18.1 and 18.2, due November 26

Difficult:
     I had a difficult time understanding the error correcting codes. I think I basically understood all the examples that were in the introduction about how we can check for errors, but I got lost in section 18.2. I understood the Hamming distance but I'm not sure how we really get the codewords or how we use the codewords once we have them.

Reflective:
     It seems that error checking often involves either resending information or just sending multiple repetitions of the same message. It seems that this could get expensive very quickly, especially for large messages. I'm not sure if there is a better way but it does seem that there could be a pretty large cost with error checking.