ideas to work on:
molecular dynamics simulation [guy next to me in the cafe is talking about this]
drawing cool graphs: art through plots, 2D and 3D
computational linguistics: create our own T9: see /usr/share/dicts/words for a 1 M file of english words

FIRST PROJECT: NEURAL CHECKERS
Required software/packages
	Python (2.7.*)
	Tkinter - making python GUI's
	PyBrain - neural network library for python
	
	maybe down the line: python-visual (or VPython)
	also, will probably want to get NumPy (math functions) and SciPy (matrix and numerical methods functions)