Short term solution: Mount a curtainrod, hang a blanket above the door. You'd be surprised how much putting a little cloth between you and the problem will help while you get a better solution worked out. The blanket disrupts the airflow and slows down the unwanted loss of heat/cooling. It's not a perfect solution but it's better than nothing.

They don't seem malicious. Just curious.

(m)ARKHAM(ill)

That's why mARK HAMill

Literally born to the role.

One of the things I'm hearing from this guy that I don't like is this notion that truth only exissts and is true when it's discovered. He appears to axiomatically reject the idea of absolute truth, despite the fact that it's at the core of science, engineering, art, music, all philosophical and intellectual pursuits really.

Here's the question: Is a thing true whether or not we know, and can relate to, the truth of the thing? Plato sure as hell thought so. This guy is muddying these waters in a way I find borderline dishonest. Knowledge and truth are two UTTERLY different things and he's conflating the two rather badly.

This conflation is a problem because he's mixing up the theory of truth and the theory of knowledge. Knowledge is not known until it is known, that's an axiom, but one of the axioms of truth is that truth is true whether it's known nor not.

Knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of a truth does not alter the truth in any way. Looking at the fridge will not put butter there, or take it away it was either already there or it already wasn't, the only thing that changed is our knowledge of the truth about fridge butter. His argument, insofar as I can follow it (no genius here) is fudging that boundary in an unpleasant way.

The only thing that can alter the truth is action. If I take all the butter out of the fridge, it renders the entire earlier question a matter of historic truth rather than existential truth. It invalidates no part of past fridge butter. Present truth is what it is, there is no butter. Historical truth is what it is, there was butter.. Again, this is something this fellow is playing fast and loose with in an unpleasant way.

If the goal of the pursuit of knowledge is to obtain the truth, which I believe it is, then we need to separate the theory of truth from the theory of knowledge, which this dude appears not to be doing.

In fact, I believe "the truth is what exists, or existed in a given timeframe, regardless of whether it is known" is pretty much axiomatic, and blows this guy's sophistries out of the water.

If they win in the next couple years they'll deal with the cap hell that follows. It's only a disaster if they can't get over the top. The B's have been oh-so-close too many times in the last decade.

I mean hat else could they do? The man is a titan.

In other words, the european union has been sandbagging heavily on its transition to green energy and never would have done it if Russia hadn't given them a kick in the pants.

Not a big shock, but let's phrase things correctly.

Shop? Get a stand, park it right outside the stadium.

They have a lot of cap sucked into that oline which is going to make it much less of an easy fix than it looks on the surface. They also have huge needs in their secondary and LB corps and many key payers getting older/injury prone.

The colts would literally be "out of the frying pan into the fire" for Carr. At last the Jets have some hope to build on. The Colts need to be gutted and rebuilt but Irsay's going to waste his core for a few more years before he admits it. It's no place for a prized QB.

The Colts are going to be a bottom feeding team next year, Carr or no Carr. Mark my words.

I'd like to see him go to the Seahawks. Geno Smith had a great year, but the Seahawk brass are too seasoned to get too attached. What Geno did will cement him for several more years as a sought-after backup QB but no one's gonna go crazy. Carr would be a huge upgrade.

Not just in brazil either, the Caribbean sugar industry more or less copied what Brazil was doing, up to and including the importing of African slaves.

We make too much of our own sugar for that. Sugarcane and sugarbeet combined we're the world's largest sugar manufacturer.

Emperor Justinian I of the Roman (Byzantine) Empire. The man has it all, skill, shrewdness, patience, and the ability to think strategically on multiple levels. With apologies to Trajan, Justinian might just have been the real "Last Roman." Hi dynasty was one of the last to be named in Latin. His dynasty was also the last one to rule Rome itself.

Justinian spent his entire career getting amazing things done with never quite enough resources to do them properly. He weathered the plague and invasions from literally all sides, locked horns with a Persian empire at the height of its own strength, and still managed to reclaim several lost Roman provinces including Hispania, Italia and Africa. He goes down in history as one of the greatest individual monarchs the world has ever known.

All Italy joining the central Powers would have done is give the Franco-British fleet something to actually attack. Italy is extremely vulnerable to an enemy who can gain naval superiority, as she found out in WWII, and a joint Italian-Austrian naval axis would be no match for the Franco-British one. With Germany mostly hiding its surface fleet from Britain, Franco-British assets could have easily been transferred to the mediterranean, perhaps overcoming an Austro-Italian flotilla trying to check access through the Strait of Gibraltar, and have no shortage of targets to easily bombard and docked fleets to destroy piecemeal.

One of the only things stopping that from happening in WWII is that the Regio Aeronautica was actually pretty good early in the war. Easily Italy's best fighting branch with good planes and great pilots in reasonable numbers that could stand up to the British on their own at first. That combined with the neutralization of the French fleet, delayed the Franco-British ability to pummel Italia for a few years.

Italy would have had no similar protection, however, in 1915, and nearly the whole coastline was vulnerable to coastal raiding,bombardment, and eventually invasion, as the US-British naval coalition eventually proved. Minus the US but plus France, which at the time was a major naval player in its own right, Britain would have easily achieved the same success even with the small, technologically backward Austro-Hungarian fleet muddying the waters a bit.

So with that being siad it was impossible to imagine aligning with the Central Powers ending well for Italy. They simply had no ability to properly aid them in the one theater that mattered -- the Mediterranean naval theater. Thus Italy had a choice between staying out of the war or picking the side that was astronomically more likely to rule the Mediterranean during and after the war, which was the Entente.

Sacroegoismo was simply a reasonable argument that if they sided with the Entente they might get some desired territory out of it, and that self interest aligned them with the security of the seas offered by the Entente, which was essential to Italian survival. Since they only had 2 options they chose the one that gave them the best chance to gain. Simple enough.

Fun fact: The Russians were stupid enough to invade this.

I have a personal theory about that. I don't know how valid it is but it makes sense to me.

The sensational way to put it would be, "the Trojan War caused the Bronze Age Collapse."

Obviously it's more complicated than that.

My theory is that Troy, which is located near one of the two Turkish straits, had trading connections with grain kingdoms along the cost of what's Ukraine today. If we assume such farming kingdoms existed, Troy would be in a perfect position to flourish by playing middleman between these states and the hungry nations of the eastern Mediterranean, which would explain why such a powerful Trojan state existed in the first place that it could defy all of Greece like contemporary histories suggest it did.

We know the years before the collapse were marked by declining yields in most if not all of the major players in the region, and as the years went on and yields began to shrink further and further but the population didn't decline along with it. Usually when yields decline populations decline too Famine, disease, starvation, confilict over remaining sources of food, all usually combined to ensure the nation goes demographically negative until the population has shrunk to the level it can support. This didn't happen in the late Bronze Age. Or at least when it did happen, it happened all at once suddenly, rather than gradually..

Why? I believe it was because there was a source of plentiful grain to import -- a region that even today is one of the great suppliers of the world's food. Ukraine.

So the grain farms of the northern Black Sea, which I admit I'm presuming to exist but have been there as far back in recorded history as you care to go, became a critical source of food for the empires around the eastern Mediterranean and Troy prospered as a middleman, possibly by shipping the grain itself, and possibly by collecting strait fees or navigation fees on other merchant shipping to help ships traverse the straits safely to reach their customers on the other side.

This in turn would explain why Troy, despite being only one city, could have the economic clout and resources to face the might of the Mycenaean Greeks and think they had a shot (also possibly why the siege of Troy didn't work very well, as they had a ready source of food behind the siege lines that the Mycenaeans couldn't easily stop).

A long siege of Troy would, however, cut off the rest of the eastern Mediterranean from these supplies of desperately needed grain. It would turn the Turkish straits into a warzone and the Greeks would be trying to use their powerful navy to isolate Troy. The grain kingdom(s) of Crimea and the northern Black Sea, robbed of their customer base by the inconvenient strait, may have even fallen apart without a source of revenue they had become dependent on to fund their states, and when the siege settled down, the region had devolved back into a more primitive state, removing these kingdoms from the board as grain exporters for a period of time.

With the Trojan grain network gone, nations that had become more and more dependent on its merchants for food now had that support kicked out from under them. With growing populations and shrinking food supplies, and the deficit no longer easy to make up from import, collapse became inevitable. Ironically, this is also a plausible explanation for why the Greek themselves didn't exploit their victory to colonize the straits until many centuries later. Pulling down Troy's house pulled down their own as well!

It's just an idea. But I think it checks out if you believe (as I do) that the Troy that was besieged by the Greeks was the one that flourished during the late Mycenaean era, and I believe that's where the consensus is right now.

It's simple enough. The French outright built trading ports and left the interior alone for the most part while the English and Duth built productive colonies based around a primary product to contribute to their trading empire. Tobacco and cotton for the English, furs for the French, sugar for the Dutch. There was a lot of overlap of course but those tended to be the major focuses.

The Spanish were more about building self contained, self sufficient communities that mostly did their own thing. A lot of what they built was plonked on top of extant civilizations and their infrastructure so unlike the other European states they tended to build administrative or bureaucratic cities in their colonies very early. It stands to reason, they had a MUCH larger initial population of natives to manage and the existing infrasturcture meant that large population centers could be built and maintained much earlier than the other European colonies that didn't have the bones of prior empires to build on.

While the French, British and Dutch focused on mercantilism for the most part, a lot of Spanish ideas of empire were still rooted in feudalism. Rather than dependent producer colonies or trading hubs the Spanish wanted fiefs that would manage their own affairs, keep their own peace under the authority of the Crown, pay their proper tribute, and answer their king's call to arms.

So yes, it is true that Spain was less focused on trade. Because their view of a proper empire required their colonies to be self sufficient while the British, French and Dutch model favored keeping the colonies dependent on the home country.

We've seen hair under the "hats", especially on female Toadlings, so yes.

I doubt it. By the time Rome finally collapsed it had been in decline for a couple centuries. Populations declined throughout the Italian peninsula during this period, that's why it was conquerable in the first place. By the time the Ostrogoths overran Italy the peninsula was a shadow of its former self and there were few people left to flee. That, and the Ostrogothic Kingdom functioned nominally as a suzerainty of the eastern empire so there wasn't a tremendous change in the daily life of the Italian peoples.

Nimoy as The Master could have been incredible.

I prefer to say that it ended.

ISRO Mars orbiter transmits final signals, ending wildly successful mission for India's fledgling space program

There's your headline

The mission is not dead. It is complete.