ProgressReport 10 July 2026
My habits have all been good. I probably could use some more meditation, but have started stretching and wearing the fitbit air, no more watch. I have also made a big push for the pipe. Im liking the pipe, but need to figure out how to use it as a way to relax more.
We have made some AirBnB moves, got more pictures, updated the title and description, added two-night weekday stays, and moved to a looser cancellation policy. We are now starting to get some bookings again. I think the cancellation policy was the big change.
My writing has been strong, I'm keeping a healthy one week in advance for the Higgs blog and am thinking of pushing this to two. My reading has also been strong. I have read lot of Shakespaeare: MacBeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. I have started "the singularitry is near" and have been making good progress on the physics of energy.
There has been a decent amount of social activity: I played poker with Mark and the Mt Lebo gang. I saw Olivito, and spent time with Cat and Tony and with Steve and Hovik.
On the work front… my promotion is in! I think there will be no issues here. There has been some drama with Matteo and Valentina going up early. Its not clear to me what the expectations should be; they're packets are pretty weak and they have chosen internal letter writters that aren't entirely appropriate. I have now been asked by after a pullout…
SAMs has devolved into an utter shit show. Shernell Smith has refused to pay the physics TAs and has stopped replying to email. I've washed my hands of this debacle.
In better news, PGSS has been going strong. We are already starting week four! Its been a good class, with lots of good questions… The TAs have been week, although I havent really pushed them much.
On the 4b side, I have updated the mixed samples with the 25 GeV cut. This required a migration to the new akward2. This was relatively smooth, with claude of course. I have moved to using mutagen to coordinate code among machines. I think this will be much cleaner in the end.
I have done lots of thinking about the claimed improvements from the "jet-less" method. I've convinced myself that this will be impossible to calibrate, but maybe there are interesting lessons to learn. This has lead me to a big SvB study, which has been the mega project this month. I have studied scaling the network size, training data, and adding features (using the mixed data as the background model). This gives potential solid improvement and I have presented this in our internal group meeting. I still need to demonstrate that we can model this in background and signal.
AE has continued slow progress on low pT and it now now seems like its worth doing. Next steps are to validate in Run2 and if all is as expected, setup calbiration of btagging and signal acceptance.
For HGC, we have had lots of good MMTS progress. We are now regularly thermal cycling modules. There has been no production due to lack of bassplates. They still do not really understand the poor adhesion of the kapton layers. Lots of new faces: Inna, Brennan, Shrinidhi all start. They all seem competent and nice. Ive started prepareing slides for the July status review.