Alexander, I'm fine with a more specific argument name. ns was what 
the Timer already used internally.

Antoine, from __main__ import name1, ..., nameN works fine on the 
command line, but inside a function you'd have to declare the names 
you want to pass to the Timer as globals which I find a bit clumsy. 
Apart from giving a syntax warning a star-import affects the generated 
bytecode and produces the (slower) LOAD_NAME instead of LOAD_FAST.