The PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test is administered to 15 year olds in industrialized countries every three years. The 2006 results were just released and show that US students are ranked 17th out of 30 in science and 24th in math. About 1.3% of students reached the highest level on the [...]
Archive for December 5th, 2007
5 Dec
Snowier and snowier
The snow continues here. Today it was covering the road. When I took Daedalus and Willow out in the morning, they both weren’t having any of it. Daedal balked at the door and Willow was stepping gingerly and obvious wondering what had gone wrong with the world. They finally got used to it, though the [...]
5 Dec
Java Properties
I discovered the java.util.Properties class a couple weeks ago in the ginormous Java API docs. If you’ve ever created a software project where you have a lot of different settings that change frequently, this is the class for you. In my research, I implement all these different algorithms for various things, find out [...]
5 Dec
Python ecstacy
From the most excellent xkcd:
I felt the exact same way when I first picked up python. It was like finding the holy grail of programming languages. To be able to just throw things into a list and access them without having to worry about casting. To throw around functions like they were variables. To [...]
