D3.js is, to me, one of those tools that makes things possible rather than making things easy (although I only use javascript once every year or two so it's alw

D3.js is, to me, one of those tools that makes things possible rather than making things easy (although I only use javascript once every year or two so it's always a slog). This is big: it's like a zero-to-one step, rather than incremental progress. This fall I made an interactive visualization of the fine-grained plate tectonic model I have built for the Himalaya and Tibet for a research project[0]. The model building process (i.e., finding the relative motions of the plates) is largely solving a system of linear equations, so it's not immediately apparent what the results really mean and whether they are acceptably realistic. D3.js allows me to explore and understand my own scientific results so much more thoroughly than the static quiver plots that I was making in Matplotlib--being able to pan and zoom a globe (not just a projected map!) and see the tectonic plates move through time is phenomenal. Being able to share the results so trivially as a web page is a huge force multiplier as well. Thanks so much, Mike! [0]: http://rocksandwater.net/blog/2020/11/tibet-blocks-js/ http://rocksandwater.net/blog/2020/11/tibet-blocks-js/