iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

Why punctuation matters! Even as a native speaker and knowing the context of the Grenfell fire, the missing hyphen between the first two words turned the first half of this into a pile of disconnected words that took me a while to parse. There's only one […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Guardian headline: "Grenfell fire police investigators hand files to 20 firms and 54 people to CPS"

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

Saw a variant of this advert at Heathrow. A security blanket is a prop used by small children for reassurance against imaginary fears; the blanket itself does nothing. Is that what Cisco's selling: security theatre for emotional toddlers? Do the advertising folk at Cisco know what words are?

A huge billboard at an airport, with generic , swooshy, tech-looking rainbow lines and dots, and text reading "Cisco AI. Wrap yourself in the most powerful security blanket ever"

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

Feeling seen, by the Romans. Thanks, Antonine Wall

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

I enjoyed the Freudian typo of a "slippery slop" in this: futurism.com/future-society/student… I liked this section:

“Writing is a technology for thinking,” cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg told the New York Times in a new essay mulling the consequences of sidestepping the hard work of writing.

Writing, the piece notes, helps develop all sorts of cognitive faculties, including building our working memory, executive planning skills, and our metacognition, or the ability to be aware of your own thinking.

For all the romanticism around writing, it’s also a form of drudgery. Kellogg says that drafting a basic essay is as mentally taxing as digging a ditch is physically exhausting. You have to really rack your brain to find the right word and organize ideas in a way that makes sense to a broader audience. When they're manifested in the real world, you revise your ideas by going over them yourself or asking for feedback.

Writing, in other words, is inextricable from the labor that goes into it. And so
when you bring in a piece of machinery that offers to do the process for you, it's no longer writing, and by no extension, no longer exercising the brain.

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

I've wanted the ridiculous indulgence of an office guitar ever since my undergrad lit review supervisor had one (hi, Garrett Cotter!) And now, thanks to a recent dream purchase, I have a spare so... ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!

A guitar – black Ibanez SZ 320, no less – in Andy's office among physics books and, I'm told, the worst map of Scotland ever drawn

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

Saw this on the side of a luxury EV the other day. Have I lost my mind or is it proudly stating that this car can run for 15 mins at full power? (actually slightly less, usable capacity is 94 kWh) I'm sure it's perfectly fine in normal use – claimed range is […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Text on the side of a Polestar 4 car, reading "100 kWh / 400 kW"

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026

Ugh, new level of terrible science overhyping by bottom-feeding clickbait farms, now with double-nonsense AI graphics 🤮

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026

Following UKRI and STFC's typical clusterfuck late-announced "town hall" this afternoon — where they blandly told us to suck it up and do more science with even less funding (oh, and become entrepreneurs at the same time, somehow) — Jay Howarth was good enough to make real the image in my head...

The Shrek Lord Farquaad "Some of you may die but that's a sacrifice I am prepared to make" scene, but with (Sir) Ian Chapman's face

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026

I bet these guys are sick to the back teeth of Zero Wing references, but I still have a certain expectation of "all your BASE" gags in the slides

BASE-STEP: Transporting antiprotons in an open autonomous Penning trap system

By Marcel Leonhardt and Christian Smorra, Heinrich Heine Universitit, Dusseldorf.

Abstract:

High-precision measurements on trapped antimatter play a key role in testing fundamental symmetries and the Standard Model of
particle physics. Among the most precise results in this field are comparisons of fundamental properties of protons and antiprotons,
suchas

charge-to-mass ratios and magnetic moments, resulting in tests of CPT invariance.

These measurements are performed by the BASE (Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment) collaboration at CERN, using an
advanced multi-Penning trap system located at CERN's Antimatter Factory. The sensitivity of these measurements has reached 16
ppt for the charge-to-mass ratio and 1.6 ppb for the magnetic moment, respectively. Although we have demonstrated the capability
to reach significantly higher precision in principle, magnetic-field fluctuations originating from CERN's AD and ELENA decelerators
currently limit further improvements on practical timescales. To overcome this limitation, we developed the novel, autonomous,
open, and transportable Penning-trap system BASE-STEP. Transportable antiproton traps enable a new experimental paradigm in
which antiprotons are relocated to magnetically quiet, offline laboratories, as currently under development at Heinrich Heine
University (HHU) Diisseldorf and planned at CERN.

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/06/2026

Only went and did the Frendo Spur at the weekend! I've wanted to do this for 20+ years, so massive thanks to the other Andy B for stepping up and putting in some amazing leads when we both happened to be there and it looked plausible. Very difficult, wintery […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/05/2026

I can't overemphasise how much this sort of thing can fuck off

A snack packet titled The Great British Crunch, and if that weren't grim enough, subtitles Jolly Good Sour Cream.

Fwiw, on the back it reveals it's made in Spain...

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/05/2026

Amused that Heathrow's marketing folk have chosen to illustrate their new #AI assistant with a chat session that shows it missing several cues obvious to humans. The (weirdly written) query clearly asks about a departing flight, and surely by default you […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Advert for LHR AI/WhatsApp assistant with a conversation including:

User: Can you help confirm what gate my flight is going from?

AI: Could you please provide me with your flight number, the date of your flight, and whether it's an arrival and departure? ... (screenshot cuts off)

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/05/2026

I visited a (long) retired Glasgow physics teacher this week, who wanted to know if our dept was interested in buying some of his overflowing physics-book collection. A nice visit, largely to be some company, but also sobering to realise how deeply […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A huge bookshelf full of physics textbooks (and they were double-layered!) complete with stepladder

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/05/2026

This makes me more convinced there _is_ a bubble: BlackRock is deeply invested in AI, and part of his job is to pump that stock. He is smart enough to know that the demand for AI compute is largely on the training side, i.e. driven by the tech companies […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/05/2026

Jeez, from actual YouGov. I'd be a lot more intrigued if their amazing insights extended to knowing that how frickin' _CERN_ is not that bothered about resonating with consumers, and that if it were I wouldn't be the contact point. Firing off generic […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/05/2026

Universities still winning at software systems. What do you mean you can't read milliseconds since Unix epoch?

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/04/2026

Gemini accompanying image for Techradar article on 4-sigma b-physics anomaly hedging its bets: the article is about LHCb, the detector shown is CMS... but it has a sign hanging on it that says ATLAS! Maybe Alice is hiding somewhere […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Confused AI-gen supporting image of a penguin in a lab coat standing in an experiment cavern that seems to be made out of two perpendicular sections of LHC tunnel, with a couple of disconnected LHC dipole magnets on the floor in front of the CMS experiment... which has a sign reading "100m ATLAS DETECTOR" on the front. Another sign, high on the cavern wall, reads "LHC TUNNEL". There is no beam pipe entering the detector 🙃

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/04/2026

Just in case I have any followers in #Paisley or thereabouts, my band #HIPPO are playing The Bungalow in a couple of weeks, among an eclectic lineup. Tickets are cheap as chips, come see me hit some drums 😀

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/04/2026

Wonderful as usual from @doctorow , on the substantial recoil from American Trumpism driving green revolutions and decoupling/diversifying from US big-tech crap: pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#… But I laughed hardest at these two […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/03/2026

My god, yes. Excellent article from The Reg. If I were in business, these are the sort of people I'd want advising me, not the fanboys. www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/ai_b…

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/03/2026

Nation-scale 🔥, but what do you think the product is?

Snippet from a Google AI overview mentioning a "British-style, lower-quality product" than the original. It's not 100% clear whether being low quality is an intrinsic part of "British style", but we Brits know in our hearts...

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/03/2026

Still no meaningful action from UKRI and STFC, so letter-writing time: www.insectnation.org/blog/ukri-stfc…

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/03/2026

I don't really know why I made this, but it didn't seem to already exist on the internet, so in the interests of completism...

A wolf howling the first line of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness"

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/03/2026

Excellent weekend ski tour on the Trient glacier, but I took a big slide down a very steep and crusty couloir on the way out. I'm fine: minor injuries, managed to stop (eventually), skis retrieved, happily skied out the rest, but a little shaken. I've never […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/03/2026

Thank you, Jonn Elledge jonn.substack.com/p/no-it-is-the-ch… And although unrelated, a special prize for this on Matt Goodwin: "The man’s a shit. I hope he stubs his toe." 😆

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/02/2026

#Glasgow is quite a patchwork of wealthy and deprived areas, particularly abrupt changes on the boundaries of the blue well-off stripe from NNW to SSE seen in the amazing simd.scot map. I was reminded of this today, by the constantancy of the flow […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A screen capture of the SIMD.scot map of Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, focused on NW Glasgow

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/02/2026

Oh great, contract cheating has now involved into a full-chain academic fraud service, from ghostwriting to managing the resulting misconduct appeals. Universities are simply not resourced to counter this level of professionalised student fraud 😬 […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/02/2026

I always have to mentally strap in before reading it, but the Dr Grim column in Private Eye is the moral core of the paper, covering horrifying human rights issues the rest of the media don't touch. Extraordinarily important

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/02/2026

On the early ski bus from Geneva for perhaps the first time since my PhD. Life got busy!

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/02/2026

Excellent from Vincenzo Vagnoni on the destructiveness and short-sightedness of #UKRI / Ian Chapman's fiat decision to pull the rug from under UK big-#science projects […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Snippet paragraph:

"""
In follow-up correspondence, Chapman framed the decision as a specific choice rather than a withdrawal from Cern itself, noting that the UK would continue to pay its core membership subscription. This argument indicates a possible misunderstanding of Cern’s funding model. The subscription covers “landlord” costs: accelerators, electricity, site infrastructure and so on. It does not fund the experiments themselves. **By paying the subscription while denying its researchers the funds to build the detectors, UKRI is in essence subsidising the infrastructure for other countries while barring its own scientists fromplaying on the pitch.**
"""

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/02/2026

UCL "impact experts" and NAO on pivoting UKRI to govt priorities. They don't get it, esp the last paragraph: indirect, unintuitive and unexpected is how virtually all big science breakthroughs happened. You don't get paradigm shifts through […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/02/2026

Not the headline DSIT & #UKRI will have been wanting after a week's attempted message management. They must be secretly glad the Mandelson-Epstein furore is taking up most bandwidth. It's almost impressive how bad their comms have been, never mind the scale […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

FT headline "UK to scrap more than £250mn in planned physics project funding", with a picture of the LHC

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/02/2026

I'm still shocked that we've not managed to cancel literature-review assessments in the age of LLMs: the apparent quality of student reviews and reports has rocketed and it ain't because they understand more. 90%+ of students admit using AI tools in surveys […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/02/2026

Particularly enjoyed the intro to Jonn Elledge's newsletter this week, on Waymo in London and the category error of "jaywalking" in the UK jonn.substack.com/p/of-self-driving…

But surely the biggest issue is we simply have a different legal
relationship with our streets from that of almost any major US city. It's
not so much that jaywalking is legal here, as that it's an entirely non-
existent concept: because it's never been otherwise, describing
jaywalking as “legal” feels as baffling as saying that it's legal to drink tea.
The result is that Londoners simply don't respect cars’ rule of the road in
quite the way Americans do, and will happily nip through stationary or
slow moving traffic with just a wave of the hand, assuming everything
will be fine. The moment driverless cars arrive on the streets of London,
teenagers will be playing chicken with the things, making them stop for a
laugh and almost daring them to run them over.

But let's imagine it were possible. Let's imagine none of those barriers
were there. Then, this would be good, right? New technology! Wave of
the future! Exciting!

Well, no. For one thing, driving an Uber may not be the most glamorous
or best paid of jobs, but it nonetheless provides flexible income of the
sort many people would feel the loss of. It is not obvious to me that
replacing that with handing yet more money to big US tech firms is
actually an improvement.

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/02/2026

Oh for fucking fuck's sake. These eejits just passing on the government's "clear direction" to destroy the country's R&D and advanced-skills foundations, rather than pushing back to explain how it actually works and that what they break can't be easily put […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/01/2026

Omg, from THE: this is so going to get slammed down, and UKVI is going to treat us _all_ as a threat to be policed, rather than this bunch of bottom-feeders. Interested to see how the (further down the article) "excellent students with proper […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/01/2026

Saw this on a Quora answer and... hope you like 😆 qr.ae/pCco95

In science, we stand on the shoulders of giants. In computer science, everyone
stands on each other's feet. In web design, everyone lies on the floor in a
puddle of cheap gin and vomit.

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/01/2026

I expect this is what we'll get from a more advanced alien civilization if it finds us. "Ah yes, environmental and social crisis, catastrophe inequality, overfixation on generalised barter tokens... textbook planetary adolescence"

Clippy the paperclip, with text: Looks like you're suffering from late-stage capitalism, have you tried turning your society off and back on again?

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/12/2025

Wait, they get _bonuses_, too? No-one of the rest of us get fricking bonuses! Salaries 7x the academic median not enough, apparently 🙄

THE headline: Vice-chancellor bonuses growing despite sector funding crisis

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/12/2025

I'm literally looking for the academic travel expenses system, you overconfident idiocy machine

A typically off-the-mark AI summary wasting space at the top of a Google search:

"""
Al Overview

The term "PPUK travel particle physics” refers to the intersection of particle physics research and the theoretical concept of "travel" or motion in the quantum realm, often involving phenomena like "backflow", “negative time", and "quantum time travel” simulations.

Quantum "Travel" Phenomena: In particle physics, the concept of "travel" is very different from everyday experience and involves complex quantum mechanics:

...
"""

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/11/2025

Well there goes one of the few remaining reasons to visit the US, if you're not already boycotting it for being a borderline-fascist, racist dystopia. Well done 👏

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/11/2025

Oh did it? And without permission, too? Hard pass. (Click, click... all AI disabled.)

ACADEMIA
Our Al turned your paper "CEDAR:
tools for" into a shareable comic.
Don't want Al to create outputs of your papers? Change Al Settings

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/11/2025

"Badenoch" => drowning. Nominative determinism strikes again

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/11/2025

I see us reminiscing in the future about when "AI" was so dumb but omnipresent that every web-search return was prefixed with confident explanations of e.g. how ME and MD are the first two letters of Maine and Maryland. Trillions of dollars thrown at it, and […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A screenshot from Google's Al Overview:

"""
The U.S. state code for Maine is "ME" because it is the simplest and or most direct abbreviation, using the first two letters of its name, a common pattern for many states. This two-letter system was standardized by the USPS in October 1963 for postal and data processing efficiency, and "ME" fit the pattern well.

« Simple pattern: Using the first two letters of the state's name is a straightforward and easy-to-remember method, used for states like Maryland (MD) and Massachusetts (MA).
...
"""

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/10/2025

Good piece, interestingly positive about Russia's inability to win militarily in Ukraine, while still sanguine about the needless terror, death and destruction: luciantruscott.substack.com/p/why-b…

What happened to Putin's big attack on Ukraine? His generals told him
he would take Kyiv in five days. Today, restaurants and movie theaters
are open in Kyiv. The government is functioning. The same Ukrainian
president whom Putin thought he would force from office is still the
country's leader.

After nearly four years.

Warfare for big countries has become one huge Vietnam. Spend
hundreds of billions. Commit millions of troops. Blow shit up. Invent and
put new kinds of weapons into the war. Play the game of catch-up with
remote controlled drones and computers that hack the enemy's
defenses. Shoot more artillery shells. Fire more missiles. Blow more shit
up.

Where is the victory? Where are the Russian flags over Kyiv and Kharkiv
and Kherson? What is Putin doing on the phone with Trump? He's
demanding that Ukraine give up territory that he cannot take having
spent the lives of nearly 300,000 Russian soldiers this year alone. Trump,
to his everlasting shame, actually listened to him in Anchorage, and then
turned around and told President Zelenskyy what Putin said. Then he
lectured Zelenskyy at the White House last week, telling him once again
that he would have to give up Ukrainian land that his army has fought
over for four years.

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2025

"Not intended to be interesting debates" 😂 I hope they get Streisanded over this inept cancellation. It's so dumb that parties sell opportunities to disinform their own legislators 🤦‍♂️ www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/o…

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