Beijing's notorious air

China's always been known for its horrible air. Beijing especially is known as a metropolis coated in smog and soot and other nasty things. On an index where about 200 is unhealthy, Beijing's air recently hit 500, a level that prompted the US Embassy in Beijing, which conducts its own meteorological surveys, to call the air in Beijing "crazy bad," something which they promptly retracted as "incorrect."
That episode makes me laugh. Chinese air is so notorious, "crazy bad" isn't even incorrect anymore. I feel really sorry for people who live in Beijing; they're probably getting an hour cut off of their lives for every day they live in that smog hellhole. I mean, really? Just cause China has such a large population doesn't mean it can not care about the health of its people. It really should make an effort.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131440157
from slashdot.

Reflection on Week 10

Ooph, those labs just increased in difficulty by 10 fold. I refer to the lab where we are trying to convert any given binary number to base 10. It is by far the hardest lab I have encountered, and I took all of one of the two days this week figuring out how to get it to work, and it's still not done! And I still have to do the one after this, which is even harder! And then work on while loop labs! I'm so far behind, it's ridiculous. And the same extracurriculars that got me into this mess occupy my lunches (I sucked on Saturday, in an aside, and so I really need to work during lunch on SciO, and QB was kinda mandatory anyways). So, there also goes my main time to work on my labs and make them up...I'll need to work really hard in class.

Reflection on Week 9

This is another week where I was in class for only one day of the week, missing Monday because I was cleaning up after the Faculty-Student Quiz Bowl match (and then hanging out in Flowers' room), and then missing Friday because I was on a plane to Boston for HFT/Delta Burke. I have fallen miserably behind in labs, sadly.
I did manage to take a quiz and 100 it, though, on that one day that I was there, and I managed to finish my if/else labs and get one for loop lab done. So now I only need to do three more for loop labs, and then the while loops. Ooh, boy, I need to get working.

Reflection on Week 8

I must make a confession; I was not terribly efficient with my time this week. I didn't want to code at all! We just took a test! That will hopefully change next week.
Regardless of the disinterestedness, I did manage to learn slightly about switches. If else if I already kind of knew; it was rather obvious and straightforward. Switches, however, I find harder to understand, especially with the cases. What if the case is not a nice integer but...well, a case? Is it not applicable then, and you use if else if, or can you make it that way? For instance, can you have a case >20?
Hopefully this will be addressable tomorrow.