[dj-wonk]

I wrote an "abuse of our attention". Here's why. Attention is a limited commodity. Movement attracts the eye. Using movement is fine if it conveys information. Movement that never stops should only be used if each movement conveys information.

In this case, a better solution would be a blurred needle.

It is well known that multi-tasking and context switching has a cost. The same applies to movements on visualizations.

[flukus]

There's very little information it's trying to convey. If you don't want you're attention shifted you can just scroll down.

[dj-wonk]

I don't want to scroll away because I want to see when the mean value moves based on real data, not jitter.

One can convey mean and standard deviation without animation.

When something moves, the way it moves catches the eye. Arbitrary movement is wasted movement when it comes to conveying real information.

Take electron orbital clouds [1]. They are a nice way to show uncertainty with a static image and without animation. Indeed, an animation of an electron moving around would not the tell the story as effectively. A blurred probability cloud is a better way to do it to tell the story of probability.

Also, a blurred cloud is useful precisely because it does not imply that electrons follow predictable paths.

[1]: http://www.scottsmithonline.com/interests/medicalschool/biol...