flyaway

I spend about 8 months of the year teaching pandas to journalism students, and it's a wild ride! Despite some of the iffy syntax and pandas' seeming inability to standardize parameter names, the students seem to grok the workflow much more quickly than wrangling lists and dictionaries in the "normal" world of Python.

I know everyone loves the reproducibility Notebooks supposedly bring to the table, but without a doubt my favorite part is the ability to export super-unattractive matplotlib charts as PDF, clean them up in Illustrator, and suddenly find yourself with publication-quality graphics. Knowing you're producing something more than just some numbers to toss in a story can be a strong sell to a lot of folks.

That's fantastic! A perfect combination of tech and use case.

If you're looking to get into Landsat imagery yourself, I highly recommend the command line tool landsat-util[1] (although you do need to install it using Python 2). It allows you to search with lat/lon pairs, cloud cover, etc, and comes with tools to automatically do the band combining for you so you can have easy real-color images.

I find the the browser-friendly tools like LandsatLook[2] or Earth Explorer[3] to be more difficult to use, but if you're interested USGS has posted some great tutorials for them on YouTube[4]. There are also some interesting ideas about how to use the data itself beyond just creating pretty pictures.

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[1]: https://github.com/developmentseed/landsat-util

[2]: https://landsatlook.usgs.gov/

[3]: https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/user/usgs/search?query=landsat

Apples don't really all have the same "season" - even though they have a time to be picked, more tart apples are meant to be stored in cool conditions, with the starches converting to sugars and the acidity dropping over time.

For example, the Newtown Pippin: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/05/dining/it-s-crunch-time-fo...

> [the judge] made the extraordinary finding that Public.Resource.Org is engaged in "commercial" copying despite being a nonprofit, stating that the organization "profits" by "the attention, recognition, and contributions it receives in association with its copying and distributing the copyrighted OCGA annotations, and its use was neither nonprofit nor educational."

I know legal definitions might not always mesh with lay definitions, but is this a standard interpretation of "commercial?" It makes sense if you factor in that the grants public.resource.org receives (a few 100k a year) are directly related to their presentation of information, but the quoted passage seems a bit all-encompassing.

> It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one would you pick for this set of requirements and why?

I play this game with my students on the second day of class, along with "read all these people fighting on StackOverflow and tell me the answer you have the most faith in." They split 50/50 between terrified and super pumped about how much trust they'll be putting in Random Internet Code.

It's pretty cheap to have soil samples tested, but it winds up just confirming what you expect - our NYC backyard had 18x the upper limit for lead! Definitely raised beds.