Scientific visualization: evidence and/or fireworks

My book Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997) (with a cover featuring a video still from a scientific animation) suggested some ways of turning flashy visualization solutions (looking for some problems to solve) into credible scientific evidence:

My discussion above deliberately concluded with a brilliant visualization of scientific data by William Cleveland, which indicated how new findings could be achieved by thoughtful visualization.

One look at the current state of the art in scientific visualization was published recently in Science 313 (22 September 2006), 1729-1735:

Further information on the Science project is available at www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2006

What, then, is the state of scientific visualization on the basis of the Science report?