If you look up at line 448, you can see that the data is allocated at the beginning as type "C". It should actually /never/ have to fork (it would be some horrible bug in numpy if it did), but since it was just one extra operation during a huge data read, we figured it wouldn't hurt to add it. The only function I can find in the numpy namespace is `np.isfortran()`, which I'm not sure can guarantee C-order if it's False. I think the lack of an `isc()`-type function also indicates that this is probably overkill... based on the docs here:

http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/arrays.ndarray.html

I think we should be safe not to check (especially given the explicit C-ordering call above). @mluessi, given the lack of a standard checking method, you okay with removing this check?