Stained-glass CPI

I'm a bit of a sucker for interesting data visualizations, be they useful or otherwise. Over the weekend, the NYTimes posted a very intuitive view of the U.S. Consumer Price Index, a measure of how and where we spend our money:

An Average Consumer's Spending

Personally, I feel that rectangles (particularly squarified treemaps) tend to do a much better job of displaying the relativity of this type of data, but I have to admit that the semi-random bubbles on this particular graph were very, very pretty. The heat-map representation of rate of change is also pretty cool; unsurprisingly, oil-related spending was the big gainer. The only thing I don't quite get is the exact nature of the relationship between "rent" and "owner equivalent rent", but I suspect a few moments of CPI research would clear that up.