title: Algorithm to "smooth out" data values for visualization
body: <p>I'm reading some data for countries around the world and am playing with Google's visualization gadgets, in particular the <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/geomap.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">map visualizations</a>. The problem is, that the US always comes out way in front. While most countries have values between 1 and 50, the US consistently has a value of 2000+. Which means in the visualization, it's hard to tell the difference between all the "small countries", as they all get about the same shade of pale green, while the US always is a fat dark green.</p>
  
  <p>I don't particularly care about the accuracy of the visualization, so I'd like to smooth out or average out the values a bit so that there's a visible difference between the very-low, low and not-so-low countries. What's a good algorithm to do that?</p>
  
  <p>A pretty simple problem, but I'm not a math guy at all. ^_^;;</p>