This will brighten your day, believe me.

[luzula]

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.

Comments

[podfic-lover.livejournal.com]

Hee, that reminds me of the writer and scientist Simon Singh, who critized singer Katie Melua for inaccurate lyrics [in her song "Nine Million Bicycles"] referring to the size of the observable universe ("We are 12 billion light-years from the edge. That's a guess — no-one can ever say it's true"). Melua and Singh met, and Melua re-recorded a tongue-in-cheek version of the song that had been written by Singh:
"We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe; that's a good estimate with well-defined error bars/and with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you". (source wikipedia)

[luzula]

Ahaha. Yeah, that really is the modern-day equivalent of this anecdote.