Yes and no. When trying to show quantitative data in terms of areas or angles, then you are spot-on: same issues. But these plots, or chord diagrams more generally, are often used to show relationships (like translocations, inversions or duplications in genomes) in context of other landmarks. This use is common and less troublesome. A real problem with Circos plots is that it's so tempting to keep adding additional tracks of "information" that plots get ridiculous. It becomes like staring at the Voynich manuscript: uninterpretable but so compellingly pretty it must mean something.
"significantly lower level affair, on par of the other Star-something languages for the CM"
I'm not sure what this means. C* and CM Fortran weren't particularly low-level, unless C or Fortran 90 are "significantly low-level". For low-level fun, you'd drop to Paris (or to CMIS for "breathtakingly heart-stoppingly low-level").
One of the things I appreciate about HN is that discussions often acknowledges the pioneers. Way back in the early 1990s Eric Begleiter started Dimensional Foods to commercialize edible holographic technology. He gave a memorable demo at Thinking Machines Corp. where, in addition to rainbows from diffraction sheet molded foods, he showed some simple rendered 3D scenes floating in chocolate illuminated by a slide projector. Very impressive at the time when he broke off a chunk and ate it. The short-term idea was to give a rainbow sheen to breakfast cereals, but I think longer term there was talk of using holograms to distinguish and layer information on medicines. Made quite an impression at the time.
Thanks for this. On the updated video[0] there is an absolutely fascinating comment from a former McDonnell Douglas employee who worked with Maurice Ward and had first hand experience testing Starlite. Among other things, he states that it was actually a family of compounds formulated for specific applications and that "all that stuff about being a hairdresser was a red herring that [Maurice Ward] used to distract people from the fact that he'd spent years in the plastic recycling business," with polypropylene being incorporated into at least some Starlite formulations. Sounds like quite a character.