You thought it was dead, didn’t you? Well, I finally got around to fixing a few really annoying and obscure bugs, and integrating some outstanding patches. After an eight-month wait, Python Twitter Tools 1.5 has been released.

New feature:

• New list and mylist commands let you query and view Twitter lists (patch by Anton P. Linevich)

I’m also happy to announce that Python Twitter Tools is heavily used by a recent O’Reilly book: Mining the Social Web. Looks like a really cool title, too.

Python Twitter Tools is, as always, available in PyPI or from the project homepage.

Picture: Harajuku fashion from the totally insane Ridsnap.

So I was in a café in Berlin, drinking an Americano, reading in Le Monde (en français) about the indiscretions of the Italian prime minister and I had an epiphantic flash-view of myself from the outside. I realized I have never been so fucking Eurotrash in my life. Putting it in words like that makes me feel like I’ve just rolled out of a later William Gibson novel. That’s me: a post-national. An upper-middle-class geekling having achieved socio-cultural escape velocity. And why not? I’ve always felt out of touch with every scene I’ve rolled into. Might as well roll them all together. Be your own scene, right?

Later I’ll eat Vietnamese food and maybe drink Turkish liquor and read manga to cement my post-cultural status. Let’s implode culture until it births something new and unintelligible.

I made a mix for my friend Jeremy’s mix tumblr blog thing “Slackula Radio“. Given that most of the mixes so far have been indie rock, drone, and experimental, I decided to buck the trend and submit an electronic music mix full of rave horns, dreamy pads, and heavy beats. Because bucking the trend is how I do.

Listen to my mix: Post Raver on Slackula Radio

1. You can go to 23andme.com and for 200 USD you can get your DNA analyzed. You get a report containing 966,977 SNPs. (You also get access to reports to explain what that means so it isn’t just a pile of data).
2. NPs are “single nucleotide polymorphisms”, single variations in DNA that affect how various proteins code. Scientists only know what approximately 14,515 of them do. There’s somewhere between 10 and 30 million possible SNPs in the genome (depending on which unreferenced wiki page you believe).
3. You can download some guy’s entire SNP report from GitHub if you want.
4. Assuming 30 million SNPs, and assuming SNPs are the only allowed form of genetic variation in a “human” (which is actually not at all true, but bear with me…) there are approximately 10^(10^8.324868269729194) theoretical humans that can be created. This is a number so large it can’t be written down in conventional mathematical notation, and is vastly larger than the number of atoms in the universe.
5. YOU ARE A UNIQUE AND BEAUTIFUL SNOWFLAKE.