As any occasional reader of Edward Tufte will know, sometimes a well designed graphic can simply and effectively convey complex information. The need for graphics may be greater in the sciences than in philosophy, but even here, it can sometimes help. For example, I had a hard time explaining to my students the difference between the intrapersonal principle of the association of impressions and the interpersonal principle of sympathy until I quite literally drew them a picture. Ruby enthusiasts, now have at their disposable an easy means of producing simple yet attractive charts from quantitative data. Googlecharts is a ruby wrapper for the Google Chart API available at GitHub. To install:
$ sudo gem install googlecharts -s http://gems.github.com
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