Insanity

Is it necessary, (and okay?) to sometimes act totally insane in order to preserve your sanity? To make unrealistic demands, give in to illogical reasoning, and insist on the irrational? To give vent to all depressing feelings, albeit in the confines of your room?
I guess it is.. Makes you feel like you are 5 again, and even if its just momentary, gives you a feeling of freedom and relief afterwards!

Finished Silence of the Lambs - in one go (though that didn't help me in any way in staying awake in college yesterday :| ), and I must say it was totally worth staying up till 5, and being at the receiving end of Mayur's tirade for coming late to college.
Anyways, the book deals with psychiatry, more specifically, a psychotic serial killer and a homicidal genius. The entire plot , character development, and mind play demonstrated throughout the books is marvelous, even if bizarre in a way, and I'm totally looking forward to seeing the movie now.

My current obsession is psychiatry, and I'm also reading a couple of books related to it right now. (Again - got myself into trouble over reading one in class :| ) But that made Silence of the Lambs even more itneresting, though I guess this is another of my obsessions which will fade away in a couple of weeks!!

Next on my list to read - The Hobbit. Though I doubt I'll be so enthu as to put in even a partial nightout to read it at a stretch. But felt great to be back to reading books, full-fledged, in the middle of a hectic sem!!

It was yesterday, after ages and ages, that I read a book of 500 pages at almost a stretch. I have always been a bookworm and earlier, used to read on an average a book every week. And for me, there was no concept of reading a book over a period of time. Any barely-readable book in my hand, and my mom would have considerable difficulty in getting me to eat on time.

But in the past year or so, these instances of being transported to another world totally, dwindled to almost nothing. And so, yesterday, I felt amazing for having wasted so much time, sleep, and getting my mom mad at me - even though it wasn't too good a novel. Anyways, having finished "The Class" now, I have an incredible book in my hands - The Silence of The Lambs. And it comes in the category of those "un-putdownable" books.

Starting with the book now...

The Dancing Girl

Came across this really interesting gif today. It is claimed here that if you see the girl spinning anticlockwise, you use your left brain more than your right brain, and vice-versa if you see her spinning clockwise. That claim notwithstanding, I was quite intrigued to find out how exactly the animation can seem to move in both directions. A little bit of practice later, I was able to make her spin in either direction at will. Here's what you can try to control her direction in case you are unable to do so -
1. The simplest way would be to look away for a while and look back, and decide that you want to see her spin in a particular direction. That often works.
2. More specifically, decide that her left leg is in the air if you want to see her spin clockwise.
3. What worked best for me was looking at the shadow of her leg. If you focus on it continuously without looking at the entire image. you will notice that all it does is move from left to right, then right to left. In other words. if you tell yourself to concentrate on the left to right motion of the shadow and imagine her leg to be reversed during the right to left motion, you can control the direction of the dancer with great ease.

This led me to look up on a few things about how exactly it works, though point #3 above gives us a fair idea about what is happening. Since it's a silhouette, at no point can you tell whether the dancer is facing you, or facing away from you. That depends on your perception at that particular moment, and hence the direction of her motion also depends on your perception at that time.

Since I'm lukhha in life anyways, here's a few more links that were very interesting.
Here are a few comments about what people say about the illusion, and while some are quite insightful, most are just pretty stupid.
This is a paper recommended for understanding the phenomenon involved, albeit it went almost completely over my head. However the paper provides a compilation of various such perceptual rivalry phenomenon examples with some explanations here.
The animated necker cube, in particular, provides a visual and compelling explanation of illusions like these. Among the more astonishing illusions were Dale's Colour Cross (Do check the stepwise background removal), Dale Purves Illusion, Logveninko's Illusion, and the typical Checker Shadow Illusion that's been doing the rounds of internet recently.

Top 5 reasons why Pune traffic is so bad (or rather, why I hate it so much)

• Simply, far too many vehicles in the city.
  
• PMT bus drivers driving as if they are on a two-wheeler, and not in a huge bus.
• Autorickshawallas scavenging for fares along the sides of real small roads.
• All vehicles, irrespective of their dimensions, cutting through lanes as and when they please.
• The never-ending processions. I honestly wonder what these people keep celebrating all the time!

Inertia

I have way too much inertia - I'm totally loathe to changing whatever activity I'm engaged in at any moment, even if it isn't halfway interesting. Always wondered why, and still don't have clue!