A year ago today was the first day of my retirement. As I mentioned at the time, I have several academic retirement projects on the go. So how has the first year gone?
Pretty well, actually. I have been to three conferences: CapoCaccia in May, UCNC in August, and ALife in October. I have had multiple papers published, some of which I did a large chunk of the work for. I have started learning about Topological Data Analysis, and am applying it to some real biological data sets; I've really enjoyed writing all the code for this. Our new LoCoMo ARIA project is fascinating, with our two post-docs making great strides, and I am pulling ideas from both simulation and open-ended evolution into it. My penultimate PhD student has passed his viva. Added to this, I have a handful of other papers and projects also making progress.
And I think I have figured out how to level up the open-ended evolution experiments I have been thinking about, thanks to a chance conversation at ALife that put me on the beginning of the track to a relevant 2003 paper (many thanks to whoever that was; I spoke to so many people there I'm afraid I have forgotten who pointed me in this direction originally). But it's still just pages of scribbled notes and fever dreams for now; watch this space!
On the non-academic side, I am managing to do more reading, too.
So, all in all, a productive, enjoyable, and actually amazingly relaxing, first year. Not having a fortnightly 175-mile commute is a wonderful lifestyle change. It did take me about 6-9 months to stop going: "wait, what is it I'm forgetting to do?" Particularly when doing some of that fiction reading. But I'm now past that, and looking forward to year two of fun research.
