25.2.06
rock on charles babbage,
the inventer of the computer, in a letter to alfred lord tennyson
"Sir: In your otherwise beautiful poem The Vision of Sin there is a verse which reads: ‘Every moment dies a man / Every moment one is born.’ It must be manifest that, if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill…I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read: ‘Every moment dies a man / Every moment one and one sixteenth is born.’ The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.
"I am, Sir, yours etc,
Charles Babbage."
"Sir: In your otherwise beautiful poem The Vision of Sin there is a verse which reads: ‘Every moment dies a man / Every moment one is born.’ It must be manifest that, if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill…I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read: ‘Every moment dies a man / Every moment one and one sixteenth is born.’ The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.
"I am, Sir, yours etc,
Charles Babbage."
# posted by weierstrass @ 05:03 
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Babbage once counted all the broken panes of glass of a factory, publishing in 1857 a "Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows": 14 of 464 were caused by "drunken men, women or boys
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