What is it like to be a bell-ringer in Cambridge?

The trip was definitely worth it for couple of reasons. Firstly, Berlin is beautiful. The amount of work that has been done there after the war to repair all the bombed historical buildings and parks is absolutely stunning. Also the number of art, monuments and museums showing the horrors of the war is huge. I really like the German philosophy concerning these issues: they say that in order to prevent any other war and persecution like this, it is necessary to know our history well and take the lesson from it.

Secondly, Berlin has incredible number of museums and thanks to the MuseumsPass, one can visit them very cheaply (you pay 12 Euros and then you can go to any of the 50 listed museums without paying for three consecutive days). Conveniently, all the big history museums and art galleries are located on one island – The Museum Island. So I have seen the Ishtar Gate and The Statue of Nefertiti without having to leave the safe grounds of the European Union.

Then I arrived in Cambridge. I live in the same house as last year, I have just moved to a bigger and nicer room: it has got three times the number of windows my previous room had (that is, three) and it is twice as big.

As usually, there was the Societies Fair in the first week of the term. Although I have been there twice already (in the first and the second year), I have never noticed the Cambridge University Guild of Change Ringers. This society goes to the church every Saturday to change-ring the bells on the church tower. What is change ringing? According to Wikipedia: “Change ringing is the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a series of mathematical patterns called “changes”. Change ringing differs from many other forms of campanology (such as carillon ringing) in that no attempt is made to produce a conventional melody.”

To be honest, it is surprisingly difficult. We were only allowed to pull the bell rope on the first meeting, and that was hard enough on its own. I hope the time permits me to visit the ringers society often enough so that I get good.

When talking about societies it would be shame not to mention the Stokes society. I became a life member last year and it was one of the best ways how to spend 7 Pounds. They organize popular scientific talks every Wednesday. The first talk of the term was about Ebola and it was given by a person who, if the WHO listened to him in 2005, would perhaps be able to cure Ebola in Africa through bat vaccinations. The second talk was slightly less depressive. It was given by a geologist who is one of the people deciding where the Mars rover Curiosity will move next. He talked about Mars exploration, geology and the search for life on Mars.

The third year is also exciting from the academical point of view. I enjoy the subjects we are doing this year, in particular Natural Language Processing, Quantum Computing, Bioinformatics and Digital Signal Processing. Also, since I am in the third year, I am working on my final year project. The project I am working on is trying to generate mind maps from given plain text essays. I will give you more information in the next blog, as so far I have only started and there is not much to talk about yet. However, I am enjoying it a lot and I am looking forward to having it working.