I've always found enjoyment in finding statistics in things that interested me, so here's a few thoughts on project ideas. The main thing is to find a data set

I've always found enjoyment in finding statistics in things that interested me, so here's a few thoughts on project ideas. The main thing is to find a data set that interests you, and use that interest for fun or for profit: - pull down your facebook backup, run it through sentiment analysis, throw it in a db, explore yourself through facebook's eyes! - a while back I was looking to buy a car and used scrapy to process cars.com, ran their vins through a look up tool to find cars that were actually manuals (and not just manumatics, seems few can tell the difference these days). Found reasonable national prices, average miles, etc. - interested in politics? pull down the data sets for voting records, explore your local politicians' voting records, compare them to national averages or historical information, etc. - interested in movies? find movie datasets (or scrape imdb.com, themoviedb.org, etc) and find which genres pay the least per actor, have the smallest cast, etc. Lots of datasets are available online, if not in machine readable format, then in a format that can be easily scraped. Have fun!