Levi-Strauss Machine

I've been thinking about the computer Deep Thought in Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.  For those of you not familiar, gist is: alien race builds a city-sized computer to answer "The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything."  After seven and a half million years, the computer delivers the answer: 42.  The "joke," here, is that though the answer is true (as Deep Thought was very careful to verify), its recipients realize that they never really understood the question.

I have also been thinking about the story "The Aleph" by Borges.  The gist: that there exists a point in a poet's basement by which one may observe the entire universe from every angle at once. It is a point in space that contains all other points.  The "joke," here, being that the poetic fruit such transcendant knowledge is awarded second place in the National Prize for Literature--an achievement that is only impressive on human scale.

I enjoy the play of near-symmetries found in setting these stories side by side.  Deep Thought's creators, though eventually presented with a perfect answer, are foiled by the inadequacy of their initial Question.  Borges' poet has a similar problem, though the sequence is reversed: presented with a perfect and unmediated source of knowledge about the universe, he is unable to formulate an interesting poetic or philosophical Question that this knowledge might address.  His poem is little more than a sequence of obsessively detailed descriptions.