I heard about this great open source app called Grand Perspective (Mac only) for quickly and visually finding what files are using up the most space on your hard drive. It's simple, and does what it says. Here's a screenshot of the scan I just did on my root folder:
At work I've been using more and more into this idea of using visual techniques to analyse complex data, and this is a great example.
The problem with statistics is that unless you are very well versed in the discipline, it is hard to use them correctly, and even harder to explain your findings to others. But with clever visual representations of data, suddenly important patterns just seem to jump out. I think this is because the human brain is basically an incredibly advanced pattern recognition engine.
As I do more and more analysis this way, it seems like using computers to attempt to extract important facts out of data is a stupid waste of time. It's much more efficient and effective to use the computer to do the grunt work of presenting the data visually, and your brain to do the analysis.
