Tootfinder

Running pre-Christmas errands, a relative who likes cannabis wanted to stop at the dispo. I strolled in too, and at the checkout counter I noticed a sign about Tuesdays. Couldn’t resist, told the relative to consider this part of their Christmas present and pulled out my credit card.
Just so I could say I got the Senior Citizens discount on a bag of weed.
Best of the season to everyone.

A 29-year-old Llano California man is in custody,
charged with killing #Carl #Grillmair, a Caltech astrophysicist Monday after carjacking his own relative and burglarizing a home.
Los Angeles County Sheriff's detectives say 67-year-old Carl Grillmair was found shot to death on the porch of his home in rural…

29-year-old man charged with killing renowned Caltech astrophysicist at his Llano home
A 29-year-old Llano man is in custody, charged with killing a Caltech astrophysicist Monday after carjacking his own relative and burglarizing a home.

…and the injunction is blocked by a circuit court packed with Trump loyalists.
Given ICE’s sharp increase in attacks on observers this morning, and the viciousness of those attacks — that coming on suddenly after a few days of relative quiet — I really wonder if they heard about the decision before the public did.
https://mastodon.social/@heidilifeldman/115935167630801010

One more thought...
One of the more toxic elements of the whole "manosphere" thing relative to dating is the application of game theory to relationships. They've got people trying to "maximize their dating potential" or whatever, trying to find the "most attractive march" (which is it's own fucked up thing I'm not even going to dig in to). But that whole mindset is basically going to always leave you miserable.
Oh, you're single? You need a partner. Oh you have a partner? Could you get a "better" one?
It turns relationships into the endless pointless grind of capitalism. Fuck that. None of that shit makes sense. No matter how "well" you do in that game, you always feel like a loser. Everyone does. Fuck that game. Quit.
The constant desire makes you miserable and your misery makes you unlikable. When you let go of it, you leave room to experience what is instead of constantly imagining what could be.
You will always be able to imagine a better "could be" than what is now. By comparing your situation now to that "could be" you will always see your situation as bad because it's worse than your yardstick.
Is your situation good for you? Is it serving you? It can be good and it can also be possible to make it better. When was the last time you just experience your life instead of trying to strategize your way into "something better."
Throw away the yardstick. Something something Buddha.
Edit: all this is of course aside from the whole objectification thing, which is it's own whole set of fucked up. But yeah... All that shit is real bad news.

Is Senator Mike Lee sad that he isn't old enough to have witnessed his relative's execution for the Mountain Meadows Massacre?
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2026/01/20/charlie-kirk-mike-lee-calls/

Raiders report: Relative of franchise royalty finally finds end zone https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/raiders/raiders-report-relative-of-franchise-royalty-finally-finds-end-zone-3592291/

Helmut Barz fragt: Was, wenn Wähler und Wählerinnen gar nicht ihren eigenen Vorteil maximieren wollen, sondern den Nachteil anderer? Sein Artikel erklärt, wie relative Deprivation und Statusangst die Demokratie untergraben – und warum wir dringend ein neues „Wir“ brauchen. #Demokratie #Sozialpsychologie

Regularized Random Fourier Features and Finite Element Reconstruction for Operator Learning in Sobolev Space
Xinyue Yu, Hayden Schaeffer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17884 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17884 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.17884
arXiv:2512.17884v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Operator learning is a data-driven approximation of mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces, such as the solution operators of partial differential equations. Kernel-based operator learning can offer accurate, theoretically justified approximations that require less training than standard methods. However, they can become computationally prohibitive for large training sets and can be sensitive to noise. We propose a regularized random Fourier feature (RRFF) approach, coupled with a finite element reconstruction map (RRFF-FEM), for learning operators from noisy data. The method uses random features drawn from multivariate Student's $t$ distributions, together with frequency-weighted Tikhonov regularization that suppresses high-frequency noise. We establish high-probability bounds on the extreme singular values of the associated random feature matrix and show that when the number of features $N$ scales like $m \log m$ with the number of training samples $m$, the system is well-conditioned, which yields estimation and generalization guarantees. Detailed numerical experiments on benchmark PDE problems, including advection, Burgers', Darcy flow, Helmholtz, Navier-Stokes, and structural mechanics, demonstrate that RRFF and RRFF-FEM are robust to noise and achieve improved performance with reduced training time compared to the unregularized random feature model, while maintaining competitive accuracy relative to kernel and neural operator tests.
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It’s possible that this is nothing at all, and they’ll be back in full force today. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has suggested that maybe the worst is over.
But we took the days of relative rest anyway. Hmm, “rest” is wrong: mutual aid, food distribution, school observers, people doing laundry for those who can’t go to a laundromat — that continues unabated. But there’s a definite feeling of catching our breath for a moment.
3/

I have been made aware of a #Grokepedia entry about a relative of mine. The text is elaborate and sounds ok, except for some repetitions. Knowing a few things about my relative, I can attest that the Grokepedia entry contains numerous errors and some contradiction already in the first half. It is so long that I couldn't read the second half.
To wit, it is inadvisable to rely on Grok…

Copy-Trasform-Paste: Zero-Shot Object-Object Alignment Guided by Vision-Language and Geometric Constraints
Rotem Gatenyo, Ohad Fried
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14207 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14207 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.14207
arXiv:2601.14207v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study zero-shot 3D alignment of two given meshes, using a text prompt describing their spatial relation -- an essential capability for content creation and scene assembly. Earlier approaches primarily rely on geometric alignment procedures, while recent work leverages pretrained 2D diffusion models to model language-conditioned object-object spatial relationships. In contrast, we directly optimize the relative pose at test time, updating translation, rotation, and isotropic scale with CLIP-driven gradients via a differentiable renderer, without training a new model. Our framework augments language supervision with geometry-aware objectives: a variant of soft-Iterative Closest Point (ICP) term to encourage surface attachment and a penetration loss to discourage interpenetration. A phased schedule strengthens contact constraints over time, and camera control concentrates the optimization on the interaction region. To enable evaluation, we curate a benchmark containing diverse categories and relations, and compare against baselines. Our method outperforms all alternatives, yielding semantically faithful and physically plausible alignments.
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@…
That doesn't mean passkeys are worse, those are your words not mine. I've made no judgement call about the relative qualities of these options.
All I am saying is, it matters.
If I store all my passkeys on my Apple account only, and then get locked out tomorrow because I broke Apple's TOS, that would suck.
That's not a con…

Suspect in National Guard shooting served alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan, relative says (NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/suspect-national-guard-shooting-served-us-troops-afghanistan-relative-rcna246170
http://www.memeorandum.com/251127/p13#a251127p13

The SpaceX #Crew-11 Post-Splashdown News Conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFOVIAxEFng was quite interesting: nothing detailled, of course, about the astronaut health issue (at first "serious", now the person is "fine", in Isaacman's words) and while this was *not* an emergency return some such scenarios were discussed in detail. The crew stays at a hospital in San Diego over night (the only change relative to a regular off-California splash-down) before all four should continue on to Houston ... and will eventually meet the press.

I spent Sunday with friends I hadn’t seen in a month or more. We baked cookies, worked on a jigsaw puzzle, shared stories. The story sharing consists of someone talking about a personal experience that would have seemed unthinkable a month ago: a friend with a missing relative, a car left in the street, a family who had 8 loads of laundry because they couldn’t leave the house, running on the ice and fumbling for the whistle while witnessing somebody being abducted right there, right in front of them.
After each story, there is really nothing to say. It is horrible. We nod. We know. We continue the puzzle.
4/

How much do you a) drive, b) walk/bicycle/etc, or c) take transit?
#ModeShift

Brent Toderian (@brenttoderian.bsky.social)
Have you seen this? This recent study of mode share (the % share of transportation trips that are by car, transit, walking, biking etc) relative to city size and income levels in almost 800 cities in 61 countries. Interesting results. HT @davidzipper.bsky.social https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412024001272

How much do you a) drive, b) walk/bicycle/etc, or c) take transit?
#ModeShift

Brent Toderian (@brenttoderian.bsky.social)
Have you seen this? This recent study of mode share (the % share of transportation trips that are by car, transit, walking, biking etc) relative to city size and income levels in almost 800 cities in 61 countries. Interesting results. HT @davidzipper.bsky.social https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412024001272

Feels like all I've done is knit baubles for the last fortnight but this is all I have to show for it. To be fair one's with Mum and one's on the 🎄 as I wasn't happy with it. I've ordered the wrong size bauble and played yarn chicken with the white so it hasn't been plain sailing. @… has ordered two more for a relative so that's m…

@… @… @… I think relative color would change the browser support minimums, if you gate it v…

Americans express fear and negativity toward AI, often relying on bad arguments like water usage, a stark contrast with Asia and Europe's relative positivity (Noah Smith/Noahpinion)
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/i-love-ai-why-doesnt-everyone

I love AI. Why doesn't everyone?
Anti-AI sentiment might or might not be rational, but it certainly relies on a lot of bad arguments.

Total Cohort Fertility Rate and Total Period Fertility Rate for Ireland, using birth data up to end 2024. Consistent downward trend in both, the relative pause in the middle of the TPFR decline is associated with large net in-migration (including of young women) during the Celtic Tiger.
#mastodaoine

From 1981 to 2016, hermit thrushes migrating through Chicago became smaller, with shorter bills and longer wings, relative to body size— there are genetic changes associated with shortening bills, but not the other changes
Genetic and morphological shifts associated with climate change in a migratory bird https://doi.org/10.11…

L'occasion de rappeler que l'acupuncture n'est qu'un placebo bien mis en scène.
https://www.rtbf.be/article/les-acupuncteurs-mettent-en-garde-apres-la-disparition-de-tout-cadre-legislatif-11676602…

@… Found an old XP laptop I got from a relative, and found some programs on it, and wondering if you need samples for anything. We've got Final Draft 6, Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4, Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 Dell Edition w/ Animation Studio 3, Memorex exPressit Label Design Studio, Office XP, Sonic DLA & RecordNow!, and WordPerfect Office 11.

Fun game idea for a very specific crowd: optimization race.
Given a large compute heavy codebase, say ngscopeclient, each player picks a block that they think has significant potential for speedups. Everything is in play from algorithmic restructuring to porting to GPU.
After the time limit the player with the largest percent speedup relative to baseline is declared the winner.

A Shopware 6 plugin failed because it used a relative path to load a file from vendor/, which broke in a deployer setup where custom/plugins is shared across releases. Since plugins can live in different locations, such paths are unreliable. The fix is to use kernel.project_dir and build the vendor path dynamically via DI. Read the full blog post to learn how.

Shopware 6: Don’t make assumptions about paths and were your plugin lives
We have a template which generates documents for us. Unfortunately it broke with the following error: php.CRITICAL: Uncaught Error: Failed opening required ‚/var/www/customer-deploy/shared/cu…

"Out of curiosity, I used this brand-new search engine you might have heard about, “Google,” to learn more about the subject. I found a copy of CaptureNet, a freeware packet sniffer part of the SpyNet/PeepNet by Laurentiu Nicula; then I looked up for the port number used by MSN Messenger (it was 1863 in case you were wondering.) Finally, I found out how to enable “promiscuous mode” in the network card in my laptop."

The Weakest Link
The professor stopped the class. He asked one students for his phone number. After entering the number into a device looking like a handheld calculator, he asked this unsuspecting student to go outside the classroom and call a friend or a relative. The student complied. After a few seconds, to our astonishment, the machine picked up the call. We could all clearly hear our friend talking to his mum about dinner plans for that evening.

"To understand just how poor this performance was, consider that nothing of this magnitude has happened since 2009, when the global economy began to recover from the financial crisis. Stocks are no anomaly, US bonds and the dollar are relative losers as well."
'Americans were sold fool’s gold': Scathing analysis tears into Trump's broken promise - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-economy-2674841708/

Good Morning #Canada
#HappyBirthday to Elliot Page, born February 21, 1987, in Halifax Nova Scotia. Page is a Canadian actor, producer, and activist, known for his leading roles across Canadian and American film and television, and for his outspoken work as an activist for #LGBTQ rights and against discrimination. His accolades include nominations for an Academy Award, three BAFTA Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and a SAG Award. While most of his career was performed as Ellen Page, he came out as gay in 2014 and as transgender in 2020.
Next time we try to summon the courage to defend or joyfully acknowledge a LGBTQ friend or relative, we should recognize the struggle that most experience just to find a little bit of happiness. Everyone deserves to love and be loved.
#CanadaIsAwesome #CanadianHeroes
https://www.biography.com/actors/elliot-page

One excavator,
10,000 bodies,
a sea of rubble:
inside Gaza’s effort to retrieve and bury its dead
Under the relative calm of a ceasefire,
Civil Defense crews in Gaza are undertaking the monumental feat of recovering thousands of bodies still trapped under the rubble.
The level of decomposition in the bodies is very high,
which makes it difficult for families to identify them.
The lack of tools and technology for advanced DNA testing has also …

One excavator, 10,000 bodies, a sea of rubble: inside Gaza’s effort to retrieve and bury its dead
Under the relative calm of a ceasefire, Civil Defense crews in Gaza are undertaking the monumental feat of recovering thousands of bodies still trapped under the rubble.

Five-year-old deported to Honduras despite being US citizen is latest child victim of Trump crackdown.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/27/five-year-old-girl-us-citizen-and-mother-deported-honduras

Five-year-old deported to Honduras despite being US citizen is latest child victim of Trump crackdown
Mother whose visa application was pending says she will send girl back to US soon accompanied by another relative

#Kundenglücklichmachungsposteinlieferungsgeräusch, heute mal anders : die letzten #klexadventskalender kommen in die relative Nähe, und der Weihnachtsklexpress legt nun mit Aushilfsrudolf Frau #Atelierhütehund ab zur persönlichen Auslieferungstour.

It is probably just me, or just my relative newcoming to Fediverse having not yet found my true centre, but I'd spend more time here if there were more totally-off-the-rails posts like this one:
https://www.tumblr.com/teledyn/804124363834146816/vbartilucci-lemonsharks-girlactionfigure?source=share

Man we are so living in the future. I just had an insanely productive session with AI agent. Code written mostly by the agent and me just guiding it through what I need. It's incredible.
Over Thanksgiving I was talking to a relative about the AI and they were saying how it WILL all change our lives. I couldn't help but think how much it ALREADY has changed our lives and we just take all the changes for granted. It's here. It's doing it.

High-precision luminescence cryothermometry strategy by using hyperfine structure
Marina N. Popova, Mosab Diab, Boris Z. Malkin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19088 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19088 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.19088
arXiv:2511.19088v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A novel, to the best of our knowledge, ultralow-temperature luminescence thermometry strategy is proposed, based on a measurement of relative intensities of hyperfine components in the spectra of Ho$^{3 }$ ions doped into a crystal. A $^{7}$LiYF$_4$:Ho$^{3 }$ crystal is chosen as an example. First, we show that temperatures in the range 10-35 K can be measured using the Boltzmann behavior of the populations of crystal-field levels separated by an energy interval of 23 cm$^{-1}$. Then we select the 6089 cm$^{-1}$ line of the holmium $^5I_5 \rightarrow ^5I_7$ transition, which has a well-resolved hyperfine structure and falls within the transparency window of optical fibers (telecommunication S band), to demonstrate the possibility of measuring temperatures below 3 K. The temperature $T$ is determined by a least-squares fit to the measured intensities of all eight hyperfine components using the dependence $I(\nu) = I_1 \exp(-b\nu)$, where $I_1$ and $b = a\nu \frac{\nu}{kT}$ are fitting parameters and a accounts for intensity variations due to mixing of wave functions of different crystal-field levels by the hyperfine interaction. In this method, the absolute and relative thermal sensitivities grow at $T$ approaching zero as $\frac{1}{T^2}$.and $\frac{1}{T}$, respectively. We theoretically considered the intensity distributions within hyperfine manifolds and compared the results with experimental data. Application of the method to experimentally measured relative intensities of hyperfine components of the 6089 cm$^{-1}$ PL line yielded $T = 3.7 \pm 0.2$ K. For a temperature of 1 K, an order of magnitude better accuracy is expected.
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Good confidence builder, certainly, but it shows how much stronger the EPL is relative to the Champions League. At this moment, 5 of the top 8 UCL spots are EPL teams.
Don't have a clear MOTM today. So many players were excellent. I'll give it to Endo for doing so much dirty work and filling in seamlessly.
#LFC

For the past week or so I’ve been following @… posts about the events at this years “Ashes” cricket series.
I am enjoying being quite mystified by the terminology. I know very little about the game beyond it being a distant relative of baseball with a much harder ball and wickets with little baubles on top instead of a strike zone judged by an umpire. I have concluded that …

Campbell: Eliminated Lions are at 'rock bottom' https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/47465476/out-playoffs-lions-playing-respect-season-finale

Yesterday @… had questions about Christmas Past. Reading replies reminded me: My first foray into wood work was when visiting a relative for Christmas.
I was 7 or 8, and we were visiting my dad's uncle Friedel in Lingen. We made some wooden ornaments, with a coping saw and dull chisels.
My dad still has an ornament I modeled after a lego set…

LEGO 1555 Santa Claus
Comprehensive information about LEGO 1555 Santa Claus, a Basic set released in 1986.

Just checked out some truly excellent books from the library to read to my 4-year-old:
Adèle & Simon by Barbara McClintock (things to find), The Marvelous Now by Angela DiTerlizzi and Lorena Alvarez Gómez (rhyming & positive encouragement about mood regulation), and Forts by Katie Venit & Kenard Pak (lovely ode to children's forts).
I had a wonderful reverse-Magritte moment reading Adèle & Simon where Simon loses his drawing of a cat and my kid pointed out one of the actual cats in the image. I said "No, that's a cat, we're looking for a drawing of a cat," before realizing that technically we were looking for a drawing of a drawing of a cat, and the thing my kid pointed to was indeed a drawing of a cat, just not in that category relative to Simon's frame of reference...
#AmReading #ReadingNow #ChildrensBooks

Although there are striking differences between the cells that make up your eyes, kidneys, brain and toes,
the DNA blueprint for these cells is essentially the same.
Where do those differences come from?
Scientists are realizing the defining qualities that make up each cell actually lie in a cousin of DNA called RNA.
RNA was long considered DNA’s boring biochemical relative.
Researchers thought it merely takes the genetic information stored in DNA and delivers i…

RNA is key to the dark matter of the genome − scientists are sequencing it to illuminate human health and disease
Researchers are embarking on the RNA equivalent of the Human Genome Project, including sequencing all the chemical modifications that make cells unique.

Approximate Cartesian Tree Matching with Substitutions
Panagiotis Charalampopoulos, Jonas Ellert, Manal Mohamed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08570 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08570 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08570
arXiv:2602.08570v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Cartesian tree of a sequence captures the relative order of the sequence's elements. In recent years, Cartesian tree matching has attracted considerable attention, particularly due to its applications in time series analysis. Consider a text $T$ of length $n$ and a pattern $P$ of length $m$. In the exact Cartesian tree matching problem, the task is to find all length-$m$ fragments of $T$ whose Cartesian tree coincides with the Cartesian tree $CT(P)$ of the pattern. Although the exact version of the problem can be solved in linear time [Park et al., TCS 2020], it remains rather restrictive; for example, it is not robust to outliers in the pattern.
To overcome this limitation, we consider the approximate setting, where the goal is to identify all fragments of $T$ that are close to some string whose Cartesian tree matches $CT(P)$. In this work, we quantify closeness via the widely used Hamming distance metric. For a given integer parameter $k>0$, we present an algorithm that computes all fragments of $T$ that are at Hamming distance at most $k$ from a string whose Cartesian tree matches $CT(P)$. Our algorithm runs in time $\mathcal O(n \sqrt{m} \cdot k^{2.5})$ for $k \leq m^{1/5}$ and in time $\mathcal O(nk^5)$ for $k \geq m^{1/5}$, thereby improving upon the state-of-the-art $\mathcal O(nmk)$-time algorithm of Kim and Han [TCS 2025] in the regime $k = o(m^{1/4})$.
On the way to our solution, we develop a toolbox of independent interest. First, we introduce a new notion of periodicity in Cartesian trees. Then, we lift multiple well-known combinatorial and algorithmic results for string matching and periodicity in strings to Cartesian tree matching and periodicity in Cartesian trees.
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Atomic and molecular systems for radiation thermometry
Stephen P. Eckel, Eric B. Norrgard, Christopher Holloway, Nikunjkumar Prajapati, Noah Schlossberger, Matthew Simons
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08668 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08668 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08668
arXiv:2512.08668v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Atoms and simple molecules are excellent candidates for new standards and sensors because they are both all identical and their properties are determined by the immutable laws of quantum physics. Here, we introduce the concept of building a standard and sensor of radiative temperature using atoms and molecules. Such standards are based on precise measurement of the rate at which blackbody radiation (BBR) either excites or stimulates emission for a given atomic transition. We summarize the recent results of two experiments while detailing the rate equation models required for their interpretation. The cold atom thermometer (CAT) uses a gas of laser cooled $^{85}$Rb Rydberg atoms to probe the BBR spectrum near 130~GHz. This primary, {\it i.e.}, not traceable to a measurement of like kind, temperature measurement currently has a total uncertainty of approximately 1~\%, with clear paths toward improvement. The compact blackbody radiation atomic sensor (CoBRAS) uses a vapour of $^{85}$Rb and monitors fluorescence from states that are either populated by BBR or populated by spontaneous emission to measure the blackbody spectrum near 24.5~THz. The CoBRAS has an excellent relative precision of $u(T)\approx 0.13$~K, with a clear path toward implementing a primary
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Scientists Identify Remains of the Earliest Human Ancestor https://www.404media.co/scientists-identify-the-remains-of-the-earliest-human-ancestor/

Relative to many, my life is very good,
-- in that I am alive and housed, fed, sometimes employed.
I am healthy and loved.
Still, I am about to lose my entire mind over the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) website,
and the fact that someone,
probably a bot farmer,
has already used my 16-year-old son’s identity to establish a fraudulent account.
This is a common scam,
one that was fortunately detected before any money changed …

FAFSA Is Breaking Me
I think I have been holding it together in the face of everything we can’t stop talking about—the killing and the dying, the explosions and the terror, the eggs and the bird flu and the shameless ghouls ruining the good parts of our country, the weapons and the

Optical clocks with accuracy validated at the 19th digit
K. J. Arnold, M. D. K. Lee, Zhao Qi, Qichen Qin, Zhang Zhao, N. Jayjong, M. D. Barrett
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07346 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07346 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.07346
arXiv:2512.07346v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We report a comprehensive evaluation of all known sources of systematic uncertainty for two independent $^{176}$Lu$^ $ single-ion optical references, finding total systematic uncertainty of $1.1\times10^{-19}$ and $1.4\times10^{-19}$ for the two individual systems and $9.6\times10^{-20}$ for the difference. Through direct comparison via correlation spectroscopy, we demonstrate a relative frequency agreement of $-2.4\pm(5.7)_\mathrm{stat}\pm(1.0)_\mathrm{sys}\times10^{-19}$, where `stat' and `sys' indicate the statistical and systematic uncertainty, respectively. The comparison uncertainty is statistically limited after approximately 200 hours of averaging with a measurement instability of $4.8\times10^{-16}(\tau/\mathrm{s})^{-1/2}$.
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This morning in Minneapolis:
Somebody posted in one of the local chats that their neighbor didn’t come home last night, looking for help finding them. Family doesn’t know where they are. They’d been taking the legal path to seek asylum. ICE doesn’t have their name (but that means very little; they hide names, kidnap anonymously, even discard people’s IDs).
Meanwhile, confirmed ICE sightings are ramping up in my area now after some relative early morning quiet.
Just in case you wondered how things are going here.

Multi-port programmable silicon photonics using low-loss phase change material Sb$_2$Se$_3$
Thomas W. Radford, Idris A Ajia, Latif Rozaqi, Priya Deoli, Xingzhao Yan, Mehdi Banakar, David J Thomson, Ioannis Zeimpekis, Alberto Politi, Otto L. Muskens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18205 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18205 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.18205
arXiv:2511.18205v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reconfigurable photonic devices are rapidly emerging as a cornerstone of next generation optical technologies, with wide ranging applications in quantum simulation, neuromorphic computing, and large-scale photonic processors. A central challenge in this field is identifying an optimal platform to enable compact, efficient, and scalable reconfigurability. Optical phase-change materials (PCMs) offer a compelling solution by enabling non-volatile, reversible tuning of optical properties, compatible with a wide range of device platforms and current CMOS technologies. In particular, antimony tri-selenide ($\text{Sb}_{2}\text{Se}_{3}$) stands out for its ultra low-loss characteristics at telecommunication wavelengths and its reversible switching. In this work, we present an experimental platform capable of encoding multi-port operations onto the transmission matrix of a compact multimode interferometer architecture on standard 220~nm silicon photonics using \textit{in-silico} designed digital patterns. The multi-port devices are clad with a thin film of $\text{Sb}_{2}\text{Se}_{3}$, which can be optically addressed using direct laser writing to provide local perturbations to the refractive index. A range of multi-port geometries from 2$\times$2 up to 5$\times$5 couplers are demonstrated, achieving simultaneous control of up to 25 matrix elements with programming accuracy of 90% relative to simulated patterns. Patterned devices remain stable with consistent optical performance across the C-band wavelengths. Our work establishes a pathway towards the development of large scale PCM-based reconfigurable multi-port devices which will allow implementing matrix operations on three orders of magnitude smaller areas than interferometer meshes.
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