Story of a 'spinning lady'

Did you notice the figure above? To see the spinning lady, click this link and return back. Is it a spinning lady? In which direction, you feel the lady is spinning? clockwise or counter-clockwise? One can feel the spinning of the lady in either clockwise or counterclockwise. But once you feel lady spin in one direction, your brain continues in that state and insist to be in that state. If you feel that the lady is spinning in clockwise, it is too difficult to see the motion in counter-clockwise direction. But sometimes our brain switches from one state to other state automatically, but changing the state of feeling of brain is difficult to achieve manually.
This is a beautiful eye illusion. Do you know how that beautiful lady, cheated your brains?
Answer is, the lady didn't cheat you, but the cheater is her shadow. Actually, the image shows the shadow of a spinning lady. In this, a 'shadow' plays in important role in cheating you. The pure shadow of an image will not provide the entire information about an object to the brain. From a shadow, we can't predict whether the front side or backside of the object we are viewing. If you didn't understand what I just said, please go through an example.
Look at the picture below.
The middle picture is photo-shot of the spinning lady. Concentrate on the picture and tell what you are viewing- the frontside or backside? It may be both. Look at the left picture. It is the modified version of middle one by adding eyes in her face. Now you feel that you are viewing the front side of the lady. At the same time, you see the backside of the lady in the right picture, but that also a modified version of middle picture with marking of a hair bud. This is important to be noted. While you are viewing the middle picture only, your brain fall in to the mess of finding whether the shadow is of the front side or backside. Then your brain 'randomly' choose one possibility (not actually). But in other pictures, your brain has powerful proof that indicates the state of the lady's body.
Now the problem associated with the spin direction of the lady is not vague. If your brain 'assumed' a side of the lady's body you are viewing, this will determine which direction, she is spinning.

Yo Frankie: Open Game Project from Blender

Do you remember Big Buck Bunny?

'Big Buck Bunny'(Code-named Peach)is a classical animated short film entirely from Blender platform which is open source. The video reveals the power of Blender of course, and also contains a neat story with full of fun. If you didn't see this short film yet, you are too late, but here is the chance to download. The hero in this film is a big Buck. Other characters are some naughty animals named Frank, Rinky and Gamera. I personally like Frank's acting than others. I think many people realize that secret, that is why the rise of new open game named Yofrankie (Code-named Apricot). The name came from Frank's name and hero is Mr. Frank. You need to download the game (~120MB) which will run on a Blender engine or Crystal space. Another good side of YoFrankie is that you can develop it in your way wince it is open source. A number of good tutorials are there published in the official website. Both Big Buck Bunny film and YoFrankie are released under Creative Commons Attribution License. Watch a video of Yofrankie below:

Make your own animations using Gimp

Hey Gimpers,
Gimp is not only an 'image manipulation' program. You can build your own animations using Gimp. It is very very easy. Just try it. There are plenty of tutorials available on the Gimp official website.
Click here for a nice and intuitive video tutorial.