Plus ca change…

…plus c’est la meme chose.
Scanning my bookshelves to find something to read in the bath, I picked out my 1988 edition of John Allen Paulos’s book, “Innumeracy”. (I will have some more to say about this in a later entry) What struck me was a paragraph on page 70 I opened by chance, which seemed to have a curious contemporary relevance:
“Disproving a claim that something exists is often quite difficult, and this difficulty is often mistaken for evidence that the claim is true. Pat Robertson, the former television evangelist and Presidential candidate, maintained recently that he couldn’t prove that there weren’t Soviet missile sites in Cuba and therefore there might be. He’s right, of course, but neither can I prove that Big Foot doesn’t own a small plot of land outside Havana.”