ProgressReport 20 June 2025

There's a lot of bad news. Kareem is dying. I'm glad I got the chance to see him while I could still interact with him. It seems like he is at the end of the line. I got bad lab results; my Lp(a) and apoB are high. The Lp(a) is just bad genetic luck. The apoB can be controlled with a statin, which I have started. I want to be very aggressive here. We also had a water leak in the 8th-floor lab; no equipment damage, but it wasted several days.

Some good news: Jessica received the outstanding MCS achievement award, and Sindhu has won a USCMS upgrade student award. My recent track record with letter writing has been excellent: 5/5 (Manfred / Byron / Wes / Jessica / Sindhu). This is something I want to keep sharp.

It's still been a relatively slow time for me. My habits and reading have been good. I've been reading a lot of Shakespeare but not really getting that much out of it. I've put it aside for a while and started to read about the French Revolution.

I need more meditation; I will start getting up for it daily. Finally met the neighbors across the alley (Joey and Kelly); they seem pretty normal, all things considered. I played with them in a parent-vs-kids soccer game; I went hard. It was fun and good exercise.

On the work side, the HH4b unblinded results look good, no surprises. I've put in some good work on getting a draft of plots for the paper. This is in a good place and a big improvement on what I did for HIG-22-011.

I set up code to try reclustering jets to improve the signal mass peak. The simplest approach didn't work (not that I really expected it to). I think it's in a good spot for a student to look into.

There's been a lot of good progress on the boosted synthetic "v0" (meaning just declustering the subjets). With Chance, I've made PDFs, and the synthetic data needs to be examined in the plots and repeated for the signal.

Wes had an interview with Buffalo; the practice talk was good.