I've long thought it would be awesome if someone started a business along these lines: a news source driven by data analysis; like fivethirtyeight but for analysis of all sorts of news and current events, not just elections.

How about "Freakonomics News?" A reality show using the methods used by the campaigns to figure out the behavior of "cohorts" could be devastating. Marketers have known scary stuff about us based on personal data, even before the Internet. A show based on actuarial data and gene sequencing would be both informative and appeal to base instincts.

I'm currently struggling to find a satisfactory IDE for python for this exact reason. This seemingly obvious feature has to be hacked on to just about every popular coding tool. The best things I've found so far are the ipython web notebook (the only problem being that it stores my code as JSON and has poor/no keybindings) and emacs python-mode (which is buggy as all hell).

NB: The only tool I've ever found that works in the manner I want it to as far as REPL languages go is RStudio. If I had an RStudio that was language agnostic so it could work with python, ruby, lisps, or what have you, I would be a happy, happy man.

edit: if anyone has any suggestions in this regard, please, leave a comment!

I use WingIDE's[1] professional version (which includes the editor source code) and it has the ability to highlight a section and evaluate it either in the REPL or at the current breakpoint in a debug probe.

It also has decent vi and emacs keybinding support, really nice interactive debugger (including template debugging for Django) and great intellisense. It's the best Python IDE I have found, the support is great and I have been a very happy customer for three years now. (I was using emacs for everything before).

[1]http://wingware.com/

Do you know if it supports ipython? I'm on the scientific computing side of the python world, so django is less important to me . . .

It does not unfortunately. You can do interactive matplotlib plotting but it doesn't behave in the same "shell + REPL" way that ipython does.

That math app sounds amazing. I think this is something that would be great to have in a Surface-type device with a touchscreen and a keyboard — I would love to have that sort of input integrated with Mathematica or sympy or what have you. I would never need to fiddle with LibreOffice Math ever again!

The degree to which this is possible has been hugely exaggerated. Yes, you can have DNA mailed to you, but not DNA as its packaged in the human genome.

When you order from NEB or Sigma-Aldritch, what you get is a short DNA sequence (usually on the order of hundreds to thousands of basepairs) in a buffer solution. When forensic scientists do DNA preps of cellular samples from a crime scene or for a paternity test, they purify genomic DNA. This is millions of basepairs coiled around storage proteins to form a densely packed material called chromatin. The procedures used to purify chromosomal DNA would wash away any of the much smaller, synthesized fragments of the sort that you can order from a company, meaning that faking a paternity test in this manner is impossible.

Biotechnology is exciting, but not so exciting as University press offices might have us believe :(

Putting your genome online in this manner is more of a concern for insurance than anything else, I think— although as others have pointed out, discriminatory insurance practices based on preexisting conditions will soon be illegal in the U.S. . . . still, better not to take any chances.

Can you suggest any resources for learning about profiling in python? I'm just getting into scientific computing with numpy,scipy,etc. and I'd be interested to learn more.

I used timeit (http://docs.python.org/2/library/timeit.html), cProfile (http://docs.python.org/2/library/profile.html) and pycallgraph. There is a nice Q&A on this subject: http://stackoverflow.com/q/582336/343834.

Ian Ozsvald has a nice tutorial on high performance python, from profiling through cython and some multiprocessing and parallel techniques. You can find video and other materials here: http://ianozsvald.com/2012/03/18/high-performance-python-1-f...

Nostalgia is universal, but Britain is in the somewhat unique position of having once been a hyperpower and today being substantially less relevant on the world stage.

Not that unique actually. Many (perhaps most) countries in Europe have some period in the past when they were much more powerful than they are now.

There's a reason why a huge portion of the population in the western hemisphere speaks Spanish.

And why quite a bit of Africa speaks French...

Perhaps not truly unique, but two things about the British Empire perhaps make it sting a little more:

1) It ended more recently than other European empires.

2) "The sun never sets on the British Empire". It was huge.

2 was also true of Spain at some point.

Plenty of countries in Asia too.

Russia happens to be in both, and it definitely suffers from this nostalgia.

Seems to me if anywhere Mogolia would probably suffer the most from this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mongol_Empire_map.gif

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire

Except it ended 700 years ago, not less than 100.

Unique? Portions of Italy have seen power come and go multiple times, if you count the Roman Empire. The Republic of Venice was still a going concern when the United States was in its infancy, and had been so for hundreds of years.

Hmmm I use python for most scientific computing applications, but I do a lot of statistical things in R. I've been interested in trying pandas for a while, might be time to give it a shot . . .

My initial thought was that while I've never done any 3D printing so I'm not how hard the plastic is, it might be possible to print something in the right shape and use it to unscrew these? Its an interesting idea, but the screws are likely in tight enough that only a solid metal screwdriver would be able to remove them.

Alternatively, if you're young and single just live with a bunch of roommates — group cooking/cleaning/etc is really cheap.

I for one love LibreOffice Writer and find it to be much more intuitive and configurable than Word. Draw and Calc leave something to be desired, but the needs they fill are better served by Adobe products and R respectively, imho.