NightHawk

• A favourite cafe - Gaby's
• A favourite cake place - Valerie
• A favourite restaurant - Incanto
• A favourite pancake place - Kensington Creperie
• A favourite card shop - Medici
• A favourite art gallery - Courtauld Gallery
• A favourite museum - Victoria & Albert
• A favourite cinema - Curzon Soho
• A favourite street - Museum Street
• A favourite square - Golden Square
• A favourite park - St James's Park
• A favourite building - Palace of Westminster
• A favourite statue - Boadicea
• A favourite oddity - Little Ben
• A favourite church - St Mary's, Harrow

Posted by Roger Darlington at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Many thanks to my friend Dominic Ridley for drawing my attention to this amusing clip from Louis CK on the Conan O'Brian Show.

We should all moan less and be happier. How? Check out my advice here.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few weeks ago, I thoroughly enjoyed viewing the feel-good movie "Slumdog Millionaire" [see my review here] and my wife surprised me on Valentine's Day by giving me the soundtrack CD of the movie.

The final song is called "Jai Ho" and is played during an exuberant dance sequence at the end of the film and in fact on Sunday it won the Academy Award for Best Song. You can listen to a sound clip of the song here and see the text of the lyrics here.

But what does "Jai Ho" mean (I've seen various suggestions) and what is the song all about? Can a Hindi-speaking reader of NightHawk illuminate us?

Posted by Roger Darlington at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (74)

You probably won't have noticed it but the British Government has just launched a new web site to explain to UK citizens what it is doing to tackle the economic recession. It's called "Real Help Now".

The idea is said to borrow from the the wish of the Obama administration in the United States to show how the financial package just approved by Congress is actually been spent. That web site is called "Recovery.gov".

One can only welcome government efforts to be more transparent although, of course, a third of UK homes and a quarter of US homes don't have connection to the Internet.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Actually, you are living through one - the global financial crisis that has stunned bankers and traders around the world. Actually you are one - in evolutionary terms, your chances of being here are "a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions".

The concept and the quote come from Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his bestselling book "The Black Swan: The Impact Of The Highly Improbable". You can read my review of the book here.

As you will see, I found the book to be over-hyped and badly written. If you want better books on new ways of thinking, try "Freakonomics" [my review here] or "Blink" [my review here] or "Predictably Irrational" [my review here].

Posted by Roger Darlington at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last night was a great evening for the British at the 81st Academy Awards ceremony - for full list of nominations and winners, see here.

"Slumdog Millionaire" won no less than eight Oscars including Best Film and Best Director [see my review here] and, after six nominations, Kate Winslet, won the Best Actress accolade for "The Reader" [see my review here].

Other films that I've seen which won awards were "The Dark Knight" [see my review here] and "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" [see my review here].

Posted by Roger Darlington at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm guessing that you've never heard of the film "The Counterfeiters" - but this Austrian work the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year. I'm guessing that you've never heard of "Operation Bernhard" - but this secret German plan devised during the Second World War was the largest counterfeiting operation in history. And I'm sure that you've never met Adolf Burger, the Slovak Jew who wrote the book which inspired the account of "Operation Bernhard" in "The Counterfeiters".

I admit, until this afternoon, I had not seen the film, known of the operation, or met the author. You can read my review of the film and account of his talk here.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A reader of my web site has recently e-mailed me to ask whether I am a Buddhist. Apparently he thought from my writings that I might be. In fact, I am not. I am a humanist.

But what do Buddhists believe? They don't believe in God or an after life - which is fine by me. But they do believe in things like karma and rebirth - which I don't accept. For details on Buddhism, see here.

Is Buddhism a religion? Many people believe that it is, but It is argued that it is not here

Posted by Roger Darlington at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If this story is true (check out the photo), then Indian Babu Sassi is a new kind of hero. Certainly he has a top job.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Suriname is the smallest state in terms of area and population in South America. The country is the only Dutch-speaking region in the Western Hemisphere which is not a part of the Netherlands.

Since independence from the Netherlands in 1975, the former Dutch Guiana has endured coups and a civil war. Former military strongman Desi Bouterse dominated politics for much of the post-independence era, but the country is now under civilian rule. The country enjoys a relatively high standard of living but also faces serious political and economic challenges.

Suriname is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the Americas. Most of its less than half a million people are descended from African slaves and Indian and Indonesian indentured servants brought over by the Dutch to work as agricultural labourers. However, there is little assimilation between the different ethnic groups, who confine their contacts to the economic sphere. Similarly, most political parties are ethnically based which acts as a serious obstacle to consensus-building.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mauritius is a volcanic island of lagoons and palm-fringed beaches in the Indian Ocean which has a reputation for stability and racial harmony among its mixed population of one and a quarter million Asians, Europeans and Africans. Various cultures and traditions flourish in peace, although Mauritian Creoles, descendants of African slaves who make up a third of the population, live in poverty and complain of discrimination.

The island has maintained one of the developing world's most successful democracies and has enjoyed years of constitutional order. It has preserved its image as one of Africa's few social and economic success stories, being a sugar and clothing exporter and a centre for upmarket tourism, but Mauritian exports have been hit by strong competition from low-cost textile producers and the loss of sugar subsidies from Europe.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The last CD that I bought was "Rockferry" by the young Welsh singer Duffy - I especially love the track "Mercy". Her singing reminds me of the late, great Dusty Springfield.

So I'm delighted that, in this evening's Brit Awards, Duffy won three times: Best British Female, Best British Album and Best British Breakthrough Act. You can see the full results here and Duffy's reaction here.

I feel sorry for Coldplay though - "Viva la Vida" is a really good album.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 11:19 PM | Permalink

The Central African Republic (CAR) has been unstable since its independence from France in 1960 and is one of the least-developed countries in the world. It has endured several coups and a notorious period under a self-declared emperor, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who headed a brutal regime which ended in 1979.

Today General François Bozizé, president and former coup leader, faces instability from mercenaries who helped him to power and from rebels. A pan-African military force (Minurca) has been in place since 2003 to restore order, but violence has spilled over from Sudan and Chad

Decades of instability have undermined the economy. The population of 4.4 million is among the poorest in the world and even the government struggles to pay wages to public sector workers.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've only just seen the 2005 documentary film "Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room" [my review here].

There's special chill in seeing this work through the prism on the recent collapse in the global banking system. It makes you realise that, while the guys at the top of Enron may have been particularly creative/crooked, the financial framework that allowed them to get away with massive fraud for so long - a system of deregulation and self-denial - equally permitted the excessive exuberance that brought down the home loans market and then the financial institutions themselves all around the world.

Millions upon millions have lost jobs and homes and livelihoods because regulators and politicians were slaves to the free market. We need new transparent and accountable regulatory systems and they need to be kept in place throughout the inevitable economic cycle. We cannot afford to keep relearning history.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Bahamas is an archipelago of 700 islands and islets in the Caribbean. It only has a population of around 330,000 but it attracts millions of tourists each year to enjoy its mild climate, fine beaches and beautiful forests.

A former British colony and now a Commonwealth member, the country is a major centre for offshore finance and has one of the world's largest open-registry shipping fleets. It enjoys a high per capita income, but there are imbalances in the distribution of wealth, most of which is concentrated in the commercial and tourist centres.

As with other Caribbean countries, the Bahamas faces the challenge of tackling drugs trafficking and illegal immigration. It has taken steps to clean-up its offshore banking system.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As you know, this blog is called NightHawk so, if you're a regular visitor, I guess that you are a Nighthawker. But, thanks to my friend Nick Hobson, I find from this article that, in a very different context, "nighthawking" is a bad thing. It seems that:

"Nighthawking is defined as the search and removal of antiquities from the ground using metal detectors without the permission of landowners or where the practice is banned. The maximum penalty is three months in prison and a £1,000 fine."

Posted by Roger Darlington at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's time to have another week of postings in my long-running series called Forgotten World - a look at parts of the world that hardly feature in our media or thoughts. You can check the previous 160 entries here.

After World War II, Albania became a Stalinist state under Enver Hoxha, and remained staunchly isolationist until its transition to democracy after 1990. The 1992 elections ended 47 years of communist rule, but the latter half of the decade saw a quick turnover of presidents and prime ministers. Many Albanians left the country in search of work and the money they send home remains an important source of revenue.

During the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, nearly 500,000 ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo spilled over the border, adding to the population of just over 4 million and imposing a huge burden on Albania's already fragile economy. While there have been signs of economic progress with inflation under tighter control and some growth, the country remains one of the poorest in Europe.

It is less than 72 km (45 miles) from Italy, across the Strait of Otranto which links the Adriatic Sea to the Ionian Sea, and it is a potential candidate for membership in the European Union

Posted by Roger Darlington at 07:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In my home, I have approaching 2,000 books - probably not that unusual for someone who is both middle-class and middle-aged. But some visitors to our house - especially some rather cheeky young relatives - sometimes ask me: "Have you read them all?"

Of course, I haven't - not least because a proportion of them are reference works. But should I have read them all?

Currently I'm reading "The Black Swan: The Impact Of The Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

At one point, early in the book, Taleb refers to the library of the writer Umberto Eco which apparently amounts to some 30,000 titles. It seems that Eco has the same problem as me with visitors exclaiming "How many have you read?"

Now Taleb argues that "Read books are far less valuable than unread books" and he calls this collection of unread books "an antilibrary". I love my antilibrary because I love learning.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Then shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose..
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England .
We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing,
grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?
Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend.
If you have a bunch of odds and ends
and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English
should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?

We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
in which your house can burn up as it burns down,
in which you fill in a form by filling it out,
and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I hope that you're spending it with your loved one. My Valentine of the past 27 years - my wife Vee - bought me a card and a little present - the soundtrack CD to the film "Slumdog Millionaire" [see my review of the movie here]. This evening, I'll be taking Vee for dinner at her favourite local restaurant: "Incanto" at Harrow-on-the-Hill.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the last couple of weeks, I've done a number of postings mentioning that I was reading "The Nazi Holocaust: Its History And Meaning" by Ronnie Landau. I've now finished this excellent work and you can read my review here.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is the bicentenary of the birth of the English naturalist Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882). Darwin was the creator of the theory of evolution which has now been proved beyond any reasonable doubt and which has transformed our vision and understanding of the natural world and our place in it.

You can read all about the man here.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Based on a recent Gallup poll of 143 countries (China is the most notable exception), there's some fascinating data and commentary from an American perspective here.

A few key points are:

• "A population's religiosity level is strongly related to its average standard of living. Gallup's World Poll, for example, indicates that 8 of the 11 countries in which almost all residents (at least 98%) say religion is important in their daily lives are poorer nations in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the 10 least religious countries studied include several with the world's highest living standards, including Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Hong Kong, and Japan."

• "Social scientists have noted that one thing that makes Americans distinctive is our high level of religiosity relative to other rich-world populations. Among 27 countries commonly seen as part of the developed world, the median proportion of those who say religion is important in their daily lives is just 38%. From this perspective, the fact two-thirds of Americans respond this way makes us look extremely devout."

• "... there is wide regional variation in religiosity across the 50 American states ... Lining up these percentages with those on our worldwide list allows us to match residents of the most religious states to the global populations with which they are similar in terms of religiosity ... Alabamians, for example, are about as likely as Iranians to say religion is an important part or their lives. Georgians in the United States are about as religious as Georgians in the Caucasus region."

Posted by Roger Darlington at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A month ago, I did a posting about media reports that a wind turbine in Lincolnshire operated by Ecotricity had broken as a result of being hit by a UFO. At the time, Dale Vince, Ecotricity's managing director, told the BBC that the UFO theory was "the best ... that we have currently got". I ridiculed this assertion.

A report today confirms that the turbine was not damaged by an alien spacecraft but simply came apart because of a broken bolt - a bolt from the blue, you might say.

At the time, various experts were convinced that this was evidence of a UFO. How could they get it so wrong? I explain here "Why people believe weird things". And how could I - someone who knows nothing about wind turbines or space travel - be right? Quite simply, I followed my own advice on "How to think critically".

Posted by Roger Darlington at 08:04 PM | Permalink

I attended a meeting at the House of Commons today and found the entrance to the building besieged by the media. The meeting - convened by the UK Internet Governance Forum - was held in Portcullis House and the strong media presence was not for us but for the bankers about to appear before the Treasury Select Committee to explain how they led the British banking system into catastrophic collapse.

And what did they say? See here.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 05:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I did a posting recently about the difficulty of reading 1,000 novels.

I've now found the answer.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In this posting, I explained how Vee and me had received for Christmas DVDs of series six and seven of "The West Wing". Then, in this posting, I reported that we had watched the 22 episodes of series six in just 12 days. We've just finished watching the 22 episodes of series seven which took us 15 days.

The number of times we viewed the election campaign of the fictional Matt Santos and thought of the parallels with the campaign of the real life Barack Obama seemed to be endless and I've found this site which has the most comprehensive list that I've seen of the similarities between "The West Wing" and Obama's "improbable journey". Is this art imitating life or life imitating art?

Either way, I've now seen all 154 episodes of the seven series of "The West Wing" twice and, after 308 viewings, I guess that I must now confine myself to the real thing.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ten years ago today, my mother died. She was aged 78 - but she had a serious stroke a decade before and her deterioration over the next ten years was terribly sad to behold.

Today, I'm travelling up to Leicester to join my younger sister Silvia and my younger brother Ralph and together we will remember and celebrate her life and all that she did for the three of us.

Mum at her most beautiful and carefree,
in Naples in her twenties

You can read my eulogy to her at her funeral here.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I love travelling - the chance to experience different cultures and meet different nationalities and to see the world in a more informed and enlightened way. I've been very fortunate and so far managed to visit 52 countries all around the world. You can read about some of my travels here.

But I always have lots of other places in my mind for future visits. This weekend, my wife and I tentatively planned our travelling for the next three years:

Easter 2009 - return trip to Prague to see our 'second family'

Autumn 2009 - holiday in Iran in the year of the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution

Easter 2010 - return trip to China with our 'Chinese family' in Oxford

Autumn 2010 - holiday in Kiev, Ukraine

Sometime in 2011 - the BIG ONE: a trip to Australia and New Zealand to mark our 30 years together

Let's see how much of this actually happens ....

Posted by Roger Darlington at 04:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

As regular readers of NightHawk will know, I'm currently reading "The Nazi Holocaust: Its History And Meaning". The book mentions in passing the case of a Slovak Jew called Rudolf Vrba and I recently saw a television programme about this remarkable story.

Together with his friend Alfréd Wetzler, Vrba managed to escape from the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. They made their way back to Slovakia where they told their astonishing tale of the Nazi industrial extermination of the Jews in occupied Poland. At first, they were disbelieved but, even when their account was circulated, the response was not what they expected and wanted.

Read this incredible story here.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a blog posting last summer, I reported that the Phoenix cinema in north London first opened in 1910 as "The East Finchley Picturedrome", offering 'the world's finest picture plays', it has been open as a cinema ever since, and it claims to be the oldest purpose-built continuously serving cinema in the UK - it has never been a bingo hall, snooker hall or dark even during two World Wars.

Recently a reader of NighHawk has drawn attention to her local cinema and staked a claim to the title. The historic Curzon Community Cinema in Clevedon, North Somerset, in the west of England is claimed as the oldest purpose-built, continually operating cinema in the world. The original building opened in 1912 and films have been presented on this site ever since. The Curzon is now a community cinema, operated as a registered charity.

So - who is right? Or is there another claim?

Posted by Roger Darlington at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Five years after the peak of the violence in the Darfur region of western Sudan, some 2.7 million people remain scattered in camps and dependent on an international community that has no clear idea what to do with them, no sure way of protecting them, and no practical plan for a solution.

"We have created an open-ended, ongoing $3bn peacekeeping and humanitarian process that chiefly serves to maintain the miserable status quo, this stasis of misery. There is no end in sight. Under the status quo now prevailing, there is a certain level of violence that has become normal, large parts of the countryside remain depopulated, pro-government and rebel groups work as bandits, for and against each other, Unamid [the UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur] is ineffective, carjacking and robbery has become a regional industry, and millions are stuck in the camps. People say it can't go on indefinitely like this. But unless something radical changes, it will."

Posted by Roger Darlington at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I've mentioned in a couple of recent postings, I'm reading a book entitled "The Nazi Holocaust: Its History And Meaning". Of course, it is widely known - if not accepted by Holocaust denialists - that some six million Jews perished in the Shoah.

Without in any way wanting to diminish the uniqueness and the horror of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, the terrible truth is that the death toll in the Second World War was far far greater than six million, but this figure is not so much in the public consciousness, not least because historians have made - and continue to make - varying estimates.

The Wikipedia page concerning the casualties of the Second World War provides one country by country breakdown which totals an incredible 73 million.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 06:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've always thought that racism was not just morally repugnant but logically absurd since, if you go back a few generations in most people's families, you find yourself in a different race or ethnicity or nationality. Ultimately, of course, we can all trace our ancestry back to tribes in Africa.

In the case of the Darlingtons - my family on my father's side (my mother was Italian) - I am advised by a Darlington (no direct relative) in Australia that the name may well be linked directly to the Angeln inhabitants in the northern region of England.

My Australian Darlington friend had his DNA submitted to the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project mapping the distribution of the human race around the planet. This has indicated the origin of a common ancestor located in the region of northern Germany/southern Denmark approximately 5,000 years ago. All subsequent males that share this DNA haplogroup with modern English surnames are most likely to be related to this one person.

As to when later ancestors crossed the channel to England, this is unknown. It could have been with the Angeln 'invasion', or any one of the subsequent Danish, Scandinavian, Viking, Norman or later 'invasions'.

The information is tenuous as the application of surnames happened only later in the 13th-14th centuries. Of particular interest to me, however, is the fact that Edward the Confessor's own confessor was in fact a friar known as Jean de Derlington.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

My first name Roger was brought to England by the Normans - it comes from two Germanic words 'hrod' and 'gar' meaning respectively 'fame' and 'spear'.

My family name Darlington came originally from the English place name 'Deornothingtun' in the north-east of England.

Working backwards, 'tun' (our 'ton') is found in hundreds of English place names from Stockton to Brighton and means simply ‘settlement’. Indeed our word' 'town' comes, in fact, from 'tun'.

'Ing' is a difficult word, that here means ‘named for’.

Then we have 'Deornoth' which was a man’s name - giving us 'Deornothingtun' as 'the Settlement Named for Deornoth'.

And what do we know about Deornoth? Unfortunately, absolutely nothing. No records have made it down to us.

But the word 'Deornoth' does tell us something about the times that he lived in for, as with almost all early English names, 'Deornoth' is really two words combined. 'Deor' meant ‘beast’ - our word 'deer' comes from here. 'Noth', on the other hand, meant ‘boldness’. So 'Deornoth' was 'Beast-boldness'.

And when did 'Beast-boldness' live? Well, 'the Settlement Named for Beast Boldness' was first recorded in the eleventh century, but it may have been five hundred years old by then, so it could date back to the Angeln 'invasion' about 500 AD.

I'm very interested in naming practices around the world - which are really varied - which is why I wrote this essay.

Posted by Roger Darlington at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Readers of NightHawk in Britain don't need telling this but my many readers outside the UK might be interested to know that we are experiencing our heaviest snow in 18 years. The last time that we had so much of the white stuff was 7-9 February 1991 - that's before we had the Web and blogs!

Here in London, it started last night and this morning we measured five inches in our garden. The kids in our crescent are loving it - no school and lots of snowboarding. I only had one event scheduled in town today but it was cancelled because of the snow. It's just as well - most of London's buses and tube lines are out of action.

The spinney at the end of our garden

A view toward some of our neighbours

Posted by Roger Darlington at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I confess that I've never had a biology lesson in my life because, for most of my school years, my school did not have a biology teacher. But, of course, over the subsequent years I've read things around the subject. I've always been utterly unpersuaded by the notion of creationism - it makes no sense and there is no supporting evidence. Conversely, I've always found the idea of evolution totally convincing - it is an elegant explanation and it is supported by masses of evidence.

This evening, I watched a television programme that was the clearest and most illuminating that I've ever seen on the theory of evolution: ""Charles Darwin And The Tree of Life". It was written and presented by the brilliant David Attenborough. You can read more about the programme, see when it will be repeated, and find more information on evolution here.

Footnote (2/1/09): Today it is reported that, here in the UK, only one quarter of people believe that Darwin's theory of evolution is "definitely true" with another quarter holding that it is "probably true". Some 10% are young earth creationists while another 12% back intelligent design. The final quarter are unsure. This is why I wrote my essay on "Why people believe weird things".

Posted by Roger Darlington at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)