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

[kill-claudio.livejournal.com]

That is BRILLIANT. I particularly like how "something must be conceded to the laws of metre". Dear Alfred, you can have poetic license, but only within an acceptable margin of error. Love Charles. Luz, you have definitely brightened my day.

[luzula]

Yeah, it's like two completely different worldviews colliding. Glad it could improve your day, too!