I am planning to learn how to write better. I am starting that by maintaining a stream of consciousness personal daily log. Also get more practice by commenting on Hacker News :)
The analogy of the question "What is life?" with "What is a computer?" bring up interesting parallels. The author defines a computer as any device that has transistors, RAM, etc that is, the computing substrate. But there were devices that didn't use transistors, but used vacuum tubes or mechanical gears (like Babbage's Analytical engine), which I think are still computers. We have some good theoretical model of computers: like Turing machines. One possible definition of a computer is any device that is Turing complete.
I wonder what such a theoretical model of life would look like.
|Q-Z| is countably infinite, but |Q| = |Z|. There are countably infinite rational numbers that are not counting numbers, yet there are exactly as many rational numbers as counting numbers.