A specific example from my own use. Basic image processing to track a bright spot. I want to be able to take a stack of 100 TIFs, look for a few white spots o

A specific example from my own use. Basic image processing to track a bright spot. I want to be able to take a stack of 100 TIFs, look for a few white spots on a black background - and track their centroids. That's it. State of the art: - powerful, but written in many years ago in a government-controlled, expensive version of Fortran http://sun.iwu.edu/~gspaldin/rytrack.html http://sun.iwu.edu/~gspaldin/rytrack.html - Growing, but written in Java (burnt out two batteries, a fan and an HD trying to track 128px x 128px frames...). Also very difficult to modify/extend/customize/export http://fiji.sc/wiki/index.php/TrackMate http://fiji.sc/wiki/index.php/TrackMate Oh and did I mention it was written in Java? On the data analysis side. I want to take a CSV file with a large number (1000s) of such 2D coordinates and pull information out. Average distance between hop. Total distance traveled. Duration of travel. Extraordinarily basic matrix/vector manipulations of any other random flavor of basic computation I, the scientist, can come up with. Fortunately I'm one of very few biochemists who reads HN. I know how to use Mathematica. I've taught myself Python and Cocoa. But I've never taken a course on CS. I still don't know the real difference between a float and a double.