Some Photos from the Stuttgart Summer School

Recently, I attended the GLOW & DGFS Summer School in Stuttgart. It was a great experience. Here is a picture from there. In the picture to the left you can see Ewa and me. She is a doctoral student from Wroclav in Poland. I will visit her in two weeks.

But, also on a more general level the summer school was a great experience. I had the opportunity to talk to some more advanced students in linguistics, which gave me much inspiration on which way I would take in the future. What was equally great, was the teachers. They really showed us their own current work, and discussed it with us. This way you get a real impression on what scientific work is like and how far you would still have to go, to become a scientific worker. Great! And, though I am still far away from that, the way is not as long, as I thought it would be :-)

And another picture is below. This is from the last evenening.

Some people even managed to set up a blog on their day-to-day experience at the summer school.

First post!

Hello world!

In this blog I will talk about those things, that I want to talk about. Period. As you can see from the name of this blog, I speak German. The german word Pendel means pendulum in English. I chose this name for my blog, because of the big influence that this book by Umberto Ecco had on me. It's called Il pendolo di Foucault. Basically, it is the better version of Dan Brown's thriller The Da Vinci Code. Of course, it was published way before the latter.

This book had so much influence on me! I read it the first time, when I was like 15. I didn't understand anything. But, still, it has an exciting story to tell, it has crime, romance -- everything, all combined in an excellent plot.

Anyway, it was this book that inspired me to study linguistics. Also, Belbo, one of the protagonists, shares my fascination in computers. And the younger protagonist -- I forgot his name -- sets up some kind of semantic network using paper cards, with his later wife. This anticipates a large deal of what I am occpupied with at the moment. For instance, I recently discovered lingbuzz. It's a database of linguistic articles.

For this blog, I am planning to develop these topics a little. And hopefully, I will also find some other topics.