Carl Sagan

25 minutes ago, Highgate said:

Yeah you can never be sure if the action has been stopped at precisely the right moment or not.  But if you introduce a margin of error, won't the debate just switch to whether the toenail was within the margin of error line or not, rather than whether it was ahead or behind the last defender?  Whatever criterion is used, whether it's offside by any amount, margin or error or 'clear daylight' between the players, the decision will often come down to judgement calls based on millimetres. 

I'd be happy to bin VAR altogether and go back to best guess by the officials.  At least then people could go back to celebrating goals naturally when they occur.  

You're right I'm just shifting the goalposts. As has been said many times, the only way to make VAR work is to have it on the big screen while officials discuss the decision with the fans listening to the conversation. If they're not even prepared to do that, we're much better off ditching it. 

Not convinced they stopped the action at the right millisecond or that they were correct drawing them from the defender's foot when other ball-playing parts of his body looked closer to goal. Very cruel. The system cannot be accurate so should there be some sort of margin of error? 

31 minutes ago, Poynton ram said:

Whilst I appreciate we don’t know the retained list yet with so many players out of contract we ought to have a reasonable kitty to fund a rebuild. I am sure it has been reported that Hourihane is on 12k PW and he’s leaving. If we do go up how much extra tv revenue is there in the EFL? Off topic I have seen some bookies offering 100/1 on Bolton finishing second and 1000/1 on Peterborough finishing second- tasty odds

Thanks for the "off topic". At those odds (which proved correct), madness not to have a small insurance bet. I'm much more confident now we'll finish second and I'll not get a few grand.

Sounds as though the National League has been supporting Gateshead against the EFL, but the EFL won't budge, despite Gateshead playing at their ground since 1971. However, Gateshead Council has refused to guarantee they can stay there for 10 more years. 

The stadium is obviously a huge community asset but from my experience of seemingly perverse council planning decisions, I'm making an educated guess as to why the council has refused. If it's up for election in May, I hope the club organizes a local campaign and they're all voted out. 

The club claims they're still preparing for the game, but I don't see what avenues are left to them. 

Very much hope @DarkFruitsRam7is right with this fine thread and hasn't gone too soon. And, yes, I was going to post Martine too, but beaten to it. And a big happy birthday to @Ellafella! 

Our moments seem so very rare because we do have an amazing propensity to throw it away at the death. Because of which I'm a little surprised at the confidence on the forum this last couple of weeks - but so far justified. I'm not counting any chickens until the fat lady has sung at Pride Park on Saturday. After which I hope to revel with the rest of you in a perfect moment. I've only seen two promotions live before - Palace and the playoffs. Very much hoping for a hattrick! 

As I can't post Martine, here's a much more inspiring vocal to get Rams pulses racing. For this one moment in time... 

With one game to go, we can't finish lower than third. Please let's not finish third! 

11 minutes ago, hintonsboots said:

Attacking bench, no defenders.

Was a bit shocked by this. I guess if we lose one centre half we switch to a back 4, and if we lose a wingback then, NML, CBT, Barkhuizen or Smith drop in. 

8 minutes ago, Eddie said:

I'm 4 days younger than Leighton.

This one really hit home.

I didn't know what reaction to put to that, so replying instead. Miserable isn't it? Saw on Twitter Leighton had been ill - no more details. Wishing all Rams health and happiness, but this does hit home... 

Didn't Mackay call him "the final piece in the jigsaw"? 71 feels no age nowadays. RIP 

Even though Musk didn't buy Twitter to turn a profit, it's extraordinary real-time massive data, feeding into Grok, will likely end up turning it into the most valuable AI company there is. No one else has anything remotely comparable. All the other large language models have cutoffs when their training data ends.

1 hour ago, AndyinLiverpool said:

Over here in pedants' corner, we'd like to point out that Space X still hasn't worked.

SpaceX is the most successful space company there's every been. It launches 90% of the entirety of the world's mass to orbit each year. It's only mid-April and it's already launched and landed 40 orbital missions. And is the only private company (not a nation) to ever fly people into low-Earth orbit, to the space station and beyond. Nearly 50 astronauts have flown this way. Then it has more than 5,500 Starlink satellites in orbit, more than half the total number of satellites there are. Yours is some very strange new meaning of the term "hasn't worked" with which I was previously unaware.

Has Evatt thrown in the towel? 

Congratulations to Portsmouth who are promoted as Champions after tonight's results, which were:

• Portsmouth 3 Barnsley 2
• Bolton 2 Shrewsbury 2
• Peterborough 4 Fleetwood 1

A fabulous draw by Shrewsbury means we only need 4 points from the final 2 games to guarantee promotion. Goal difference not quite enough to rely on just the 3 points. But if both Bolton and Peterborough drop points on Saturday, victory at Cambridge would see us up.

The other Saturday fixtures are:

• Bolton vs Port Vale
• Bristol Rovers vs Peterborough

My take is that the Warne future discussion remains premature. With all my heart I hope he succeeds and gets us over the line, fulfilling what in the summer were the minimum expectations of the majority of the forum (in the days when polls were allowed).

We know we are guaranteed a chance of automatic promotion going into the final game. Even with the possibility of being promoted before the final game. I say let's watch it play out and then discuss what happens next. By that point, @Davidmight even allow us to have a poll again? 

8 hours ago, Srg said:

I love Sibley as much as anyone, but he couldn’t do CBT’s role. Sibley runs in treacle, which is frankly why he hasn’t hit the heights we thought he might when he broke through. 

I find posts like this just weird. One of Sibley's many strengths is his ability to run with the ball at his feet, at speed, leaving midfielders of defenders in his wake. He's absolutely no slouch. We are a team whose instructions are to bypass central midfield and play the ball wide at the earliest possible opportunity. If we were prepared to vary our approach and played Sibbo in midfield, then we'd have the threat from the wings and also the threat from the centre.

53 minutes ago, Eoghan1884 said:

Seen on X, the 12 players out of contract. If we went up who would you sign on. 

 -Liam Thompson ✅ 2 years + 1 year op
- Louie Sibley ✅ 2 years + 1 year op
- Martyn Waghorn ❌
- Dwight Gayle ✅ 1 year as 3rd/4th choice
- Joe Wildsmith ✅ 3 years 
- Conor Hourihane ❌ not a chance 
- Korey Smith ✅ 1 year for depth
- Craig Forsyth ✅ 1 year for depth and he’s a legend 
- James Collins ❌ love him and he works so hard but he’s already not the best at L1 level nvm championship
- Scott Loach ❌ get a young lad as third choice 
- Darren Robinson ✅ 3 year + 1 year op and get him out on loan 
- Tom Barkhuizen ✅ 1 year + 1 year op for depth and see if he can still play at championship level

 Copying and then adapting the post:

- Liam Thompson ✅ 1 year + 1 year op
- Louie Sibley ✅ 2 years + 1 year op
- Martyn Waghorn ❌
- Dwight Gayle ✅ 1 year
- Joe Wildsmith ✅ 2 years + 1 year op 
- Conor Hourihane ❌
- Korey Smith ❌
- Craig Forsyth ❌ 
- James Collins  ✅ 1 year + 1 year op. Has earnt his chance
- Scott Loach ❌ get a young lad as third choice 
- Darren Robinson ✅ 2 year + 1 year op and get him out on loan 
- Tom Barkhuizen  ❌ 

It took a lot of effort to get the club to move the away fans into the corner so the Derby fans could have the better seats. It would be daft to change it away from that.

Meanwhile, the EFL tried to impose a Premier-league-mandated points deduction on Leicester. Leicester said, hold on, there's nothing in your rules that allows you to do this, and took out an injunction to stop it. The EFL said, "oh yes of course you're right" and withdrew the deduction.

My conclusion is that the EFL doesn't know its own rules and if we'd had the wherewithal to be able to contest their outrageous behaviour against us, we'd have won as well.

EFL statement:

Leicester Statement: 

After yesterday's results:

• Bolton 1 Portsmouth 1
• RAMS 3 Orient 0
• Oxford 5 Peterborough 0

we now have 

Bolton play their game in hand on Tuesday at home to Shrewsbury, with Peterborough at home to Fleetwood the same night. You'd expect them both to win, but if Peterborough don't and if Bolton lose, a win for us on Saturday would secure promotion.

2 hours ago, TigerTedd said:

I’m just thinking if you don’t have a friendly Anne Hathaway because there is no option other than to send the space ship on a red dwarf style journey spanning thousands of years (unless you had like one generational family of in bred caretakers on the ship), then you’d need to work out a way of automatically raising embryos into a civilisation of children, without it descending into lord of the flies. That’s going to be a pretty shitty childhood at best. And with absolutely no way for us sending the ship to know how it would turn out. Seems like it would be theoretically possible, but it all seems a bit unethical. Stupid ethics getting in the way of a good bit of science. If nothing else I’ve come up with the plot of a decent sci fi book. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my study. 

I think this underestimates AI and how it will advance. Soon it will be able to bring up children here, so in decades/centuries it would be far more capable of doing this for a new space colony. If Human and machine minds work together, we'll be able to start spreading across the Galaxy (and beyond according to some work).

[And, on one weird evening, a very friendly Anne Hathaway pulled me out of the audience in her one-woman New York Theatre play (she was playing a remote drone pilot in the USAF) and we had simulated sex before she went on to be pregnant and then had our baby! Very happy to oblige 😂😂 Maybe there'll always be a friendly Anne Hathaway to bring up children?] 

22 minutes ago, TigerTedd said:

I know FTL travel is pure sci fi, but I guess with enough progress in automation tech, would it be possible to shoot off an unmanned ship full of frozen embryos and hundreds of years later have that ship populate a new colony light years away.

i wonder what the ethics would be in that. 

Fascinating stuff, isn't it? I'd say FTL (faster than light for those who don't know it) is probably scifi, but there's a chance. Failing that, there's time dilation from relativity, so you can make the journey by travelling *very* fast, even if thousands of years would pass on Earth. I guess your question about the ethics of sending embryos is related to the ethics of generational ships, but my thought is none of us choose the circumstances of our births. 

Coming back from America I rewatched Interstellar on the plane, which of course ends with Anne Hathaway's Dr Brant beginning the process of developing the embryos at the end. Which is a lovely twist, with Humans branching to form different civilizations across space.

I'm also publishing a book on brain preservation at the moment and, while not discussed in the book, the author and I have talked separately about the applicability of it for long-duration spaceflight. It could well be an "ethical" method to seed the stars in the future. 

1 minute ago, Jourdan said:

You don't want to pop the cork too early!

On 10/04/2024 at 07:56, Mucker1884 said:

Is this Worman fella playing out of merit, or have they just picked him for his name! 😁

It's like having Mick Derby playing for us... or Sammy Sixfinger playing for florist! 🤓

Never understood us not signing Matt Derbyshire early in his career when he was obviously going to become a good player.

Been in America for a few days, including a bit of work at the Carl Sagan Institute - even got to sit at the desk in his Cornell University office. They're searching for Earth-like worlds beyond the solar system, which we might one day travel to. The hardest step is this first one, becoming a multiplanetary species, building a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. Once we've done that it will have led to so many new technologies, especially around automation, life support and terraforming, that the next steps become far easier.

Been away for ever and find no one has updated this thread. After today's win against Orient and the other results, we can't finish lower than 4th. Come on you Rams!