document_title: Limbic system

question_text: the limbic system is an important part of the brain because it regulates

text: Limbic system

text: Structure[edit]

text: The limbic system was originally defined by Paul D, MacLean as a series of cortical structures surrounding the limit between the cerebral hemispheres and the brainstem: the border, or limbus, of the brain. These structures were known together as the limbic lobe.[6] Further studies began to associate these areas with emotional and motivational processes and linked them to subcortical components that were grouped into the limbic system.[7] The existence of such a system as an isolated entity responsible for the neurological regulation of emotion has gone into disuse and currently it is considered as one of the many parts of the brain that regulate visceral, autonomic processes.[8]

text: Therefore, the definition of anatomical structures considered part of the limbic system is a controversial subject. The following structures are, or have been considered, part of the limbic system:[9][10]

text:
Cortical areas:

Limbic lobe
Orbitofrontal cortex, a region in the frontal lobe involved in the process of decision-making.
Piriform cortex, part of the olfactory system.
Entorhinal cortex, related with memory and associative components.
Hippocampus and associated structures, which play a central role in the consolidation of new memories.
Fornix, a white matter structure connecting the hippocampus with other brain structures, particularly the mammillary bodies and septal nuclei

Subcortical areas:

Septal nuclei, a set of structures that lie in front of the lamina terminalis, considered a pleasure zone.
Amygdala, located deep within the temporal lobes and related with a number of emotional processes.
Nucleus accumbens: involved in reward, pleasure, and addiction.

Diencephalic structures:

Hypothalamus: a center for the limbic system, connected with the frontal lobes, septal nuclei and the brain stem reticular formation via the medial forebrain bundle, with the hippocampus via the fornix, and with the thalamus via the mammillothalamic fasciculus. It regulates a great number of autonomic processes.
Mammillary bodies, part of the hypothalamus that receives signals from the hippocampus via the fornix and projects them to the thalamus.
Anterior nuclei of thalamus receive input from the mammillary bodies. Involved in memory processing.

text: Function[edit]

text: The structures of the limbic system are involved in motivation, emotion, learning, and memory. The limbic system is where the subcortical structures meet the cerebral cortex.[1] The limbic system operates by influencing the endocrine system and the autonomic nervous system. It is highly interconnected with the nucleus accumbens, which plays a role in sexual arousal and the "high" derived from certain recreational drugs. These responses are heavily modulated by dopaminergic projections from the limbic system. In 1954, Olds and Milner found that rats with metal electrodes implanted into their nucleus accumbens, as well as their septal nuclei, repeatedly pressed a lever activating this region, and did so in preference to eating and drinking, eventually dying of exhaustion.[11] The limbic system also includes the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia are a set of subcortical structures that direct intentional movements. The basal ganglia are located near the thalamus and hypothalamus. They receive input from the cerebral cortex, which sends outputs to the motor centers in the brain stem. A part of the basal ganglia called the striatum controls posture and movement. Recent studies indicate that, if there is an inadequate supply of dopamine, the striatum is affected, which can lead to visible behavioral symptoms of Parkinson's disease.[1]

text: The limbic system is also tightly connected to the prefrontal cortex. Some scientists contend that this connection is related to the pleasure obtained from solving problems. To cure severe emotional disorders, this connection was sometimes surgically severed, a procedure of psychosurgery, called a prefrontal lobotomy (this is actually a misnomer). Patients having undergone this procedure often became passive and lacked all motivation.

text: The limbic system is often classified as a “cerebral structure”. This structure is closely linked to olfaction, emotions, drives, autonomic regulation, memory, and pathologically to encephalopathy, epilepsy, psychotic symptoms, cognitive defects.[12] The functional relevance of the limbic system has proven to serve many different functions such as affects/emotions, memory, sensory processing, time perception, attention, consciousness, instincts, autonomic/vegetative control, and actions/motor behavior. Some of the disorders associated with the limbic system are epilepsy and schizophrenia.[13]

text: Hippocampus[edit]

text: Various processes of cognition involve the hippocampus.

text: Spatial memory[edit]

text: The first and most widely researched area concerns memory, spatial memory in particular. Spatial memory was found to have many sub-regions in the hippocampus, such as the dentate gyrus (DG) in the dorsal hippocampus, the left hippocampus, and the parahippocampal region. The dorsal hippocampus was found to be an important component for the generation of new neurons, called adult-born granules (GC), in adolescence and adulthood.[14] These new neurons contribute to pattern separation in spatial memory, increasing the firing in cell networks, and overall causing stronger memory formations.

text: While the dorsal hippocampus is involved in spatial memory formation, the left hippocampus is a participant in the recall of these spatial memories. Eichenbaum[15] and his team found, when studying the hippocampal lesions in rats, that the left hippocampus is “critical for effectively combining the ‘what, ‘when,’ and ‘where’ qualities of each experience to compose the retrieved memory.” This makes the left hippocampus a key component in the retrieval of spatial memory. However, Spreng[16] found that the left hippocampus is, in fact, a general concentrated region for binding together bits and pieces of memory composed not only by the hippocampus, but also by other areas of the brain to be recalled at a later time. Eichenbaum’s research in 2007 also demonstrates that the parahippocampal area of the hippocampus is another specialized region for the retrieval of memories just like the left hippocampus.

text: Learning[edit]

text: The hippocampus, over the decades, has also been found to have a huge impact in learning. Curlik and Shors[17] examined the effects of neurogenesis in the hippocampus and its effects on learning. This researcher and his team employed many different types of mental and physical training on their subjects, and found that the hippocampus is highly responsive to these latter tasks. Thus, they discovered an upsurge of new neurons and neural circuits in the hippocampus as a result of the training, causing an overall improvement in the learning of the task. This neurogenesis contributes to the creation of adult-born granules cells (GC), cells also described by Eichenbaum[15] in his own research on neurogenesis and its contributions to learning. The creation of these cells exhibited "enhanced excitability" in the dentate gyrus (DG) of the dorsal hippocampus, impacting the hippocampus and its contribution to the learning process.[15]

text: Hippocampus damage[edit]

text: Damage related to the hippocampal region of the brain has reported vast effects on overall cognitive functioning, particularly memory such as spatial memory. As previously mentioned, spatial memory is a cognitive function greatly intertwined with the hippocampus. While damage to the hippocampus may be a result of a brain injury or other injuries of that sort, researchers particularly investigated the effects that high emotional arousal and certain types of drugs had on the recall ability in this specific memory type. In particular, in a study performed by Parkard,[18] rats were given the task of correctly making their way through a maze. In the first condition, rats were stressed by shock or restraint which caused a high emotional arousal. When completing the maze task, these rats had an impaired effect on their hippocampal-dependent memory when compared to the control group. Then, in a second condition, a group of rats were injected with anxiogenic drugs. Like the former these results reported similar outcomes, in that hippocampal-memory was also impaired. Studies such as these reinforce the impact that the hippocampus has on memory processing, in particular the recall function of spatial memory. Furthermore, impairment to the hippocampus can occur from prolonged exposure to stress hormones such as Glucocorticoids (GCs), which target the hippocampus and cause disruption in explicit memory.[19]

text: In an attempt to curtail life-threatening epileptic seizures, 27-year-old Henry Gustav Molaison underwent bilateral removal of almost all of his hippocampus in 1953. Over the course of fifty years he participated in thousands of tests and research projects that provided specific information on exactly what he had lost. Semantic and episodic events faded within minutes, having never reached his long term memory, yet emotions, unconnected from the details of causation, were often retained. Dr. Suzanne Corkin, who worked with him for 46 years until his death, described the contribution of this tragic "experiment" in her 2013 book.[20]

text: Amygdala[edit]

text: Episodic-autobiographical memory (EAM) networks[edit]

text: Another integrative part of the limbic system, the amygdala is involved in many cognitive processes. Like the hippocampus, processes in the amygdala seem to impact memory; however, it is not spatial memory as in the hippocampus but episodic-autobiographical memory (EAM) networks. Markowitsch's[21] amygdala research shows it encodes, stores, and retrieves EAM memories. To delve deeper into these types of processes by the amygdala, Markowitsch[21] and his team provided extensive evidence through investigations that the "amygdala's main function is to charge cues so that mnemonic events of a specific emotional significance can be successfully searched within the appropriate neural nets and re-activated." These cues for emotional events created by the amygdala encompass the EAM networks previously mentioned.

text: Attentional and emotional processes[edit]

text: Besides memory, the amygdala also seems to be an important brain region involved in attentional and emotional processes. First, to define attention in cognitive terms, attention is the ability to home in on some stimuli while ignoring others. Thus, the amygdala seems to be an important structure in this ability. Foremost, however, this structure was historically thought to be linked to fear, allowing the individual to take action in response to that fear. However, as time has gone by, researchers such as Pessoa,[22] generalized this concept with help from evidence of EEG recordings, and concluded that the amygdala helps an organism to define a stimulus and therefore respond accordingly. However, when the amygdala was initially thought to be linked to fear, this gave way for research in the amygdala for emotional processes. Kheirbek[14] demonstrated research that the amygdala is involved in emotional processes, in particular the ventral hippocampus. He described the ventral hippocampus as having a role in neurogenesis and the creation of adult-born granule cells (GC). These cells not only were a crucial part of neurogenesis and the strengthening of spatial memory and learning in the hippocampus but also appear to be an essential component in the amygdala. A deficit of these cells, as Pessoa (2009) predicted in his studies, would result in low emotional functioning, leading to high retention rate of mental diseases, such as anxiety disorders.

text: Social processing[edit]

text: Social processing, specifically the evaluation of faces in social processing, is an area of cognition specific to the amygdala. In a study done by Todorov,[23] fMRI tasks were performed with participants to evaluate whether the amygdala was involved in the general evaluation of faces. After the study, Todorov concluded from his fMRI results that the amygdala did indeed play a key role in the general evaluation of faces. However, in a study performed by researchers Koscik[24] and his team, the trait of trustworthiness was particularly examined in the evaluation of faces. Koscik and his team demonstrated that the amygdala was involved in evaluating the trustworthiness of an individual. They investigated how brain damage to the amygdala played a role in trustworthiness, and found that individuals that suffered damage tended to confuse trust and betrayal, and thus placed trust in those having done them wrong. Furthermore, Rule,[25] along with his colleagues, expanded on the idea of the amygdala in its critique of trustworthiness in others by performing a study in 2009 in which he examined the amygdala's role in evaluating general first impressions and relating them to real-world outcomes. Their study involved first impressions of CEOs. Rule demonstrated that while the amygdala did play a role in the evaluation of trustworthiness, as observed by Koscik in his own research two years later in 2011, the amygdala also played a generalized role in the overall evaluation of first impression of faces. This latter conclusion, along with Todorov's study on the amygdala’s role in general evaluations of faces and Koscik’s research on trustworthiness and the amygdala, further solidified evidence that the amygdala plays a role in overall social processing.

text: Evolution[edit]

text: Paul D. MacLean, as part of his triune brain theory, hypothesized that the limbic system is older than other parts of the forebrain, and that it developed to manage circuitry attributed to the fight or flight first identified by Hans Selye [26] in his report of the General Adaptation Syndrome in 1936. It may be considered a part of survival adaptation, leading to what describes evolution adaptation throughout the history of species differentiation in reptiles as well as mammals (including humans). MacLean postulated that the human brain has evolved three components, that evolved successively, with more recent components developing at the top/front. These components are, respectively:

text:
The archipallium or primitive ("reptilian") brain, comprising the structures of the brain stem – medulla, pons, cerebellum, mesencephalon, the oldest basal nuclei – the globus pallidus and the olfactory bulbs.
The paleopallium or intermediate ("old mammalian") brain, comprising the structures of the limbic system.
The neopallium, also known as the superior or rational ("new mammalian") brain, comprises almost the whole of the hemispheres (made up of a more recent type of cortex, called neocortex) and some subcortical neuronal groups. It corresponds to the brain of the superior mammals, thus including the primates and, as a consequence, the human species. Similar development of the neocortex in mammalian species unrelated to humans and primates has also occurred, for example in cetaceans and elephants; thus the designation of "superior mammals" is not an evolutionary one, as it has occurred independently in different species. The evolution of higher degrees of intelligence is an example of convergent evolution, and is also seen in non-mammals such as birds.

tag: ol

text: According to Maclean, each of the components, although connected with the others, retained "their peculiar types of intelligence, subjectivity, sense of time and space, memory, mobility and other less specific functions".

text: However, while the categorization into structures is reasonable, the recent studies of the limbic system of tetrapods, both living and extinct, have challenged several aspects of this hypothesis, notably the accuracy of the terms "reptilian" and "old mammalian". The common ancestors of reptiles and mammals had a well-developed limbic system in which the basic subdivisions and connections of the amygdalar nuclei were established.[27] Further, birds, which evolved from the dinosaurs, which in turn evolved separately but around the same time as the mammals, have a well-developed limbic system. While the anatomic structures of the limbic system are different in birds and mammals, there are functional equivalents.

text: Clinical significance[edit]

text: Damage to the structures of limbic system results in conditions like Alzheimer's disease, anterograde amnesia, retrograde amnesia, and Klüver-Bucy syndrome.[citation needed]

text: Society and culture[edit]

text: Etymology and history[edit]

text: The term limbic comes from the Latin limbus, for "border" or "edge", or, particularly in medical terminology, a border of an anatomical component. Paul Broca coined the term based on its physical location in the brain, sandwiched between two functionally different components.

text: The limbic system is a term that was introduced in 1949 by the American physician and neuroscientist, Paul D. MacLean.[28][29] The French physician Paul Broca first called this part of the brain le grand lobe limbique in 1878.[6] He examined the differentiation between deeply recessed cortical tissue and underlying, subcortical nuclei.[30] However, most of its putative role in emotion was developed only in 1937 when the American physician James Papez described his anatomical model of emotion, the Papez circuit.[31]

text: The first evidence that the limbic system was responsible for the cortical representation of emotions was discovered in 1939, by Heinrich Kluver and Paul Bucy. Kluver and Bucy, after much research, demonstrated that the bilateral removal of the temporal lobes in monkeys created an extreme behavioral syndrome. After performing a temporal lobectomy, the monkeys showed a decrease in aggression. The animals revealed a reduced threshold to visual stimuli, and were thus unable to recognize objects that were once familiar.[32] MacLean expanded these ideas to include additional structures in a more dispersed "limbic system", more on the lines of the system described above.[29] MacLean developed the intriguing theory of the "triune brain" to explain its evolution and to try to reconcile rational human behavior with its more primal and violent side. He became interested in the brain's control of emotion and behavior. After initial studies of brain activity in epileptic patients, he turned to cats, monkeys, and other models, using electrodes to stimulate different parts of the brain in conscious animals recording their responses.[33] In the 1950s, he began to trace individual behaviors like aggression and sexual arousal to their physiological sources. He analyzed the brain's center of emotions, the limbic system, and described an area that includes structures called the hippocampus and amygdala. Developing observations made by Papez, he determined that the limbic system had evolved in early mammals to control fight-or-flight responses and react to both emotionally pleasurable and painful sensations. The concept is now broadly accepted in neuroscience.[34] Additionally, MacLean said that the idea of the limbic system leads to a recognition that its presence "represents the history of the evolution of mammals and their distinctive family way of life." In the 1960s, Dr. MacLean enlarged his theory to address the human brain's overall structure and divided its evolution into three parts, an idea that he termed the triune brain. In addition to identifying the limbic system, he pointed to a more primitive brain called the R-complex, related to reptiles, which controls basic functions like muscle movement and breathing. The third part, the neocortex, controls speech and reasoning and is the most recent evolutionary arrival.[35] The concept of the limbic system has since been further expanded and developed by Walle Nauta, Lennart Heimer and others.

text: Academic dispute[edit]

text: There is controversy over the use of the term limbic system, with scientists such as LeDoux arguing that the term be considered obsolete and abandoned.[36] Originally, the limbic system was believed to be the emotional center of the brain, with cognition being the business of the neocortex. However, cognition depends on acquisition and retention of memories, in which the hippocampus, a primary limbic structure, is involved: hippocampus damage causes severe cognitive (memory) deficits. More important, the "boundaries" of the limbic system have been repeatedly redefined because of advances in neuroscience. Therefore, while it is true that limbic structures are more closely related to emotion, the brain can be thought of as an integrated whole.


document_title: Universal Declaration of Human Rights

question_text: who created the un declaration of human rights

root

text: Universal Declaration of Human Rights

text: Structure and content[edit]

text: The underlying structure of the Universal Declaration was introduced in its second draft, which was prepared by René Cassin. Cassin worked from a first draft, which was prepared by John Peters Humphrey. The structure was influenced by the Code Napoléon, including a preamble and introductory general principles.[4] Cassin compared the Declaration to the portico of a Greek temple, with a foundation, steps, four columns, and a pediment.

tag: p

text:
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Universal Declaration of Human Rights

tag: table

text: The Declaration consists of a preamble and thirty articles:

text:
The preamble sets out the historical and social causes that led to the necessity of drafting the Declaration.
Articles 1—2 established the basic concepts of dignity, liberty, equality, and brotherhood.
Articles 3—11 established other individual rights, such as the right to life and the prohibition of slavery.
Articles 6—11 refer to the fundamental legality of human rights with specific remedies cited for their defence when violated.
Articles 12–17 established the rights of the individual towards the community (including such things as freedom of movement).
Articles 18–21 sanctioned the so-called "constitutional liberties", and with spiritual, public, and political freedoms, such as freedom of thought, opinion, religion and conscience, word, and peaceful association of the individual.
Articles 22–27 sanctioned an individual's economic, social and cultural rights, including healthcare. Article 25 states: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services." It also makes additional accommodations for security in case of physical debilitation or disability, and makes special mention of care given to those in motherhood or childhood.[5]
Articles 28—30 established the general ways of using these rights, the areas in which these rights of the individual can not be applied, and that they can not be overcome against the individual.

tag: ul

text: These articles are concerned with the duty of the individual to society and the prohibition of use of rights in contravention of the purposes of the United Nations Organisation.[6]

text: History[edit]

text: Background[edit]

text:
State of the Union (Four Freedoms) (6 January 1941)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 6 January 1941 State of the Union address introducing the theme of the Four Freedoms (starting at 32:02)

Problems playing this file? See media help.

text: During World War II, the Allies adopted the Four Freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want—as their basic war aims.[7][8] The United Nations Charter "reaffirmed faith in fundamental human rights, and dignity and worth of the human person" and committed all member states to promote "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion".[9]

text: When the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany became fully apparent after World War II, the consensus within the world community was that the United Nations Charter did not sufficiently define the rights to which it referred.[10][11] A universal declaration that specified the rights of individuals was necessary to give effect to the Charter's provisions on human rights.[12]

text: Creation and drafting[edit]

text: In June 1946, the UN Economic and Social Council established the Commission on Human Rights, comprising 18 members from various nationalities and political backgrounds. The Commission, a standing body of the United Nations, was constituted to undertake the work of preparing what was initially conceived as an International Bill of Rights.[13]

text: The Commission established a special Universal Declaration of Human Rights Drafting Committee, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, to write the articles of the Declaration. The Committee met in two sessions over the course of two years.

text: Canadian John Peters Humphrey, Director of the Division of Human Rights within the United Nations Secretariat, was called upon by the United Nations Secretary-General to work on the project and became the Declaration's principal drafter.[14] At the time, Humphrey was newly appointed as Director of the Division of Human Rights within the United Nations Secretariat.[15]

text: Other well-known members of the drafting committee included René Cassin of France, Charles Malik of Lebanon, and P. C. Chang of the Republic of China (Taiwan).[16] Humphrey provided the initial draft which became the working text of the Commission.

text: According to Allan Carlson, the Declaration's pro-family phrases were the result of the Christian Democratic movement's influence on Cassin and Malik.[17]

text: Once the Committee finished its work in May 1948, the draft was further discussed by the Commission on Human Rights, the Economic and Social Council, the Third Committee of the General Assembly before being put to vote in December 1948. During these discussions many amendments and propositions were made by UN Member States.[18]

text: British representatives were extremely frustrated that the proposal had moral but no legal obligation.[19] (It was not until 1976 that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights came into force, giving a legal status to most of the Declaration.)

text: Adoption[edit]

text: The Universal Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly as Resolution 217 on 10 December 1948. Of the then 58 members[20] of the United Nations, 48 voted in favor, none against, eight abstained[21][22] and Honduras and Yemen failed to vote or abstain.[23]

text: The meeting record[24] provides firsthand insight into the debate. South Africa's position can be seen as an attempt to protect its system of apartheid, which clearly violated several articles in the Declaration.[21] The Saudi Arabian delegation's abstention was prompted primarily by two of the Declaration's articles: Article 18, which states that everyone has the right "to change his religion or belief"; and Article 16, on equal marriage rights.[21] The six communist countries abstentions centred around the view that the Declaration did not go far enough in condemning fascism and Nazism.[25] Eleanor Roosevelt attributed the abstention of Soviet bloc countries to Article 13, which provided the right of citizens to leave their countries.[26]

text: The 48 countries which voted in favour of the Declaration are:[27]

text:
Afghanistan
 Argentina
 Australia
 Belgium
 Bolivia
 Brazil
 Burma
 Canada[a]
 Chile
 China
 Colombia
 Costa Rica
 Cuba
 Denmark
 Dominican Republic
 Ecuador
 Egypt
 El Salvador
 Ethiopia
 France
 Greece
 Guatemala
 Haiti
 Iceland
 India
 Iran
 Iraq
 Lebanon
 Liberia
 Luxembourg
 Mexico
 Netherlands
 New Zealand
 Nicaragua
 Norway
 Pakistan
 Panama
 Paraguay
 Peru
 Philippines
 Thailand
 Sweden
 Syria
 Turkey
 United Kingdom
 United States
 Uruguay
 Venezuela

text: 8 countries abstained:[27]

text:
Byelorussian SSR (Byelorussia)
 Czechoslovakia
 Poland
 Saudi Arabia
 Soviet Union
 Ukrainian SSR (Ukraine)
 Union of South Africa
 Yugoslavia

text: Other countries only gained sovereignty and joined the United Nations later,[29] which explains the relatively small number of states entitled to the historical vote, and in no way reflects opposition to the universal principles.

text: International Human Rights Day[edit]

text: The Declaration of Human Rights Day is commemorated every year on December 10, the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration, and is known as Human Rights Day or International Human Rights Day. The commemoration is observed by individuals, community and religious groups, human rights organizations, parliaments, governments, and the United Nations. Decadal commemorations are often accompanied by campaigns to promote awareness of the Declaration and human rights. 2008 marked the 60th anniversary of the Declaration, and was accompanied by year-long activities around the theme "Dignity and justice for all of us".[30]

text: Significance and legal effect[edit]

text: Significance[edit]

text: In 1948, the UN Resolution A/RES/217(III)[A] adopted the Declaration on a bilingual document in English and French, and official translations in Chinese, Russian and Spanish.[31] In 2009, the Guinness Book of Records described the Declaration as the world's "Most Translated Document" (370 different languages and dialects).[32][33] The Unicode Consortium stores 431[34] of the 503[35] official translations available at the OHCHR (as of June 2017[update]).

text: In its preamble, governments commit themselves and their people to progressive measures which secure the universal and effective recognition and observance of the human rights set out in the Declaration. Eleanor Roosevelt supported the adoption of the Declaration as a declaration rather than as a treaty because she believed that it would have the same kind of influence on global society as the United States Declaration of Independence had within the United States.[citation needed] In this, she proved to be correct. Even though it is not legally binding, the Declaration has been adopted in or has influenced most national constitutions since 1948. It has also served as the foundation for a growing number of national laws, international laws, and treaties, as well as for a growing number of regional, sub national, and national institutions protecting and promoting human rights.

text: For the first time in international law, the term “the rule of law” was used in the preamble of the Declaration. The third paragraph of the preamble of the Declaration reads as follows: "Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law."[36]

text: Legal effect[edit]

text: While not a treaty itself, the Declaration was explicitly adopted for the purpose of defining the meaning of the words "fundamental freedoms" and "human rights" appearing in the United Nations Charter, which is binding on all member states. For this reason, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a fundamental constitutive document of the United Nations. In addition, many international lawyers[37][38][39][40] believe that the Declaration forms part of customary international law[41] and is a powerful tool in applying diplomatic and moral pressure to governments that violate any of its articles. The 1968 United Nations International Conference on Human Rights advised that the Declaration "constitutes an obligation for the members of the international community" to all persons. The Declaration has served as the foundation for two binding UN human rights covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The principles of the Declaration are elaborated in international treaties such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and many more. The Declaration continues to be widely cited by governments, academics, advocates, and constitutional courts, and by individuals who appeal to its principles for the protection of their recognised human rights.

text: Reaction[edit]

text: Praise[edit]

text: The Universal Declaration has received praise from a number of notable people. The Lebanese philosopher and diplomat Charles Malik called it "an international document of the first order of importance",[42] while Eleanor Roosevelt—first chairwoman of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) that drafted the Declaration—stated that it "may well become the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere."[43] In a speech on 5 October 1995, Pope John Paul II called the Declaration "one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time" but the Vatican never adopted the Declaration.[44] In a statement on 10 December 2003 on behalf of the European Union, Marcello Spatafora said that the Declaration "placed human rights at the centre of the framework of principles and obligations shaping relations within the international community."[45]

text: Criticism[edit]

text: Islamic countries[edit]

text: Turkey— which was a secular state with an overwhelmingly Muslim population—signed the Declaration in 1948.[46] However, the same year, Saudi Arabia abstained from the ratification vote on the Declaration, claiming that it violated Sharia law.[47] Pakistan—which had signed the declaration—disagreed and critiqued the Saudi position.[48] Pakistani minister Muhammad Zafarullah Khan strongly argued in favor of including freedom of religion.[49] In 1982, the Iranian representative to the United Nations, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, said that the Declaration was "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition" which could not be implemented by Muslims without conflict with Sharia.[50] On 30 June 2000, members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (now the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) officially resolved to support the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam,[51] an alternative document that says people have "freedom and right to a dignified life in accordance with the Islamic Shari'ah", without any discrimination on grounds of "race, colour, language, sex, religious belief, political affiliation, social status or other considerations".

text: Some Muslim diplomats would go on later to help draft other UN human rights treaties. For example, Iraqi diplomat Bedia Afnan's insistence on wording that recognized gender equality resulted in Article 3 within the ICCPR and ICESCR. Pakistani diplomat Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah also spoke in favor of recognizing women's rights.[49]

text: A number of scholars in different fields have expressed concerns with the Declaration's alleged Western bias. These include Irene Oh, Abdulaziz Sachedina, Riffat Hassan, and Faisal Kutty. Hassan has argued:

text: What needs to be pointed out to those who uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be the highest, or sole, model, of a charter of equality and liberty for all human beings, is that given the Western origin and orientation of this Declaration, the "universality" of the assumptions on which it is based is – at the very least – problematic and subject to questioning. Furthermore, the alleged incompatibility between the concept of human rights and religion in general, or particular religions such as Islam, needs to be examined in an unbiased way.[52]

text: Irene Oh argues that one solution is to approach the issue from the perspective of comparative (descriptive) ethics.[53]

text: Kutty writes: "A strong argument can be made that the current formulation of international human rights constitutes a cultural structure in which western society finds itself easily at home ... It is important to acknowledge and appreciate that other societies may have equally valid alternative conceptions of human rights."[54]

text: Ironically, a number of Islamic countries that as of 2014[update] are among the most resistant to UN intervention in domestic affairs, played an invaluable role in the creation of the Declaration, with countries such as Syria and Egypt having been strong proponents of the universality of human rights and the right of countries to self-determination.[55]

text: "The Right to Refuse to Kill"[edit]

text: Groups such as Amnesty International[56] and War Resisters International[57] have advocated for "The Right to Refuse to Kill" to be added to the Universal Declaration. War Resisters International has stated that the right to conscientious objection to military service is primarily derived from—but not yet explicit in—Article 18 of the UDHR: the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.[57]

text: Steps have been taken within the United Nations to make this right more explicit, but—to date (2017)—[update]those steps have been limited to less significant United Nations documents. Sean MacBride—Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Nobel Peace Prize laureate—has said: "To the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights one more might, with relevance, be added. It is 'The Right to Refuse to Kill'."[58]

text: American Anthropological Association[edit]

text: The American Anthropological Association criticized the UDHR while it was in its drafting process. The AAA warned that the document would be defining universal rights from a Western paradigm which would be unfair to countries outside of that scope. They further argued that the West's history of colonialism and evangelism made them a problematic moral representative for the rest of the world. They proposed three notes for consideration with underlying themes of cultural relativism: "1. The individual realizes his personality through his culture, hence respect for individual differences entails a respect for cultural differences", "2. Respect for differences between cultures is validated by the scientific fact that no technique of qualitatively evaluating cultures has been discovered", and "3. Standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive so that any attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the beliefs or moral codes of one culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any Declaration of Human Rights to mankind as a whole."[59]

text: Bangkok Declaration[edit]

text: During the lead up to the World Conference on Human Rights held in 1993, ministers from Asian states adopted the Bangkok Declaration, reaffirming their governments' commitment to the principles of the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They stated their view of the interdependence and indivisibility of human rights and stressed the need for universality, objectivity, and non-selectivity of human rights. However, at the same time, they emphasized the principles of sovereignty and non-interference, calling for greater emphasis on economic, social, and cultural rights—in particular, the right to economic development over civil and political rights. The Bangkok Declaration is considered to be a landmark expression of the Asian values perspective, which offers an extended critique of human rights universalism.[60]

text: Organizations promoting the UDHR[edit]

text: This section may contain an excessive amount of intricate detail that may interest only a particular audience. Please help by spinning off or relocating any relevant information, and removing excessive detail that may be against Wikipedia's inclusion policy. (November 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

text: International Federation for Human Rights[edit]

text: The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) is nonpartisan, nonsectarian, and independent of any government, and its core mandate is to promote respect for all the rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.[61][62]

text: Amnesty International[edit]

text: In 1988, director Stephen R. Johnson and 41 international animators, musicians, and producers created a 20-minute video for Amnesty International to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration. The video was to bring to life the Declaration's 30 articles.[63]

text: Amnesty International celebrated Human Rights Day and the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration all over the world by organizing the "Fire Up!" event.[64]

text: Unitarian Universalist Service Committee[edit]

text: The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) is a non-profit, nonsectarian organization whose work around the world is guided by the values of Unitarian Universalism and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It works to provide disaster relief and promote human rights and social justice around the world.

text: Quaker United Nations Office and American Friends Service Committee[edit]

text: The Quaker United Nations Office and the American Friends Service Committee work on many human rights issues, including improving education on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They have developed a Curriculum to help introduce High School students to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[65][66]

text: American Library Association[edit]

text: In 1997, the council of the American Library Association (ALA) endorsed Article 19 from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[67] Along with Article 19, Article 18 and 20 are also fundamentally tied to the ALA Universal Right to Free Expression and the Library Bill of Rights.[68] Censorship, the invasion of privacy, and interference of opinions are human rights violations according to the ALA.

text: In response to violations of human rights, the ALA asserts the following principles:

text:
“
The American Library Association opposes any use of governmental prerogative that leads to intimidation of individuals that prevents them from exercising their rights to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas. We urge libraries and librarians everywhere to resist such abuse of governmental power, and to support those against whom such governmental power has been employed.
The American Library Association condemns any governmental effort to involve libraries and librarians in restrictions on the right of any individual to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas. Such restrictions, whether enforced by statutes or regulations, contractual stipulations, or voluntary agreements, pervert the function of the library and violate the professional responsibilities of librarians.
The American Library Association rejects censorship in any form. Any action that denies the inalienable human rights of individuals only damages the will to resist oppression, strengthens the hand of the oppressor, and undermines the cause of justice.
The American Library Association will not abrogate these principles. We believe that censorship corrupts the cause of justice, and contributes to the demise of freedom.

”

text: Youth for Human Rights International[edit]

text: Youth for Human Rights International (YHRI) is a non-profit organization founded in 2001 by Mary Shuttleworth, an educator born and raised in apartheid South Africa, where she witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of discrimination and the lack of basic human rights. The purpose of YHRI is to teach youth about human rights, specifically the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and inspire them to become advocates for tolerance and peace. YHRI has now grown into a global movement, including hundreds of groups, clubs and chapters around the world.[70]


document_title: The Prince & Me

question_text: who plays paige in the prince and me

question_tokens: who plays paige in the prince and me

text: The Prince & Me

text: Plot[edit]

text: Paige Morgan (Julia Stiles) is a pre-medical student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Across the Atlantic, Denmark's Crown Prince Edvard (Luke Mably), prefers to live the life of a playboy, and when with his family often ignores or marginalizes his royal responsibilities.

text: Inspired by a television commercial showing Wisconsin co-eds flashing their breasts, Edvard meets with his parents, King Haraald (James Fox), and Queen Rosalind (Miranda Richardson), and announces his intention to attend college in America—specifically, Wisconsin. The Queen then dispatches Edvard's majordomo, Søren (Ben Miller), to chaperone the trip. Arriving at the university, Edvard orders Søren to keep his identity a secret and to call him 'Eddie'.

text: Later at a bar Eddie sees Paige serving and asks her to take off her shirt, as on TV. Paige angrily drenches Eddie with the drink hose and bouncers escort Eddie from the bar. Though he has apologized, Paige is annoyed when Eddie and she are assigned as lab partners for an organic chemistry class. Since the class is important for Paige's medical school ambitions, she warns Eddie to not get in her way and reprimands him after he sleeps in through one of their lab experiments. Running out of money, Eddie gets a job in the deli section of the bar. Paige reluctantly helps him during his first day, and the two start to mend fences. Although she does well in science, Paige struggles in an English literature class. Eddie uses his earlier education to help Paige gain a better understanding of William Shakespeare, and Paige instructs Edvard in common household chores like laundry.

text: Since Eddie is away from his family and unfamiliar with American holidays, Paige invites him to her parents’ dairy farm for Thanksgiving. Paige's father explains how he struggles to keep the small farm afloat, and Eddie uses his mechanical skills to fine-tune a riding mower for a race, which he wins. A rival racer proves a sore loser and punches Eddie. After the fight that follows, Paige treats his grazes and the two kiss for the first time.

text: Back at school, Eddie and Paige sneak off to the library stacks to pursue a romantic encounter. While there, members of the Danish tabloid press ambush the couple. Once away from the mayhem, Paige learns his real identity and walks away from him through the rain. Just then Eddie is notified by his mother that his father is very ill and she asks him to return. While Paige is questioned at a viva voce panel about Shakespeare, she realizes that she loves Edvard and runs to find him, only to discover that he has already left for Denmark. She follows him there and while being driven round Copenhagen is delayed by a royal parade. Paige leaves her taxi and is recognized from the papers by the crowd, who call Edvard’s attention to her. He mounts her behind him on his horse, hurriedly opens a parliamentary session and takes her to the castle.

text: The queen objects to Edvard's choice, but the king tells him that if he loves Paige, he should marry her. Edvard proposes and Paige accepts. After witnessing him reconcile workers and employers in a parliamentary committee, the queen realizes that Paige has helped him grow up at last and will make a good queen. However, during a palace ball Paige remembers that she is betraying her ambition to become a doctor working in Third World countries, breaks her engagement and returns home.

text: King Haraald abdicates and the newly crowned Edvard realizes that he too has responsibilities to shoulder. However, he arrives after Paige’s graduation and tells her that she is his choice and he is willing to wait for however long it takes to achieve her dreams. The film ends with no resolution.

text: Cast[edit]

text:
Julia Stiles as Paige Morgan
Luke Mably as Edvard, Crown Prince of Denmark/Edvard III, King of Denmark ("Eddie Williams")
Ben Miller as Søren
Miranda Richardson as Rosalind, Queen consort of Denmark
James Fox as Haraald, King of Denmark
Alberta Watson as Amy Morgan
John Bourgeois as Ben Morgan
Zachary Knighton as John Morgan
Stephen O'Reilly as Mike Morgan
Elisabeth Waterston as Beth Curtis
Eliza Bennett as Princess Arabella
Devin Ratray as Scotty
Clare Preuss as Stacey
Yaani King as Amanda
Eddie Irvine as Himself
Angelo Tsarouchas as Stu
Jacques Tourangeau as Professor Amiel
Joanne Baron as Margueritte - Royal Designer
Stephen Singer as Professor Begler
Sarah Manninen as Krista
Tony Munch as Keith Kopetsky
John Nelles as Race Announcer
Claus Bue as Lutheran Archbishop

text: Soundtrack[edit]

text: The film's soundtrack was released on March 30, 2004, in the United States by Hollywood Records.[2]

text: Track listing[edit]

text:
"Everybody Wants You" - Josh Kelley
"Just a Ride" - Jem
"Fire Escape" - Fastball
"Man of the World" - Marc Cohn
"Calling" - Leona Naess
"Good Intentions" - Jennifer Stills
"I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You" - Marc Cohn
"Symphony" - Jessica Riddle
"It Doesn’t Get Better Than This" - Katy Fitzgerald
"Freeway" - Scapegoat Wax
"Presidente" - Kinky
"Drift" - Forty Foot Echo
"Party" - The D4
"Bloodsweet" - Scapegoat Wax
"Separate Worlds" - Jennie Muskett[3]

text: Reception[edit]

text: Critics gave the film mostly negative reviews and Rotten Tomatoes rated it 27% based on 116 reviews giving it an overall "rotten" rating. They describe the film as "bland, fluffy, and predictable bit of wish fulfillment".[4] Metacritic reported the movie had an average score of 47 out of 100, based on 31 reviews.[5] The Christian Science Monitor's David Sterritt gave the film a good review, stating that the movie was "quite appealing, thanks to good-humored acting and to Martha Coolidge's quiet directing style." Meanwhile, Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times criticised the movie, calling it "a blandly diverting, chastely conceived and grammatically challenged fairy tale"[6] USA Today commented that The Prince & Me was overall "well-meaning, cute, sweet" but that the film could have been improved with "a bit more quirkiness and a little less formula."[7]


document_title: Technology in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

question_text: what is the name of the ship in hitchhiker's guide

question_tokens: what is the name of the ship in hitchhiker 's guide

text: Technology in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

text: Sirius Cybernetics Corporation[edit]

text: Most of the technology mentioned in the series are products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, a decidedly inept company which designs and manufactures a wide range of robots and labour-saving devices, such as lifts, automatic doors, ventilation systems, and the infamous Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser. In the novel So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the Guide summarises the problem with all the corporation's products:

text: It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of [their products] by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words—and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded—their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.

text: The only profitable division of the company, its Complaints division, takes up all of the major landmasses on the first three planets in the Sirius Tau system. The theme song for the Complaints division, "Share and Enjoy", apparently becomes the theme for the company as a whole. The main office-building and headquarters for the company was originally built to represent this motto, but due to bad architecture it sank halfway into the ground, leaving the upper halves of the motto's words to read (in the local language) "Go Stick Your Head in a Pig."

text: The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation invented a concept called Genuine People Personalities (GPP). GPP imbue their products with intelligence and emotion. Thus not only do doors open and close, but they thank their users for using them, or sigh with the satisfaction of a job well done. Other examples of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's record with sentient technology include an armada of neurotic elevators, hyperactive ships' computers and (perhaps most famously of all) Marvin the Paranoid Android. Marvin is a prototype for the GPP feature, and his depression and "terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side" stem from unresolved flaws in his programming.

text: The radio serial of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul mentions the Corporation, which also appears listed in the instructions to the Atari Jaguar game Alien vs Predator as a manufacturer of medical equipment.

text: By-products of Designer People[edit]

text: In the backstory Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation designed and produced synthetic personalities to order, but they turned out to be the "By-products of Designer People—amalgams of characteristics which simply could not co-exist in naturally occurring life forms". Some of these were dangerous as they did not alert people to their dangerousness. The starship Billion Year Bunker contained three of these in the hold, on their way to being blasted out of the universe—but one had escaped to Earth, "the man babbling gently about a shining city on a hill"; later revised editions clarify the reference by describing the figure as "a Reagan" (in other words, Ronald Reagan).

text: Doors[edit]

text: Doors manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation are programmed to love their simple lives; they love nothing more than to open and close for passing users, and thank them profusely for so emphatically validating their existence. Most characters in the series grow to loathe the doors, particularly Marvin (the first to explain the doors' "cheerful and sunny dispositions").

text: Happy Vertical People Transporter[edit]

text: The lifts in the Hitchhiker's Guide offices are called Happy Vertical People Transporters. As designed by the Corporation, they are meant to be sentient (enough to argue with) and have "defocused temporal perception". The latter concept is meant to enable the lifts to see far enough into the future to arrive at a floor before potential passengers realise they wanted a lift, thus saving them from having to wait around and make friends like they would have to do normally.

text: The one lift with a voice appears in Fit the Seventh of the radio series, voiced by David Tate. The lifts make cameo appearances of sorts in the radio series The Quintessential Phase and in the computer game Starship Titanic.

text: Matter transference beams[edit]

text: Matter-transference beams feature as the main means of teleportation encountered throughout the series—first used by a Dentrassi to transport Ford and Arthur onto a Vogon ship seconds before the Earth is destroyed. Ford explains that one probably loses some salt and protein when transported for the first time through a matter-transference beam. In the Hitchhiker's game, this condition is fatal without eating peanuts. Used again in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: as the team try to escape from Hotblack Desiato's stuntship, they find a room, approximately 6–8 feet tall, with what resembles a multiple shower unit with half-finished wiring tangled from the ceiling. Since there is no guidance programming and no automatic system, Marvin has to stay behind and operate the machine (he himself escapes by an artificially introduced Improbability Field). Arthur wakes up from the transport and states he has the worst headache imaginable. Arthur describes the experience as "Not as much fun as a good, solid kick in the head". As with most Corporation products, they were known to malfunction. A popular protest song about Matter Transference Beams sums it up by saying, "I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg; Ron stole Meggy's heart away while I got Sidney's leg."

text: Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser[edit]

text: The Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser is a product of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. The Guide has this to say on the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser:

text: When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to see what is likely to be well received.

text: However, no-one knows quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

text: In Fit the Ninth of the radio series, the machine fails to produce tea altogether, in fact refusing to try, and taps Eddie's logic circuits to compute why Arthur wants tea at all; "Because I happen to like it" doesn't compute. With the help of the spirit of Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth, Eddie eventually settles on the answer "because he's an ignorant monkey who doesn't know better", though this answer is not well received by Arthur.

text: In the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, on the other hand, Arthur Dent manages to freeze up a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser (along with the rest of the spaceship they are on) by asking it to make him tea, due to the various servings of the terrible-tasting sludge he'd received from the machine during the entire trip. The Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser defines tea as "The taste of dried-up leaves boiled in water". After many hours of considerable thought with the help of Eddie it manages to produce real tea, which Arthur describes as "the best tea he's ever drunk".

text: In the film adaptation, a machine similar to the drinks dispenser appears, serving brown sludge into a plastic cocktail glass. However, it is not mentioned by name, nor does it engage Arthur in conversation. There is also a similar machine nearby that detects and produces—according to Trillian—"what you're craving". While still incapable of making tea, this machine does not in fact paralyze the ship's systems—that feat is instead accomplished by the hitchhiking mice who are, in fact, the pan-dimensional beings who activated Deep Thought for the second time.

text: Ships[edit]

text: Billion Year Bunker[edit]

text: The Starship Billion Year Bunker appeared in Young Zaphod Plays it Safe. It was commissioned by the Galactic government to carry certain "by-products", such as aorist rods and biological weapons. It was meant to be almost indestructible and the cargo hold had been reinforced in many different ways. The crew was to steer the ship towards a black hole, where it would be sucked in and forever be destroyed. However, the captain took a detour to his home planet because he wanted some of the lobsters that were in abundance on the planet. The ship crashed into the water and split in two.

text: Blagulon Kappa policecraft[edit]

text: In the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this spacecraft is found on the surface of Magrathea, parked next to the Heart of Gold. It is described as "a bulbous, shark-like affair, slate-green in color, with stenciled writing in various degrees of size and unfriendliness informing whoever cared to read them as to where the ship was from, what section of the police it was assigned to, and where the power feeds should be connected." It is also totally dark and silent, as if dead.

text: The Blagulon Kappa policecraft arrives to attempt to arrest Zaphod. However, Marvin, being "bored and depressed", plugs himself into the computer and "talk[s] to it at great length; revealing [his] entire view of the universe to it", whereupon "It [commits] suicide", fortunately taking its two Blagulon Kappan pilots with it, since they required their shipboard computer to run their personal life-support systems.

text: Business End[edit]

text: In the novel And Another Thing..., this is the ship of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz.

text: Golgafrincham B-Ark[edit]

text: The Golgafrincham B-Ark was two miles long and capped by a bridge that offered a panoramic view of the stars. Its interior corridors were covered in brown Hessian wall-weave, and home to fifteen million unwanted "colonists" in cryonic suspension. The ship was built as part of an elaborate con to exile an unwitting third of Golgafrincham's population; convincing them their planet was doomed, the majority sent them off to another planet, which happened to be Earth. Upon completing its five-year journey, the ship crashed into a swamp, taking the vast majority of its sleeping passengers with it.

text: Heart of Gold[edit]

text: Heart of Gold is the first prototype ship to successfully use the revolutionary Infinite Improbability Drive. It is 150 metres long and has been represented in various shapes. The original radio series did not specify a shape. In the novel adapted from the first four episodes of the radio series, it was described as a sleek white running shoe, which the TV adaptation adopted as a basis for its depictions. In the 2005 movie, it is more spherical with a hole and red brake lights on the rear that form the shape of a heart, a shape derived from a teacup in the brownian motion producer that powers the Infinite Improbability Drive. It also features a mural around the hole which depicts the invention of the Drive. It was built as a secret government project on planet Damogran from where Zaphod Beeblebrox, the then-President of the Imperial Galactic Government, stole it at the launching ceremony.

text: The ship's cybernetics consist of a new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers with Genuine People Personalities (including Eddie the shipboard computer and Marvin).

text: In the novel Life, the Universe and Everything, it is revealed that the core of the Improbability Drive is actually the Golden Bail of Prosperity, one of five items that forms the Wikkit Gate. The drive is subsequently stolen by the robots of Krikkit, but it is later recovered by Zaphod Beeblebrox and reinstalled.

text: Starship Bistromath[edit]

text: Slartibartfast's ship in the novel Life, the Universe and Everything. The ship is said to work by abusing the laws of 'bistromathics', which is the specific mathematics of values of various factors in restaurants, such as the bill, number of people attending, number of people said to be attending, number of people who leave and the time they all arrive. In the novel Life, the Universe and Everything, bistromathics is explained that "Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in space [...], so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants."

text: The ship's appearance was described as having some of the features of a spaceship (guidance fins, rocket nozzles, escape hatches, etc.), but far more strongly resembling "a small upended Italian bistro."

text: Starship Titanic[edit]

text: A majestic and luxurious cruise-liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artifactovol. Its designers included an early form of Infinite Improbability Drive, theorising that it would then be Infinitely Improbable that anything bad would happen to it. Unfortunately, the nature of the Infinite Improbability Drive means that anything Infinitely Improbable was now bound to happen, and so the ship underwent a Total Existence Failure before it left the dock.

text: Vogon Constructor flagship[edit]

text: Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz's flagship used in the destruction of Earth. It is described in the novels as being yellow, "huge as [an] office block", and "not so much designed as congealed". Its interior is dark and squalid.

text: Drives[edit]

text: Bistromathic drive[edit]

text: The Bistromathic Drive is a starship propulsion system introduced in the novel Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book of the series.

text: The Bistromathic Drive is used in Slartibartfast's craft Bistromath and works by exploiting the irrational mathematics that apply to numbers on a waiter's bill pad and groups of people in restaurants. the novel Life, the Universe and Everything describes bistromathics as follows:

text: Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Albert Einstein's general relativity theory observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time 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.

text: Further explanation of the theory behind bistromathics:

text: The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has shown up.

text: The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of mathematics, including statistics and accountancy, and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field.

text: The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a sub-phenomenon in this field.)

text: The bridge instruments of the Starship Bistromath are ensconced in fake wine bottles.

text: The central computational area is a fake Italian restaurant table with seating for twelve encased in a glass cage. The table is decked with a faded red and white check tablecloth with mathematically positioned cigarette burns. A group of robot customers sit round the table, attended by robot waiters.

text: The mathematics play themselves out in the complex interplay between continuously circulating keys, menus, watches, cheque books, credit cards, bill pads and scribblings on paper napkins.

text: Slartibartfast explains that "On a waiter's bill pad, numbers dance. Reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible."

text: Should the ship's captain sit at the table, the mathematical functions speed up; the customers become more vociferous and wave at each other. Eventually, the equation balances, and the customers become polite and civil once more. The more heated the argument, the more complex the equation, and the farther the ship may travel.

text: Effectively, the ship takes advantage of the strange rules that only restaurants operate under by turning itself into a controlled, artificial restaurant. This allows a ship equipped with a bistromathic drive to accomplish feats quite outside the normal capabilities of spacecraft, such as travelling two thirds across the galactic disk in a matter of seconds. The drive is notably more controllable than the Infinite Improbability Drive. It is also said to "make the Heart of Gold seem like an electric pram."

text: Hyperspace[edit]

text: The Vogon ships use hyperspace travel to go faster than light. They also destroy Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Ford Prefect describes going into hyperspace as "rather unpleasantly like being drunk". When asked what's so unpleasant about being drunk, he replies, "You ask a glass of water."

text: Infinite Improbability Drive[edit]

text: The Infinite Improbability Drive is a faster-than-light drive. The most prominent usage of the drive is in the starship Heart of Gold. It is based on a particular perception of quantum theory: a subatomic particle is most likely to be in a particular place, such as near the nucleus of an atom, but there is also an infinitesimally small probability of it being found very far from its point of origin (for example close to a distant star). Thus, a body could travel from place to place without passing through the intervening space (or hyperspace, for that matter), if you had sufficient control of probability.[1] According to the Guide, the drive "passes through every conceivable point in every conceivable universe almost simultaneously;" in other words whoever uses it is "never sure where they'll end up or even what species they'll be when they get there" and "it's therefore important to dress accordingly". In the 2005 film, for instance, the first time the Improbability Drive is used, the entire ship ends up as a giant ball of yarn for a few seconds, and the main characters are rendered as animated yarn dolls.

text: The Guide's entry on the drive also states that it was invented "following research into finite improbability, which was often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess' undergarments leap one foot simultaneously to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy". It further explains that many respectable physicists wouldn't stand for that sort of thing, "partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties."

text: The Heart of Gold was the prototype ship for infinitely improbable travel. It is the Infinite Improbability Drive in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that saves Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect from very probable death by asphyxiation in deep space after being thrown out of the Vogon ship; the improbable odds against being rescued being 2276709 to one; the superscripted number incidentally being the telephone number of the Islington flat where Arthur went to a fancy dress party and first met—and totally blew it with—Trillian (in the film, the superscripted number is "2079460347" instead). Incidentally, Adams explained in the annotated volume of the original radio scripts that it was the eviction of Arthur and Ford out the spacelock of the Vogon ship that led to his own "invention" of the Infinite Improbability Drive. Adams realised that he had worked the story into a dead end, thinking in frustration that the only solutions would be "infinitely improbable." In a flash of insight and what Adams called "mental jiujitsu", the Infinite Improbability Drive was born.

text: In the third book, the Infinite Improbability Drive is discovered to be the Golden Bail of Prosperity in the Wikkit Gate. It is stolen by the white Krikkit robots; however, it was returned and the Heart of Gold returned to operational status.

text: Adams developed the notion of the improbability drive having greater causal (and narrative) effects in later books. For example, when Zaphod's great-grandfather discusses his great grandson's career-to-date, he explains that Zaphod cannot escape his destiny now the improbability field "controls you".

text: Karey Kirkpatrick, who with Adams adapted the novel for the screen in 2005, described the improbability drive as a "plot contrivance machine", allowing Adams to construct elaborate plotlines based on coincidences that would, in other narratives, be considered too improbable to be believed.[2]

text: Phargilor Kangaroo Relocation Drive[edit]

text: The Phargilor (or Penargilon) Kangaroo Relocation Drive appeared in Fit the Sixth of the radio series—it can also be heard on BBC Sound Effects No. 26: Sci-Fi Sound Effects. The drive allows, in an emergency, a ship to be ejected suddenly through the fabric of space time and come to rest far from the starting point, with the pilot rarely having time to plot where the ship will end up. Ford and Arthur use this drive to escape from the Haggunenons.

text: Photon Drive[edit]

text: The Photon Drive or Conventional Photon Drive is the standard drive that the Heart of Gold utilizes when the Infinite Improbability Drive is not in use. It is discussed briefly in the first book after an episode about the Infinite Improbability Drive, where it states that "The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive". Little is known about the Photon Drive, as it is only mentioned four times over the course of the entire series, once in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, twice in the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and once in the novel Mostly Harmless.

text: Weapons[edit]

text: Kill-o-Zap blaster pistol[edit]

text: The Kill-o-Zap is a weapon first appearing in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, wielded by the police from Blagulon Kappa when they come to Magrathea to arrest Zaphod. It is referenced throughout the series in the role of a standard and widespread brand of raygun.

text: In the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe it is described in more detail:

text: The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. 'Make it evil,' he'd been told. 'Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with.'

text: In the novel Life, the Universe and Everything, the group arms themselves with Kill-o-Zap guns against the Krikkiters. Arthur "fumbled to release the safety catch and engage the extreme danger catch as Ford had shown him. He was shaking so much that if he'd fired at anybody at that moment he probably would have burnt his signature on them."

text: In the 2005 movie adaptation, the gun has a sophisticated look. It is more of a white sphere that covers the hand and has a trigger on the inside. This version is wielded by Marvin.

text: Point of View Gun[edit]

text: The Point of View Gun is a device created by Douglas Adams for the movie version[3] of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; it does not appear in any of the previous versions of the story.[4]

text: According to the film, the gun was created by Deep Thought prior to its long pondering of the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. When used on someone, it will cause them to see things from the point of view of the firer (the Guide says that it "conveniently, does precisely as its name suggests"). According to the Guide's entry on it, though the gun was designed by Deep Thought, it was commissioned by the Intergalactic Consortium of Angry Housewives, who were tired of ending every argument with their husbands with the phrase: "You just don't get it, do you?"

text: This neatly mirrors the Total Perspective Vortex, an earlier plot device from the radio series and second novel, created by the character Trin Tragula to show his wife the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

text: Humma Kavula wants to obtain the gun in order to expand the influence of the religion he heads. He agrees to trade it with Zaphod Beeblebrox for the coordinates to Magrathea, but takes Zaphod's second head as collateral instead, as Zaphod doesn't have the gun at the time. When the gun is discovered inside Deep Thought, it is playfully used by Ford Prefect and Zaphod on one another, and eventually taken by Trillian who, wanting answers from Zaphod about how upset she was over Earth's destruction, uses it to interrogate him until he does so (In the movie adaptation, Zaphod authorised the destruction of Earth, thinking he was simply being asked for his autograph for a fan, and was completely unaware why Trillian was angry with him when she discovered this on Vogsphere). Following this, Zaphod threatens to fire the gun at Trillian, to which she scathingly replies that she is "already a woman" (implying that the gun only works on men, mainly because it was commissioned specifically by housewives, but also because women are sympathetic and thoughtful of others, and therefore can already see things from another's point of view).

text: Near the end of the film, Marvin the Paranoid Android uses the gun to save the crew of the Heart of Gold from hundreds of Vogons. After the Vogons see things from Marvin's chronically-depressed point of view, they all collapse, no longer finding a point to life.

text: There are seven holsters for Point of View Guns inside Deep Thought, but only one actual gun. The rest of the holsters are empty. At the end of the movie Arthur Dent possesses the gun, and Zaphod has not yet turned the gun over to Humma Kavula.

text: QUEST[edit]

text: Quite Unwieldy Experimental Sublimation Torpedo, an experimental anti-god missile used by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz to attack the god Thor in the novel And Another Thing.... The Vogons bought the device from Zaphod, who reveals that he installed a lawnmower engine on it in a scheme to defraud them.

text: Supernova bomb[edit]

text: Featured in Life, the Universe and Everything, the supernova bomb is "a very very small bomb" that resembles a cricket ball, and is the greatest weapon of mass destruction ever created in the history of the universe. Initially designed by the supercomputer Hactar for the Silastic Armourfiends of Striterax, who had demanded that it create an "Ultimate Weapon" but forgot that computers take instructions literally, the bomb creates a path through hyperspace that connects all major suns together into one gigantic supernova, effectively destroying the entire universe. Hactar deliberately designed the bomb with a flaw that rendered it useless; when the Silastic Armourfiends discovered this, they smashed the computer into dust and then destroyed themselves through constant warfare.

text: Hactar's particulate form wrapped itself around the idyllic planet Krikkit, isolating it from the rest of the universe, and gradually re-engineered its society until they could recreate the bomb and fulfill Hactar's program. The Krikkiters were defeated in the Krikkit Wars, racial memories of which would lead to the invention of the game cricket on Earth. Billions of years later, they built Hactar's flawed bomb and tried to deploy it, leading to their discovery of the computer's influence on their evolution. Trillian noted that it was impossible for the Krikkiters to be smart enough to build this weapon on their own, yet stupid enough not to grasp that it would destroy them if they used it. Hactar created a fully functional duplicate of the bomb and hid it in a travel bag belonging to Arthur Dent, who very nearly caused it to explode before stopping it by accident at the last second.

text: Personal items[edit]

text: Crisis Inducer[edit]

text: A watch-like device that can create an artificial crisis situation of selectable severity, in order to sharpen the wits of the user. Carried by Lintilla in Fit the Eleventh of the radio series.

text: Digital watches[edit]

text: Earth's population are described in the first novel as "so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." When Arthur Dent temporarily loses his left arm as a consequence of the Infinite Improbability Drive, he panics upon realising he can no longer operate his digital watch. Hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings built the supercomputer Deep Thought in part to comprehend why people spend so much of their lives wearing digital watches. In the 1970s, when the series was first composed, digital watches were the height of techno-fashion. For the 2005 movie The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, references to digital watches were replaced by mobile telephones.

text: Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses[edit]

text: Designed to help the wearer develop a relaxed attitude to danger. The lenses turn completely black at the first hint of trouble, thus preventing the wearer from seeing anything that might alarm him/her. Appeared in episode 3 of the TV series and in chapters 5 and 6 of the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

text: Thinking Cap[edit]

text: A special helmet that Zaphod Beeblebrox uses in the film adaptation. It is possibly an old-fashioned device, as stated by Ford Prefect that it was used when ship captains needed to concentrate. It is basically a helmet with a trigger device on top that resembles an automatic citrus juicer, which is why it is powered by common lemon juice. The effects of the thinking cap, in Zaphod's case, last about 10 minutes per lemon. On Magrathea, Arthur Dent negatively remarks to Ford's trust in Zaphod's ability at making guesses by angrily replying "Go with the hunch of a man whose brain is fuelled by LEMONS!?" After Ford starts the Thinking Cap, Zaphod (who was very groggy from having his second head removed by force) immediately was able to walk straight and think smarter than usual, and ten minutes later he could still walk, but was back to his normal, over-the-top self.

text: Towels[edit]

text: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy states that a towel is the most important item a hitchhiker can have. It also mentions that "to know where one's towel is" means to be in control of one's own life. It describes the towel as a multipurpose tool which can be converted into such things as a sail for a makeshift raft, a gas mask, a blindfold and a weapon for hand-to-hand combat. Resourceful hitchhikers have enhanced their towels in highly exotic ways, including embedding complex circuitry; Roosta, who Ford Prefect says "really knows where his towel is", fortified his towel with yellow stripes high in protein, green stripes with vitamin supplements, pink flowers of wheatgerm extract, and other areas containing barbecue sauce and anti-depressants. Ford Prefect, a traditionalist, has so far only reinforced his towel's seams, which enabled him to use it as a rope to stop himself from falling to his death. In the TV series, towels move of their own accord during hyperspatial jumps, and the amount they've moved allows an experienced hitchhiker to calculate the distance he has travelled. The towel was useful in the film version a handful of times, mainly by Ford. For example, while on the homeworld of the Vogons, he started to wave it around in front of a group of Vogons, who screamed and ran away. He also used it while attempting to cross the beach infested with shovel-like creatures which feed on thought. Another time, he used it to pull the pipe from the Vogon ship, attempting to increase the range of his ring.

text: The emphasis on towels is a reference to Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe by Ken Walsh, which inspired Adams' fictional guidebook and also stresses the importance of towels.[5]

text: When Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster was launched into space on the maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018, it carried a towel amongst other items.[6][7]

text: Other technology[edit]

text: Breathe-o-Smart[edit]

text: Breathe-o-Smart was the "sexier and smarter" in-building climate-control air-conditioning technology (in the novel Mostly Harmless) that sparked the Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots (of SrDt 3454).

text: One of the smartest features of the Breathe-o-Smart is that it cannot possibly go wrong. So. No worries on that score. Enjoy your breathing now, and have a nice day.

text: The horror erupted when three simultaneous events happened: Breathe-o-Smart Inc issued a statement "best results were achieved by using their systems in temperate climates", the breakdown of a Breathe-o-Smart system on a particularly hot and humid day putting hundreds of office staff into the street where a rampaging mob of long distance telephone operators who had got so twisted by the repetitiveness of their work that they had finally taken to the streets with megaphones—and rifles.

text: In days of riots, every single window was smashed, to cries of "Get off the line, asshole!" and a variety of animal noises.

text: So now, all (mechanical or electrical or quantum-mechanical or hydraulic or even wind, steam or piston-driven) devices are now legally required to carry this text:

text: The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

text: Sub-Etha[edit]

text: Sub-Etha is an interstellar faster-than-light telecommunications network used by hitchhikers to flag down passing spaceships. The primary hitcher's tool is known as the Electronic Thumb, a short black rod that can be used to contact passing ships and ask to be let on board. Ford also carries a Sens-O-Matic, a device for monitoring ships' Sub-Etha signals, and learns from it that the Vogons are on their way to demolish the Earth. Sub-Etha is used throughout the Milky Way for any kind of data transmission, such as listening to the news or updating the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself. The name is a reference to the ether, which was once believed to be a medium filling the universe.

text: Total Perspective Vortex[edit]

text: The Total Perspective Vortex is allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected.

text: When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it there's a tiny little speck, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."[8]

text: Located on Frogstar World B, the machine was originally invented by Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife. Because she was forever nagging him for having no sense of proportion, he decided to invent something that would show her what having a sense of proportion really meant. Unfortunately the shock of being placed in the Vortex destroyed her brain, but Trin Tragula's grief was tempered by the knowledge that he had been right and she had been wrong. In Adams' words, the Total Perspective Vortex illustrated that "In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."[9] Gargravarr, a disembodied mind, is the custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex.

text: The machine produces a virtual reality model of the entire universe by means of the axiom that any piece of matter is affected by all other matter. The Vortex reconstructs the universe through computer processing of a high-resolution scan ("extrapolated matter analysis") of a piece of fairy cake. In the words of the Hitchhiker's Guide,

text: ...since every piece of matter in the Universe is in someway affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation—every Galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.[10]

text: Only Zaphod Beeblebrox is reported to have survived the Vortex unscathed (and then to have eaten the small piece of fairy cake). When it showed him the "You Are Here" marker, Zaphod correctly interpreted the Vortex as simply telling him that he was the most important being in the universe. This is due to the fact that he entered the Vortex in an artificial universe, which had been specially created for his benefit (thus making him the most important being in it) by Zarniwoop. After emerging from the artificial universe's Total Perspective Vortex, Zaphod ate the piece of fairy cake, saying "If I told you how much I needed this, I wouldn't have time to eat it."

text: In the radio series The Quintessential Phase, the ideas behind the Total Perspective Vortex and the Guide Mark II are used to combine story lines from all of the radio episodes. This allows many of the plot lines from the divergent versions of the story to be wrapped up by the radio series' conclusion.

text: The Total Perspective Vortex was referenced as the name of an achievement for the 2016 video game No Man's Sky, which uses procedural generation to deterministically produce a virtual universe containing 18 quintillion (1.8 x 1019) planets.[11]

text: In real life, astronauts and cosmonauts experience a version of this phenomenon when in orbit and after their space experiences known as the Overview Effect.

text: Wikkit gate[edit]

text: The Wikkit Gate is an artifact featured in the novel Life, the Universe and Everything.

text: The Wikkit Gate is a universal symbol among the diverse cultures of the Galaxy of the basic ideals of civilisation. The Galactic Government therefore chose to model the key that could unlock the envelope of Slo-Time surrounding planet Krikkit after a Wikkit Gate. The gate was destroyed, then the various parts re-animated as different objects around the universe. It is composed of:

text:
A Steel Pillar of Strength and Power (Marvin's leg, but only after it had been replaced by a scrap metal merchant)
A Wooden Pillar of Nature and Spirituality (the reconstituted ashes of the cricket stump that was burnt in Melbourne, Australia to signify "the death of English cricket")
A Perspex (Plexiglas) Pillar of Science and Reason (Argabuthon Sceptre of Justice, renamed the Plastic Pillar in the U.S. version of the books)
A Golden Bail of Prosperity (The Heart of Gold's heart of gold—the Infinite Improbability Drive that powers the starship)
A Silver Bail of Peace (the Rory Award For The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word "Fuck" In A Serious Screenplay, changed to "Belgium" in the U.S. version)

text: According to the novel, the sport of cricket as played on Earth is a tasteless reminder of the Krikkit Wars, and the cricket wicket is a highly distorted racial memory of the Wikkit Gate. The novel describes the "bit where the little red ball hits the stumps" as being particularly offensive.

text: Artificial intelligences[edit]

text:
Colin, the security robot
Deep Thought
Eddie, the shipboard computer
Hactar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Marvin, the Paranoid Android

text: Publications[edit]

text:
Bartledanian story book: A very dull book, once read by Arthur Dent, in the novel Mostly Harmless. It chronicles the events of a Bartledanian whose unassuming apathy towards his life's happenstances is so complete that the lack of a working source of drinking water eventually leads to his death of dehydration. As a typical example of Bartledanian literature, the book reaches its conclusion not by bringing a satisfying end to the narrative, but simply by stopping at the 100,000th word.
Bathsheets in Space by Werdle Sneng, Fit the Eighth of the radio series.
Big Bang Theory - A Personal View, The by Eccentrica Gallumbits (the triple breasted whore of Eroticon Six) in the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Celestial Home Care Omnibus: A spacy version of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; though not as popular as the Guide.
Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations: This book deals with grammar in time-travel situations. Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up, and indeed recent editions of this book have been left blank past this point to save on printing costs, in the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Encyclopedia Galactica: A book of this name appeared in Isaac Asimov’s short story "Foundation", and it is mentioned in the Hitchhiker's Guide books as a rival to the Guide, in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is noted as being slightly more expensive than the Guide and lacking the advice "Don't Panic!" on the cover.
Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Sex But Have Been Forced To Find Out: Oolon Colluphid's latest book, in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Fifty More Things to do in Zero Gravity: Also 53 More Things to do in Zero Gravity, in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; not as best-selling as the Guide.
Heavily Modified Face Flannels by Frat Gad, Fit the Eighth of the radio series.
My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles: a collection of poetry composed by the Azgoth poet master Grunthos the Flatulent, in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (called Zen and the Art of Going to the Lavatory in the TV series).
Oolon Colluphid's God Trilogy: a trio of philosophical blockbusters in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, consisting of the books Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? They aren't as controversial as the Guide.
Siderial Daily Mentioner: The publication that sent a journalist to the trial where Prak was injected with too much truth serum, in the novel Life, the Universe and Everything.
Siderial Daily Mentioner's Book of Popular Galactic History: Tells us that the night sky over the planet Krikkit is the least interesting sight in the entire Universe, and life in the Galaxy must be space-sick, time sick, history sick or some such thing .. and stupid, in the novel Life, the Universe and Everything.
Songs of the Long Land: The book of poems that Lallafa had to travel back in time to write (again), in the novel Life, the Universe and Everything.
Sqornshellous Swamptalk: A mattressy lexicography, in the novel Life, the Universe and Everything.
Ultra-Complete Maximegalon Dictionary of Every Language Ever, The: ...is not worth the fleet of lorries it takes to cart its micro-stored edition around in, in the novel Life, the Universe and Everything.
Veet Voojagig's Story: The story of the lost biros, in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Well That About Wraps It Up For God: Oolon Colluphid's fourth book, in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
You and Your Planets: Gail Andrews' book whose astrological advice leads to the destruction of Earth by the Grebulons, in the novel Mostly Harmless.