Philosophy of Science.

"Philosophy of Science: a very short introduction"
by Samir Okasha

i learned a lot from this book, a really interesting and well written book.
if you consider yourself as a scientist (or to-be) and have never read any book
on 'philosophy of science', try this one. it's easy and worth....

In Search of Memory

"In Search of Memory" by Eric R. Kandel, winner of the Nobel prize.

a well written summary of neuroscience... with focus on memory.
and his life experience and wisdom.

i should have read this book earlier...
then it could have changed my research and even my life.

this is a must read to engineering or science students...

Visual Object Recognition

Chapter 4 Visual Object Recognition, Irving Biederman
in An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd Edition, Visual Cognition, Vol2.

It's about a psychological understanding on viewpoint-invariant object recognition. Especially it says about Geon Theory. Geon is a component of an object, which is viewpoint-invariant and object recognition is based on geons and their relations with other geons.

So far so good...
As always in some psycological research, however, we don't know how to find these geons and the relations from image inputs. With different illuminations, different angles and noise and background, finding geons is a big deal itself in machine-based object recognition. Even the experiments in this book were conducted with human brain. It says just what the result of brain function on visual input is, not how it works in details. So it doesn't say that much about how to implement this concept in machine.

- H. Choi

Programming the Universe

Seth Lloyd, "Programming the Universe," Knopf, 2006

He tries to explain everything of this universe including the origin based on information. In order to do that, he covers broad areas such as information theory, computational theory and quantum computing theory as well as physics, chemistry and biology... almost everything around me... :)
It's a really interesting book... and I learned a lot from it, though some parts are hard to get...

Anyway, my first thought right after wrapping it up is the Fourier series... Say, there is a function, f, in nature, then some basis functions can approximate it. If the number of basis functions goes infinite, the approximation approaches to the function f. In other words, if it is not infinite, it always has some error between the true function and the approximation. Interestingly, I feel like the 'infiniteness' belongs to kind of a supernatural being.

So, always, we have error to explain something, as long as we don't know the true shape. Even the general relativity theory has some errors to explain the true principle in the universe. (It is really really good approximation.) Finally, we never get to the true principle never.. but get to have a just approximation which is most plausible... I mean, the historical truth is totally hidden from scientists... forever.

This book tries to explain the universe in a new way, and it is really nice...
But still in my head I have stupid questions like "So what?" still confused...

- H. Choi