Carl Sagan

Somewhat before my time, but nice to see @loweman2 post this on Twitter:

Seems such a dearth of decent new music at the moment. So just bought Tom Bailey (Thompson Twins) and Kaiser Chiefs for next spring.

The modern world is ridiculous that you have to remember to take extra bottle tops with you to events for when the original ones are confiscated!

Great to see Dajaune Brown make it onto the pitch for 15 minutes on Tuesday. Well deserved and hopefully the first of a few appearances, though interesting to hear he might be heading out to Chesterfield on loan. What a shame he couldn't score, as that sort of thing can make all the difference to your confidence and belief. Maybe he'll get another chance in the FA Cup this weekend? Interesting to see Rooney say he'd have walked away from Derby if we'd downgraded from Category A. It's a tough balance for a first team manager tasked with promotion and also bringing through youngsters. Great to have academy players on the bench in case we end up in a comfortable position as we did in the week.

Six months left on his contract and not pulled up many trees this season. £500k will be on offer, I reckon. Maybe £1m if we can create an auction. Or the club can refuse and let Cash's contract run down till the summer.

Was all set for the first round of the Glastonbury bunfight tonight, but at the very last minute they postponed the sale for two weeks.

The Creator written and directed by Gareth Edwards (who rose rapidly to fame from Monsters to Godzilla to Rogue One). As you might expect from those movies, this is visually sumptuous, probably the best-looking film released this year. The more I think about the story, the worse it becomes. I've not read any reviews, but if I were pitching this to a studio it would be Blade Runner 2049 meets The Golden Child, with a bit of District 9 sprinkled over it. The basic story is humans vs AI. David Washington kind of reprises his role in TENET while Gemma Chan, once of Humans, gets to co-star. Tom Ince/10 More style over substance.

Very disappointed to see the vote of confidence. If we continue to perform as we are, I think the atmosphere will just get more toxic and he'll have to go but we'll have wasted more time in the process, and lost our only playing assets. My expectation is we're as likely to go down into League Two as up to the Championship if we keep Warne. But the most likely is League One through to the end of his contract, by which time there'll be a hard core of up to 15k at Pride Park.

Saw this on Twitter:

I thought the forum was quiet and everyone must be hiding in here from the management chatter. Then this! Amazing stuff, David. I'd like to think we'd all do it if needed, but I'd much rather not be needed. Huge kudos to you and the missus. Hope you get plenty of support. And, on the bright side, at least you missed Stevenage... 😂

Spotted this on Twitter: and this one too: If it continues I think I may well have to give up for a while. There is no joy in supporting Derby at the moment.

I can't believe he's still here. The only hope is that someone said Clowes never makes quick decisions, but always takes a weekend to think about them. Before the season, and looking at the woeful quality in the division, I was of the opinion anything less than automatic promotion would be seriously underperforming, given the resources at Warne's disposal. It's only October, but automatics are already gone and people are talking about us getting into the playoffs. The magnitude of Warne's failure is staggering. And there is no indication whatsoever that the football will improve - no green shoots where fans can see a way forward. Keeping him looks as if it will consign us to several years in Leagues One or Two, as it will simply be a case of managed decline. Given that, Clowes is likely asking himself "was it worth it?" Everyone thinks they will make good decisions and see the team they own rise up the leagues. But the adage about making a small fortune by buying a football club is a truism. Having entered the game, Clowes has put himself in a terrible position where whatever he does likely loses him and his family even more money. But by sticking with Warne, this loss looks all but certain. Twisting and rolling the dice again, at least gives him a chance.

I've seen it's Warnock for QPR. Not sure why so many people are keen for Eustace, but I suppose I've not followed his management career. What's the attraction?

Nah I'd have his replacement Steve McClaren back in a heartbeat.

I suspect the players long ago stopped playing for Warne. Why would they keep going when the man himself doesn't gave a clear tactical plan and just wants them to run more? If Warne stays in charge, the only things that will change are that the fans will stop coming, the team will drop further down the league, we'll lose the few decent players we have for a pittance, and we will become an established Division Three club. I can't bear it. He has to go.

Inspired by the "old people" topic on the forum, I'm interested in people's views on longevity. There's been a Radio 4 series about it these last couple of weeks, and some best-selling books are now out there. Silicon Valley is investing billions of dollars. Before the industrial revolution, life expectancy everywhere in the world was under 40 (not only because of infant mortality, but that contributed). Nowadays, with advances in science and the world becoming richer, nowhere has life expectancy under 40. In much of the developed world it is over 80. And the line on the graph where life expectancy is highest, continues to be straight, implying we are nowhere near reaching the limit. An idea is to reach life expectancy "escape velocity" where the graph rises by more than one year each year, so we always stay ahead of the curve. Currently it rises about three months every year, which isn't enough. But new techniques and new drugs are coming on stream all the time. But there is opposition. Some people (in the circles I move in, these people are called "deathists") seem to believe death brings meaning to life. To many nowadays, this itself seems an old-fashioned view. Imagine nobody died, and then the government brought in a law saying everybody had to die before or around their 100th birthday. Would death bring meaning to life then? One of the thinkers I've worked with a lot wrote a (very) short story to encourage people to think about curing death. it's called The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon No one wants to live forever in a frail, increasingly infirm body. The idea I'm talking about is to restore us, removing the hallmarks of aging. It may be possible to do this using drugs. Another option is to freeze your body (or just your brain) and plan to be revived in the future when immortality beckons. Another possibility is to be uploaded into a virtual reality future, which may be the end result of freezing your brain anyway. Think of it. Perhaps we'll be able to live long enough to see the Rams return to the Premier League!

Had Sky Sports on in the background with the live Saturday roundup, and was surprised to hear the reporter say "a billiant save by Kelle Roos". Apparently playing for Aberdeen, third in the Scottish Premiership (a long way back) and on the fringes of European football.

I love that there seem plenty of space geeks on here. Something that's going to come increasingly into the public consciousness over the next few years will be the work from Elon Musk's SpaceX to transport many tens of thousands of Humans to Mars to build the first sustainable settlement on another world. It sounds like fantasy, but the amazing thing is they're doing this in public view in Boca Chica, on the coast of Texas, and we can all watch. There are lots of livestreams and over the last couple of years a barren field has started to be transformed into a shipyard. But not for ordinary ships, for spaceships. The goal is ultimately to have completed ones roll off the production line once a week. And each will be able to take a hundred people at a time. The optimal time for going to Mars in terms of minimizing fuel (the launch window) comes round every 26 months and the plan is to have a fleet of Starships gather in Earth orbit that will then travel to Mars together, before returning to bring more settlers for the next launch window. Tickets will cost you about $250k but there'll be high baggage charges on top I should think. The secret to the low price comes from reusability and scale. SpaceX has pioneered rocket reusability and landed 65 or so "first stages" (the main rocket booster) after orbital insertion. No other company has done any - they're at least a decade ahead of the competition, but the competition should worry because their pace of innovation is extraordinary. The new rocket being built in Texas will be the first fully resusable craft where all of it flies again and again with minimal refurbishment, just the same as an airplane. The top section where the passengers and cargo will go is called Starship and the lower section to help boost it into orbit is called Super Heavy. In a dramatic innovation, instead of being built from an advanced carbon fiber skin these are both made from stainless steel. Making them a fraction of the normal rocket price. The Super Heavy booster is needed to escape Earth's gravity well. Once there it will return to Earth and launch half a dozen tankers to refuel Starship in orbit so it can fly much more quickly than normal to Mars (normally a spaceprobe just has enough fuel to reach escape velocity and then coasts all the way to Mars). Refuelling in orbit hasn't been attempted in the past, but is a technology we need to master to become a spacefaring species. Because Mars is smaller, with lower gravity (one-third of ours) the Starships can be what we call "single stage to orbit" when they take off from the red planet for the return journey. We'll build factories on Mars to manufacture fuel through a process called in situ resource utilization (ISRU), which is another technology we need to master to become spacefaring. And because they can carry so many passengers at a time, the price of the trip becomes a lot cheaper as it's divided between many more people. The Super Heavy booster will be quite similar to the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, just a lot bigger. So in principle SpaceX already knows how to design, build, fly and land that. They have started on the harder problem first, by developing Starship, the first ever fully resuable second stage. This week there's been a lot of work on the eighth prototype (called SN8 standing for serial number 8 ) which will probably be the first to attempt a high-altitude (15km up) test flight as the key trial of the novel landing system (the "belly flop"). Before now three different partial Starships have flown 150m on one engine only. It's been amazing to watch. Here's the Starship SN5 "hop test": While SN8 is the focus at the moment, also partly built are SN9 through to SN14, each better than the last, and also the very first Super Heavy booster (SH1) is being constructed. There's a good chance that the first Starships (without people) will go into orbit and return next year. There'll be hundreds of test flights before they start taking crew, but I'd expect the first uncrewed Starships to leave for Mars carrying cargo and experiments either late 2022 or early 2025. The reason SpaceX was founded was to safeguard Humanity's future by building a self-sustaining community on Mars, the aim to reach a population of a million by the end of this century. This is why the company is privately held and you can't buy shares, because shareholders might look at the amazing technology and say Mars colonization is a waste of money when we can do a lot of profitable stuff closer to home. However, NASA wants to return to the Moon by late 2024 (though after the US election this date will slip) and are contributing funds to create an adapted Starship to land on the Moon (the normal engines are too powerful for this because the rocket is so big, so SpaceX are going to add smaller thrusters higher up to do the job). However, Elon Musk has said it's easier to just go and land on the Moon than jump through all NASA's certification to say they'll allow someone to launch astronauts safely to the Moon. I hope we'll be able to keep this thread going over the next decade while we watch developments until the first Humans get to land on Mars, and it can be a wonderful record of the progress that took us to that point.