===== Original message from Alan G. Isaac | Fri, 1 Jul 2005:
This seems possibly related to sparkplots:
not really, but sparklines should probably also be scaled so
that the steepest slope is 45 degrees for accurate visual
decoding of the graph. [Edward Tufte has also written about
banking to 45 degrees in his excellent books.}
there is also another interesting sparkline implementation
in Python, using PIL: http://bitworking.org/projects/sparklines/
thanks for the input.