Look at this simply AWFUL graphic, from a NY Times article on Powerpoint – “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

Check it out here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?src=me&ref=general

Powerpoint, oh how I hate thee…

My question is, “Why is Over Government Capacity” to the left and above “Infrastructure Services & Economy”?  What does that really mean?

http://www.openendedgroup.com/field/

Field is a development environment for experimental code and digital art in the broadest of possible senses. While there are a great many development environments and digital art tools out there today, this one has been constructed with two key principles in mind:

• Embrace and extend — rather than make a personal, private and pristine code utopia, Field tries to bridge to as many libraries, programming languages, and ways of doing things as possible. The world doesn’t necessarily need another programming language or serial port library, nor do we have to pick and choose between data-flow systems, graphical user interfaces or purely textual programming — we can have it all in the right environment and we can both leverage the work of others and take control of our own tools and methods.

• Live code makes anything possible — Field tries to replace as many “features” with editable code as it can. Its programming language of choice is Python — a world class, highly respected and incredibly flexible language. As such, Field is intensely customizable, with the glue between interface objects and data modifiable inside Field itself. Field takes seriously the idea that its user — you — are a programmer / artist doing serious work and that you should be able to reconfigure your tools to suit your domain and style as closely as possible.

“Processing.js is an open programming language for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions for the web without using Flash or Java applets. Processing.js uses Javascript to draw shapes and manipulate images on the HTML5 Canvas element. The code is light-weight, simple to learn and makes an ideal tool for visualizing data, creating user-interfaces and developing web-based games.”

Untitled Mirror is a Processing based program that reads incoming video from a camera and triggers particles from points of the video frame that have changed by a certain level. The result is an image that is fairly representative, yet disappears within moments.

And view some other visualization api’s here - more links here at reddit

Or, if that bores you, simply checkout their Visualization Gallery