This will brighten your day, believe me.
May. 26th, 2010 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaOr 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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-26 06:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-26 06:58 pm (UTC)