Paul Kedrosky has a nice Many Eyes-based visualization of — of all things — Warren Buffet’s latest letter [.pdf] to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Here it is as a two word tag cloud:

A nice hand-drawn overlay of the geographical distribution of schools of Muslim jurisprudence (fiqh) from Wikipedia. This kind of map will, eventually, become a layer that you will be able to drop into your own analysis. For example, what is the rate of women’s secondary education in the Islamic world? How does that map to these schools of interpretation? And so on.

Note especially the discontinuous distribution of the Shafi (Shāfi‘ī) school, the second largest by number of adherents, presumably due to its prevelance in populous Indonesia. It’s the most ‘maritime’ of all of the schools, with adherents in east Africa, Yemen, parts of south Asia and all of southeast Asia. In the past, it had followers in the Hijaz, the coastal Red Sea communities in western Saudi Arabia, and I wonder if the hard line dividing eastern and western Yemen in the map reflects ground truth. (The eastern Yemeni region of Hadhramaut was a source of Muslim traders and preachers pivotal for the conversion of southeast Asia.)

Actually, it would also be cool to see this over time, because I have to suspect that the distribution was continuous at one point from the Horn of Africa up through the Red Sea into the eastern Mediterranean, including the Levant, Syria and what is now Jordan. It’s not indicated on the map, but Kurds are Shafi too. The eastern Mediterranean is marked on this map as “Hanafi with Shafi rites.”

So, some time in the future, we’ll be able to overlay a map of late medieval maritime trade routes with the spread of the Shafi school of Islamic jurisprudence and I bet they’ll fit together nicely.

Juice Analytics has a useful Chart Chooser that, according to them, answers the questions: “What type of chart should I use to show my data? And, “How can I make good looking Excel or PowerPoint charts?”

MIT’s Ben Fry (of Zipdecoder fame) has a new book out about data visualization; it should be good, but I haven’t read it yet.

Apparently, there’s a lot of controversy about the value of dashboards; here’s an example of a telesales dashboard done right.

There’s a Prado Medialab in Madrid that works on visualization issues, amongst others.

A neat mindmapping application built on top of Wikipedia. (This category of tool, using Wikipedia as a knowledge base, is fascinating, I think.)

An interesting map of white American regional accents that are ‘non-rhotic,’ r-droppers in other terms.

With the improvements to Google Maps still coming fast and furious (latest: ‘terrain’ layer with beautiful cartography and a ‘use mass transit’ option), it won’t be long before we can map languages and religions and jokes to this cool view from Strangemaps:

although it is a shame that we don’t have a similar view for the rest of the world.

One thing to note, however, is that the eastern reach of this 20-40% light hair band, which may well encompass Afghanistan, does not include Alexander’s Macedonia or any of modern-day Greece, suggesting that either the blondes were subsumed into later darker-haired populations or that the light-haired Afghans aren’t at all related to their putative Selucid ancestors. Herodotus, help!

But are Gallegos blonder than other Spaniards? And what is with the boot of Italy? Is that a Norman remnant? Is that possible?

Note also the relative dark-hair’dness of the Irish and the highland Scots.

I can’t wait to be able to overlay, say, a map of Catholic-ness over this one.