Or focus on the practical, and use python (or some other nice language) to process screen scrapes, serve web pages, or something else fun. You could write an a

Or focus on the practical, and use python (or some other nice language) to process screen scrapes, serve web pages, or something else fun. You could write an application to scan your twitter feed for keywords, then take some action (send you an email?) if the keywords match. You could process a whole stack of (say) project gutenberg books, looking for how word use changes with time. Then you could try it with different data structures, and see which is faster (guess what - lists take longer than dictionaries for certain tasks!).