and perform a few trivial manual cleanups.
There are a few more substantial warnings that were left alone
(several list comprehensions that redefine a variable
and several instances of assigning a variable to a lambda expression)

...in order to make the code PEP8 compliant and easier to read.

This simply changed two instances of `catch Exception, e:`
to `catch Exception as e:`

Modernize with futurize -2
Group imports properly
Change `import numpy` to `import numpy as np`
Add `# noqa` to one line added by futurize to hide a pep8 warning

futurize added some unnecessary `list(...)` for safety;
I removed the ones that are not required.

...to avoid redefining local variables