I've just spent the morning implementing various "faster" median algorithms, and it seems that constant factors, function call overhead (for recursive quickselects), etc make all alternative approaches quite slow. The sort-then-select approach is pretty damn fast, especially since I also think / am pretty sure sorted() is implemented in C...
So far I've tried median-of-medians, recursive quickselect, iterative quickselect tracking indices and partitioning in place, and heapq.nlargest. The implementation in Python 3.4.0 is both cleaner/easier to read and faster than anything I can make by an order of magnitude for 10,000 element lists. I'm sure someone else here can do better than me, but (s)he'd have a hard time beating CPython, imo.
So far I've tried median-of-medians, recursive quickselect, iterative quickselect tracking indices and partitioning in place, and heapq.nlargest. The implementation in Python 3.4.0 is both cleaner/easier to read and faster than anything I can make by an order of magnitude for 10,000 element lists. I'm sure someone else here can do better than me, but (s)he'd have a hard time beating CPython, imo.