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.

–Charles Babbage to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, re. his poem “The Vision of Sin” (via

me-taedet-huius-vitae

)

thanks chuck

(via pipistrellus)

I love how instead of changing the length of time between births of each person he changes the fraction of a person born per minute.

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