Nature Presents its Data

The manifold patterns that clouds form in the sky aren't just subjects for aesthetic appreciation, they 'are nature’s way of drawing in the sky the physics of what exactly is going on in the air ... If you can reduce their shapes and patterns to numbers and plug them into mathematical formulas, perhaps you can predict the weather, or even forecast changes in the climate.' You can see the interface at work in NOAA / NASA's jointly-produced animation of the 2008 hurricane season. It's certainly a pretty interface, although we're still not too adept at reading it intuitively ...
But then again it must be difficult to design an interface anywhere near intuitive when the data to be presented is so myriad and complex. It applies to other masses of data too---Gapminder World, a fine example, tries to intuitively present socio-economic time-series data across countries and regions. A successful interface would achieve more than just look good: it would help make sense out of raw information; it would help us make use of the data productively in a way that a poorly-presented version could never hope to do. Sometimes presentation really does make all the difference.