"Valence"

this is freaking cool. "Valence" (and i only capitalize it because it is a proprietary name in this case) is a fascinating tool for visualizing vast quantities of data and the organization of relationships within data. think space-age 3d visualization that is self-organizing, self-optimizing, and dynamic. i highly recommend a tour of ben fry's website... he (as the system's creator) has a much better and more detailed explanation of how this works, as well as a 'real-time' example of this thing in motion. i immediately started thinking about how this could be applied to visualizing spatial or temporal relations in earth-processes in order to assess potential hazard or interesting trends in tectonic organization. death to spread-sheets and data-bases!

~t