It's Christmas Day!

Another year has passed, and it has been an especially productive year for me. I do apologize in advance if this sounds like boasting, but this has been my best year in a long time and I am just so happy that the dark times are starting to be over now. 

As I reported last year, I have been building up my visualization and rendering business over the past twelve months in addition to my work as a physicist and research scientist. Early in the year I was kept busy developing some scientific animations for documentaries, and by the end of the year I had a contract to provide a steady stream of physics and mathematics animations to a new start-up company that is producing a web series called "The Edge Of Reality". In addition, because of my background in theoretical physics they have contracted me to develop ideas and write scripts for their episodes, with the first of my episodes scheduled to launch early in 2019. It is a very exciting project for me and I cannot wait to provide more information on it in the coming weeks and months.

On the research front I have less to report, but still some exciting progress. Over the late Spring months I started work on an amazing new research project in the field of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, and I have a cautious optimism that this could be one of the biggest projects of my academic career. It is still in the early stages, and it is very possible that my initial results will not carry through into the more detailed final calculations, but I am still very hopeful for it. Unfortunately my new found zeal for this project has resulted in me putting some of my older projects on the back burner for the moment, so I don't have any new results to share about those. I am hoping that in the new year I can sufficient time to work on all of them, and hope to have some very interesting results published by the end of 2019. It will depend in part on how much rendering work I am offered, since that work is currently paying better than my research funding. But in time it will all get done eventually and should result in some very interesting research papers published soon.

I was also kept busy over the summer with a busy travel schedule again. As part of my three different career paths, I have been meeting up with people and companies and working on new projects, most of which I cannot discuss yet but which should lead to some exciting news in next years letter. I also managed to take a couple of days off to go to my island retreat again this year, and it was great fun to camp out again beside the ocean and far from civilization. The skies were so beautifully dark that I spent much of the night just sitting on a stump by the beach and looking up at the stars. Such nights always remind me of why I got into astrophysics so long ago. 

So that is about it for the year. Everything else in my life is pretty much the same as it was last year. I am hoping for some other major changes in my life before the end of winter, but we will have to wait and see. Overall it has been a good and productive year for me, and a year of exciting new opportunities. And if even a fraction of them turn out the way that I expect them to, then 2019 is going to be my best year yet!

I wish you all a very happy holiday and a wonderful new year.

Merry Christmas Everyone!