This isn’t as much as direct response to Rockwell and Bradley’s Printing in Sand as a reaction to it. As I read through their embrace of scientific visualisation, a thought that I’ve been tossing around came to mind again. If visualising data should be concise, precise and easy, can is there any place for the abstract? That is to say, the artistic, the random, and the unfamiliar? Last year, Wordle struck a chord with the masses, despite it not providing much meaning beyond a pretty word count. Perhaps there’s a place in our hearts for the puzzle graph, where we don’t know immediately what’s going on, but we like to savour the time of figuring it out.