What does ** and * do for python parameters?
The *args and **kwargs ist a common idiom to allow arbitrary number of arguments to functions as described in the section more on defining functions in the the python documentation.

The *args will give you all funtion parameters a a list:

In [5]: def bar(**kwargs):   ...:     for a in kwargs:   ...:         print a, kwargs[a]   ...:            ...:         In [6]: bar(name="one", age=27)age 27name one