MeFi Projects

I've been teaching and writing about data analysis and visualization using Python for a few years now, and an absence of teaching work during the events of this year has finally given me the time to put together a book. There are also articles about various aspects of data processing with the scientific Python stack (pandas/numpy/matplotlib/seaborn) and more to come.
posted by primer_dimer on Nov 5, 2020 - 1 comment

"The Art of Python" was a miniature arts festival on Friday, May 3rd, at PyCon North America 2019, focusing on narrative, performance, and visual art "that helps us share our emotionally charged experiences of programming (particularly in Python)." It featured 4 short plays, a song, and a video remix. I started and chaired the festival. Then I wrote up a retrospective with photos, discussing why I started "The Art of Python", what led up to it, and how I feel about its future. Since I cannot be one of the co-organizers for "The Art of Python" at PyCon North America in 2020, I’ve also prepared a HOWTO guide for people who want to do this sort of thing in the future. [more inside]
posted by brainwane on Nov 4, 2019 - 0 comments

At the PyGotham 2018 tech conference, Jason Owen and I presented "Python Grab Bag: A Set of Short Plays", inspired by the Neo-Futurists' show "The Infinite Wrench". The 40-minute video is up on YouTube and my blog post links to the script and slides, credits the crew and cast, deep-links to the specific timecodes for individual plays, and gives citations for the references we made. [more inside]
posted by brainwane on Mar 29, 2019 - 1 comment

Monolog is an interactive diary bot that prompts you with interesting questions, which it chooses based on the topics you write about. [more inside]
posted by TheMadStork on Dec 23, 2016 - 6 comments

A twitter bot that uses machine learning to define invented words, posting truncated definitions on Twitter and complete ones on Tumblr. Tweet @lexiconjure a made-up word, and it'll define it for you. [more inside]
posted by TheMadStork on Feb 20, 2016 - 4 comments

Neuralsnap generates an image caption using a model I trained (convolutional and recurrent neural networks), then uses another character-level recurrent neural net that I trained on ~40 MB of poetry to expand the caption into a poem. (In this example, generated from a Rothko painting, the red text is the direct image caption, and the rest is the poetic expansion.) [more inside]
posted by TheMadStork on Jan 13, 2016 - 5 comments

My own humble contribution to the learn-to-program literature.
posted by primer_dimer on Jun 24, 2015 - 0 comments

Opinion polls are all well and good, but they don't give you much of an idea of what might actually happen in an election (particularly in a multi-party democracy like the UK). Electobot aims to solve that by running thousands of simulated elections in order to work out what might happen if the election were run tomorrow with the polls as they are. In addition to running the simulations, I've also been blogging the results at Electobot: The Blog. [more inside]
posted by ZsigE on Nov 18, 2014 - 0 comments

A course in programming in Python for literate non-programmers, offered in Brooklyn, NY. [more inside]
posted by lupus_yonderboy on Sep 24, 2013 - 8 comments

Reeborg's World, an adaptation of Karel the Robot, is designed to teach programming. At present, only Javascript is taught but a Python version is planned for the near future. By design, the progression is very slow but the aim is to cover almost all the basic features (and keywords) of Javascript using a Test-Driven Learning approach. Reeborg's World is free to use and does not require any login.
posted by aroberge on Jun 11, 2013 - 2 comments

A general-purpose dataflow programming language based on Python, written in Python [more inside]
posted by ikotler on Aug 16, 2012 - 0 comments

My friends and I built an 80s Joke Line for a hackathon event here in Toronto. You can call in to hear a joke and then share one of your own. It's cobbled together using Flask (a Python web framework) and APIs from Twilio and Soundcloud. The code is on GitHub. We are a bit short on jokes. Maybe you can help with that. [more inside]
posted by chunking express on Apr 18, 2012 - 0 comments