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Yellow Fever

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Yellow Fever last won the day on December 28 2023

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  1. It does seem odd to continue to allow clubs to run up such losses at all - If they should then get relegated anyway it places the clubs very financial survival at risk.
  2. You have to also remember we are in a Trumpian, post Brexit, toxic, post factual, culture war driven media electoral cycle. At the time of Blair none of this was true - a battle of ideas certainly but the facts would be presented plainly. No wonder SKS needs to be very careful !
  3. I could agree with this - many of his particular policies polled well (but his gargantuan 'baggage' was toxic). I still think we are seeing a lot of Tories or right leaning voters grasping at straws though - SKS is weak, leadership, there is a way back, if only.., Tories are moving to Reform etc. They'd do better if only they'd go more right etc. Any excuse will do to avoid the unpalatable truth. They are a zombie government just waiting to be put out of office. Seems to me SKS is doing just fine! 20% lead. I also seem to recall that after Miliband's defeat Labour completely misread the runes and went even more left, more extreme (Corbyn) and got solidly trounced. Tories making exactly the same mistake tacking right. You win elections from the centre ground not the far left or right. Tories will be out of power for a generation now if they even ever recover. All the current list of hopefuls after Sunak are themselves no-hopers - they need somebody untainted by the current Government's 14 years, able to call a spade a spade. Pro-business and Europe. Their next successful leader probably isn't even a an MP yet!
  4. Be silly to exclude anything but Occam"s razor suggests carbon and water the most likely in the absence of any other data point. We currently have a sample size of 1.
  5. We'll have to give the binners hope in a few weeks, only to take it away again the following week 😉
  6. Your part of the world. Think It was the Yanks or Chinese again... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg
  7. My suspicion is its all a bit like us, now more enlightened, studying chimps or gorillas - especially if one tribe mastered fire. We're being watched / studied as a potential new member of the galactic set. New interesting friends.
  8. Yes Reagans quip is odd. I don't think we have a good explanation for any of the the recent released videos. I do think they are either natural, camera artifacts but otherwise as US stated 'not us' make of it what you will. That said, the Fermi paradox holds ... where is everybody? If we are truly alone that would be remarkable and a 'great waste of space'. I think we'll find out fairly soon!
  9. All a bit too late if true ! Anybody in a 100 light years knows we are here just by our radio emissions. I prefer to be more optimistic. Any civilisation that can cross the stars must have long ago become peaceful and tolerant. Wouldn't have survived otherwise.
  10. Hi Dylan. The 'big bang' created the universe as we know it. It created the conditions for eventually stable 'matter' that leads to atoms and the ability for stars to form. A certain set of constants which if changed even slightly would lead to a Universe not as we know it if viable /stable at all. I seem to recall 10 to the power of 400 possible universes (might of been 10 ^ 100 but you get the point). Unimaginably large! Cosmology tries to explain why our Universe is the way it is and why it is so perfect for us - constraints etc but of course if it didn't suit us (or intelligent life) then we wouldn't exist and could not ask the question (anthropological principal). I'll leave 'God' out of it as that only begs who created 'him' (or the simulation we all live in programmer). Life I believe is then simply a statistical probability given the right universe and local conditions. As to statistics - if life was a 1 in billion chance of it randomly happening on a young earth it would also be 1 a billion happening to any other planet or moon given similar conditions - they are not dependent on each other. Given that there are circa 200 trillion billion stars (or planets/moons) its going to get a pretty good number of rolls of the dice. Bound to be a inner occasionally (actually lots and lots of times). That eventually leads us to the Fermi paradox - trying to place numbers on all these probabilities (the so called Drake equations) can lead to answers of tens or hundreds of technical civilizations out there - so where is everybody? The 'Zoo' answer I find most convincing.
  11. Actually, science always learns when things are unexplainable or need tweaking. I seem to recall Mercury's orbit was a quandary with pure Newtonian gravity. Today we have lots of theories trying to explain dark matter/energy (do they even exist but somethings missing) - and indeed if our present theory of gravity (or spacetime) is indeed correct. May need revision again!
  12. Of course there are other weirder possibilities but liquid water we know is abundant and a really good solvent for complex chemical reactions. Other possible solvents - ammonia for instance might work. It just seems that 'water based' life could be really abundant anyway without invoking other scenarios of which we have no experience or evidence not that it can't be imagined. It's a bit like musing on non-carbon based life - silicon, phosphorus or even mercury if I remember (plus others) - all could form the basis of complex chemistry perhaps under the right (extreme) conditions but carbon is by the far the most plausible and we already know that complex carbon organic molecules are floating free in space - the building blocks of life as we know it.
  13. I'd agree. The polls don't show that either. The 'both as bad as each other' is just a sly Tory attack to undermine Labour i.e to imply you might as well vote for us as they are no better. It clearly has some traction with some. The riposte is anybody but the (current) Tories! As far as I can see 'Reform' are around 10% splitting off a little of the rump extreme Tory vote. The days of UKIP as a single issue party are past. Equally the Greens and other more left parties split off a little of the Labour vote - not that either Reform or Greens are exclusively left/right. Not much has really changed with the 'protest' parties as in FPTP nor will it. Both will do well to get more then 1 MP if even that.
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