Today was day #1 of the Boreas Systems Thinking and Tools Workshop (day #2 is tomorrow). It was another long day as it ran from 9am-4pm and it had a MATH section! Yes, math and even worse than that- it had calculus! So not only was is super early and I had very little sleep, I also had to deal with calculus (which in all my many years of higher education I have never taken – I got away with taking algebra, the history of math, astronomy, statistics (where we had to use paper and pencils as calculators were not allowed), and environmental science for the math/science component that was needed for various undergraduate degrees…behold the power of a humanities education). Despite the math trauma, the workshop was interesting, the lunch was wonderful, and part of the day was spent playing around with an online systems dynamics modeling software called Vensim. As you might expect, my evil Mac and I had a few issues running and using the software, but luckily one of the grad students kindly helped me out.
p.s. I also made a ‘Watership Down’ joke (we were discussing bunny populations with the modeling software) and no one got it. Sigh.
