Am I the only one who finds the sombre, weighty talk of sportscasters talking about a sacked coach or a bemoaning a popular team failing to 'fire on all cylinders' weirdly incongruous coming immediately on the heels of similarly sombre media discussing current events where thousands are dying and world war three is emerging (i.e. actual, real stakes).
A look at the growth of Belfast in Northern Ireland as a home for producing TV shows, following the success of the comedy Derry Girls (Hollie Richardson/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/feb/13/belfast-home-of-quality-tv-drama…
In opening statements in New Mexico's suit against Meta, state prosecutors argue Meta misrepresented the safety of its platforms, as Meta's attorney pushes back (Morgan Lee/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/meta-new-mexi…
A gaggle of scorned landlords and real estate agents across L.A. have a message:
If Alexys Watson messages you on Zillow asking if you accept Section 8 vouchers,
choose your next words very, very carefully.
Over the last eight months, dozens of landlords and real estate agents have responded to Watson's inquiries — and dozens have been sued for $100,000. or more.
The lawsuits allege discrimination for refusing a Section 8 applicant, regardless of whether they act…
I have a weird feeling, as shit gets more and more real, that stuff like our international trade deals will have to be abandoned out of self-preservation (most were entered into to benefit not NZers, but the wealthiest NZers - a form of implicit TrickleDown). I wonder which political party will have steel enough to point it out.
One of my VR Lighthouses died last month. These things are gyroscopically spinning 24 hours a day for, what, a decade now? Nearly.
No wonder. Mostly the industry seems to be settling on using head-mounted cameras rather than sweeping infra-red beams and receptors on the head anyway.
It is true that lighthouses give accurate positioning, but means I can't easily take the headset next door, say. Or to a party.
So inside-out, as they call it, is fine for the headset now and mostly okay for the hand-controllers.
But it offers no solution at all for the foot-trackers and hip-tracker that I need for puppetting the characters in the #vr #slimeVR #trackers
Two students in falling snow at night in the courtyard between Gates Hall and the new CIS building
#photo #photography #portrait
Proton Energy Dependence of Radiation Induced Low Gain Avalanche Detector Degradation
Veronika Kraus, Marcos Fernandez Garcia, Luca Menzio, Michael Moll
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01800 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.01800 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.01800
arXiv:2602.01800v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Low Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs) are key components for precise timing measurements in high-energy physics experiments, including the High Luminosity upgrades of the current LHC detectors. Their performance is, however, limited by radiation induced degradation of the gain layer, primarily driven by acceptor removal. This study presents a systematic comparison of how the degradation evolves with different incident proton energies, using LGADs from Hamamatsu Photonics (HPK) and The Institute of Microelectronics of Barcelona (IMB-CNM) irradiated with 18 MeV, 24 MeV, 400 MeV and 23 GeV protons and fluences up to 2.5x10^15 p/cm2. Electrical characterization is used to extract the acceptor removal coefficients for different proton energies, whereas IR TCT measurements offer complementary insight into the gain evolution in LGADs after irradiation. Across all devices, lower energy protons induce stronger gain layer degradation, confirming expectations. However, 400 MeV protons consistently appear less damaging than both lower and higher energy protons, an unexpected deviation from a monotonic energy trend. Conversion of proton fluences to 1 MeV neutron-equivalent fluences reduces but does not eliminate these differences, indicating that the standard Non-Ionizing Energy Loss (NIEL) scaling does not fully account for the underlying defect formation mechanisms at different energies and requires revision when considering irradiation fields that contain a broader spectrum of particle types and energies.
toXiv_bot_toot
An eventful day at the home office so far... just spent the last 20 minutes trying to clean up the mess of pushing bag of besan (chick pea) flour off the top shelf in the pantry, which burst on impact, maximising dispersion on the coffee making stuff & the rest of the pantry. Much blue air was created. But before that had a magical few minutes when a pīwakawaka flew into the house, happily flew around a bit, & happily flew back out again.