time

Well, I am now finally living in my apartment in Vienna. I moved in last Sunday, and then my PhD student Hagen came Monday -- he is looking for an apartment, but as with me it is harder than we'd hoped. Then Will came Wednesday -- originally he was meant to come Saturday, but he had to stay in Nottingham for work. Then Hagen found a place to stay (but not to rent) on Friday so Will & I had a few nights to ourselves, which was great, but sadly now he's gone. It is not clear whether Hagen can stay with his new friend beyond Wednesday, if not I guess I will have him again.

I got very little "real science" done last week -- I was catching up on email & there are a ton of professional obligations -- reading PhD dissertations (both my students & others I am to examine), reviewing journal articles & conference papers, writing papers, etc. I did write one abstract & am trying to write two more now. The one I wrote was for a great international meeting on the extent to which non-human primate & human behaviour / evolution are analogous. The abstracts today are for a small working group on the impact of digital personal assistants (like AI ones that could talk to you) on society. That is in Oxford & Will is also invited, we will both be going to that at the end of October.

I hope I will be programming again this week. One bit of "science" I did get done last week was laying out my plans for both papers & simulations for the next 9 months. I need to get the current version of all my code up on my own laptop -- I expect I will not only be writing the simulation but also hacking with the basic AI (or worse, the user interface...) Anyway, I've barely programmed in 5 years, so it would be good to get good at it again.

Anyway, I never said -- since I'm living in Vienna now I have a 40+ minute commute each way, so I may be posting less regularly here, sorry. Hopefully I will get a lot of reading done on the train! I always thought the 30 minute commute I had in Chicago was perfect, because I'd always solved whatever problem I was having when I left work before I got in the next morning, so I always hit the ground running when I got to work, eager to try out my new idea.
Of course, most problems I have as an academic I can't just "try out" -- but if I'm back to programming, it may be a bit like this again.

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