My friend Erik sent me some biostatistical data
that he has been tracking over past few weeks. I
decided to see what it would look like as a
sparkline.
There are a bunch of libraries and web services to generate these things, and I
tried to find the simplest one implemented in Python. I found
Matthew Perry's module, installed
PIL, and I was good to go. (I made a
slight change to spark.py to expose the background color of the image as a
parameter so the graphic would match my current theme.)
More data to visualize: I've been recording my gas mileage information
since November, 2006. We can also note that gas
prices 
have been steadily climbing since then (low:
$2.10, high: $4.26). The simplicity and attractiveness of these graphics make
them particularly compelling. I can think of a few places where using sparklines
would be useful...