I recently overheard a colleague complain that we are becoming too visual as a society and that students can no longer comprehend complex ideas, let alone write about them. I couldn't help but think about that as I watched The History of the World in 100 Seconds According to Wikipedia. According the the 2010 Horizon Report (http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/visual-data-analysis/), visual data analysis is one of the key trends to watch as "the options for illustrating trends, relationships, and cause and effect have exploded, and it is now a relatively simple matter for anyone to do the sorts of analyses that were once only the province of statisticians and engineers."