@griffinevo My cousin got her PhD in marine Biology while spending a good deal of the year on a yacht, I mean research vessel. The whole time I was thinking "I made the wrong science choices somewhere." And other jealous thoughts as I was working for the third hour in a cold room.

Probably worth pointing out the yacht was off the coast of Fiji

I hope she got sea sickness.

@AtlLED

;)

so I've decided to teach myself python - I want to learn how to do some fairly simple simulations of evolution (e.g. simulate selection drift and mutation on a DNA sequence or trait). Anyone know some good sources of information on a) learning python, b) using python for simulation, c) using python for evolution simulations

?

@GriffinEvo I No, but thanks for not asking on Stack Overflow.

@J.Musser such questions tend not to go down to well on there... :)

@GriffinEvo Yeah, they're off-topic.

I've flagged hundreds as so, hence my marshal badge on that site.

BTW any one in an evolutionary biology group should add their group here... projectevomap.yolasite.com

@fileunderwater thanks

Also anyone planning on going to ESEB next year?

@GriffinEvo As for tools, I would also recommend the Ipython notebook. I also think that the Enthought distribution is great (free for academics, Ipython included) at least on Windows.

@GriffinEvo you might also want to look into Perl. I know Python is all the rage today, but Perl is sadly ignored by the newer generation of bioinformaticians. EnsEMBL has a wonderful set of tools for Perl programming that gives you pretty much full access to their entire set of data.

That said, I think I have a friend who is using python to simulate the evolution of the genetic code. He wanted to anyway, I'll ask if he's gotten anywhere.