Re: Stages of "vegan" retreat

On 16/02/2026 10:15, Derek wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:39:22 +0100, Rupert McCallum
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Rupert. Long time. I haven't seen Jon around lately, and a quick glance
> at his facebook profile shows that either he or someone on his behalf
> tightened it down 11 hours ago at the time of my writing this post. He
> usually has it quite open. He was 74 in December. Hope he's alright. He
> seems awfully quiet.

Hi Derek. Yes, hope he's okay. I was wondering how you folks were doing. 
You yourself are in reasonably good health, I hope?

We've recently bought ourselves a new house in Eindhoven, Netherlands, 
and I'm keeping myself busy with my maths as per usual, plus a bit of 
teaching.

When we get up to May 7, as you realise, I'll be celebrating my 50th 
birthday, and you'll celebrate your birthday too although I hope you'll 
forgive me if I cannot remember exactly how old you'll be. And we'll do 
a celebration for my birthday on Saturday May 9 at our new house with 
some family and friends, and I'll be in Australia from May 16 to June 7, 
doing a celebration of my birthday with some old schoolfriends on May 24 
and a celebration of my cousin's 50th birthday on May 30.

There are a couple of ambitious maths projects I've recently uploaded to 
arXiv and in the case of the set theory one I may shortly receive a bit 
of feedback from a colleague from the University of Barcelona, and then 
at that point I can judge whether or not I want to have a go at 
submitting that one to Annals of Mathematics. I'm also getting ready for 
a talk at the Effective Altruism Netherlands centre on Saturday about 
why the P versus NP problem (another one I think I might be able to 
solve) could be relevant to mitigating AI risk, which is a topic that 
effective altruists are interested in.

I've also been supporting Animal Charity Evaluators and Animal Free 
Research UK and doing a little bit of veganism advocacy work every other 
Sunday with a local animal rights organisation.