This will brighten your day, believe me.

Or at least it has brightened mine. Anyway, Charles Babbage apparently wrote a letter to Tennyson about his poem "The Vision of Sin". It went like this:

In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads, "Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;"

I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:

"Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born."

I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.

*collapses into laughter*

And yes, this comes from that comic I linked to yesterday.