Your friendly neighborhood dog I suppose?

Another vote for Python and another free book to add to the rest of the comments...

Where's the +1 Trolling mod when you need it?

Well Star Wars is easy; except for Obi-Wan, all the British are the bad guys while the Americans are the American-speakers. Star Wars can obviously be described as an allegory of the American Revolution. After all, this was made by an American with an American-mentality (Americans vs. British or as Rebels vs. The Empire). Alec Guinness slides just because he's a royal bad-ass and can do what he wants and George was lucky to get that kind of A-list star-power at the time... Best, An American

Wait, are you saying I accidentally signed on to 4chan? I didn't think that was possible!

This is an excellent point, and all depends IMO on what is considered a species. Colloquially, I think species are generally distinguished by their inability to breed with another group. Hence why all the different breeds of dogs are still Canis lupus familiarias, yet can look drastically different from one.

But there are big exceptions to this colloquial definition such as the parentage of the mules. Similar to a mule, this species-conundrum would also fracture our definitions if the Neanderthal/homo-sapien hybrids prove true as predicted by recent studies.

So, what is a species, and is a definition at this point useful to distinguish how REAL cross-breeding phenomena occur realistically?

I hear Mongo DB is web scale.

This was a really stupid thing for Dr. Gleick to do because it diminishes his cause substantially. For example, he was the lead author of the recent Science paper that everyone was making a big stink about having so many National Academy members on. I'm no (anthropogenic or not)-climate change denier, but this is bad. On a similar note, he also wrote this Forbes piece that mysteriously did not mention he was the lead author of the Science paper.

Note that all links to that code and documentation have been obliterated -- interesting, don't you think?

Oh wait, this was a different story whining about how Google was dropping a FREE service. If this is indicative of the hot, daily Google news we get here, is there some way of filtering it out? Or better yet, is there a more succinct way of teaching people that Google drops projects left and right seemingly on a whim (i.e., business case) and should not be trusted with anything important (like the coursework for the Spring class you'll be teaching).