I couldn’t even finish the first Coursera course without starting another one. This time it’s Data Science. Yummy, yummy data that I get to program into submission. We are starting off with a trip through the Twitter API and I finally learned that JSON isn’t as scary as I thought it was when I didn’t know anything about it! Go me! We did a number of things with Twitter and some Python programming. The last part of the assignment was my favorite, the most popular hashtags. Some of my code (for a different section on finding tweet locations):

And my hashtag results from a 10 minute snapshot of new tweets to Twitter:

In theory I understand hashtags. In practice they bug me, especially the ones like the above “#YouWillNotBeTakenSeriouslyIf”. Ugh. Anyway, I actually went wild and crazy and Googled some of the hashtags, because most of them mean nothing to me. I even learned some Spanish! Seamos sinceros = “let’s be honest” which sounds just like another of the type of hashtags that bother me.