somewhere will say some Sumerian calendar translated into Greek means we have entered into the last stage of the universe or something goofy.

NOTES:

(1) Missing, of course, was exactly what 42 was the answer to, which required another, larger supercomputer, which was built and called Earth and subsequently destroyed to make way for a  hyperspatial express route.

(2) In "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" one question proposed that 42 might be answering "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"   Clearly not the case but base 13 fans were quick to note that 6₁₃ X 9₁₃ is 42₁₃, causing Adams to reply "I don't write jokes in base 13."