“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 Tennyson

http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-origin-2/

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