@chl, thanks for the links, I downloaded the pdf, and bought the book from Amazon. I have been putting off these techniques for too long. The group I was in never paid much attention to them. Have you used them before?
perhaps someone here might be able to answer the first part of my question on Biology SE (thought I'd just pop a message here rather than cross-posting) RE extracting variance components from lmer - biology.stackexchange.com/questions/21993/…
Physical data visualizations, dataphys.org/list, some very neat historical examples.
Does anyone know if there is an original picture of the Galton box? Also I'm not quite sure why an abacus is not included (if the quipu counts surely an abacus would as well.)