title: What techniques exists in R to visualize a "distance matrix"?
body: <p>I wish to present a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_matrix" rel="noreferrer">distance matrix</a> in an article I am writing, and I am looking for good visualization for it.</p>
  
  <p>So far I came across balloon plots (I used it <a href="http://www.r-statistics.com/2010/02/nutritional-supplements-efficacy-score-graphing-plots-of-current-studies-results-using-r/" rel="noreferrer">here</a>, but I don't think it will work in this case), heatmaps (here is <a href="http://flowingdata.com/2010/01/21/how-to-make-a-heatmap-a-quick-and-easy-solution/" rel="noreferrer">a nice example</a>, but they don't allow to present the numbers in the table, correct me if I am wrong.  Maybe half the table in colors and half with numbers would be cool) and lastly correlation ellipse plots (here is <a href="http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/RGraphGallery.php?graph=149" rel="noreferrer">some code and example</a> - which is cool to use a shape, but I am not sure how to use it here).</p>
  
  <p>There are also various clustering methods but they will aggregate the data (which is <strong>not</strong> what I want)  while what I want is to present all of the data.</p>
  
  <p>Example data:</p>
  
  <pre><code>nba &lt;- read.csv("http://datasets.flowingdata.com/ppg2008.csv")
  dist(nba[1:20, -1], )
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am open for ideas.</p>