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Forget OLAP cubes and pivot tables! As is the case most of the time, 90% of the insight can be gleaned from very simple data plots. To be sure, the remaining 10% does shed valuable new light, but is also orders of magnitude relatively more tedious to distill.

One of my favorite tools for performing quick sanity checks on data and even for inferring high-level trends is a histogram; it simply partitions your data points into a fixed number of buckets, with each bucket holding points that fall within a given range. The resultant bucket sizes are then available to eye-ball, often plotted as bars whose lengths are proportional to the number of elements in the corresponding buckets.

In what may be Governor Schwarzenegger's most sympathetic move yet to make housing more affordable for potential home-buyers in California, he does what he can to encourage young Californians to migrate away from the state, thus setting the stage for home-prices to spiral downwards.

With already ailing education budgets slashed even further, convicted criminals let loose to terrorize innocent citizens and 20% of state parks closed, the Governor hopes that more productive Californians will be encouraged to seek domicile in Oregon and nearby states. This calculated and clever move will enable property prices eventually to reach levels where the 22,000 inmates, who will be in dire need of good housing after their early releases, can afford them.