Well, I'm on the first day of a 'complexity summer school', put on my Manchester Uni, hosted at St. Martin's College in Ambleside, in the Lake District, and pre-emptively paid for by my lovely new department. Details may or may not remain available at the school's website.

I perhaps shouldn't have been surprised, given the nature of the topics, but out of the first three lectures, two and a quarter have been totally beyond me. I haven't done the maths. I haven't even done differentiation, which was obviously going to make things rather challenging. Oop. A few others will have to pick up on some stuff (the stochastics chap got into eigenvalues at one point, saying that if anyone had problems with it, they could check in the tutorial), but at the minute its mostly 'beeeeep' for me.

It'll be worth it just to get a feel / pile of handouts and references for the kinds of approaches others are taking. Oh, and the introduction to computational modelling was good, and started to get into methods of validation and error-control.

Everyone I've met so far is either a physicist or a mathematician - though most of them seem to now be working on a bizarrely random mix of problems that come under the heading of complex systems. One physicist has PhD funding to study cellular automata models of firms competing for custom. And that's another striking feature. Like me, there's an in-flux of people with no economics background (and / or no hard social science background - again, me included) who are being let loose on economics problems.

Two factors seem to be involved: many funding bodies are chucking huge wodges of cash about, shouting 'capacity build! Complex systems! Five years! Millions of pounds!' and universities are going 'woo hoo! No probs! Giz the money! Now what!?' This is aided by the fact that there seems to be a tenuous grip on any working definition of complex systems, or when it's appropriate to use complex systems methods.

It's nice to be in a lecture theatre again, even if it might as well be in Martian. But it's making me excited about the coming year(s). Also, unlike the kind of learning I've been used to (waffle waffle book book show off by artificially manufacturing large bibliography through cynical practice at perfecting an eye for tasty, relevant quotes), I'm going to have to gain skills and incremental knowledge, in maths and Java as well as, probably, other specific fields. My brain is going to complain bitterly, I suspect, having been lulled into a false sense of gentle ease.

Reminds me of a Kate Bush lyric:

I want to be a scholar / but I really can't be bothered / Ooh, just gimme it quick, gimme it, gimme gimme gimme gimme...

Right, next lecture...