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.
Headspace app has worked well for me too. I have been using it for more than 3 months, meditating for 20 mins every day and I feel calmer throughout the day.
There are broadly speaking two kinds of meditations: focussed meditation and awareness meditation.
I heard a useful analogy of the mind being like an elephant that wants to wander around on its own.
In focussed meditation, we try to focus your attention on our breath, or some point inside our body or an idea. We tie the elephant with a rope to a pole. If it wanders too far, we tug it and bring it back to the pole.
In awareness meditation, we just observe where the elephant roams wherever it wants. That is more like leisurely mind wandering.
FWIW, I am 35 and I feel like my memory has declined from when I was 10 - 20. I used to be able to remember a lot of content for exams, song lyrics, and general knowledge.
Nowadays, I sometimes have this occur to me: I am thinking about something that I know that I know, but I cannot recall it.
> It would be expensive -- requiring a freeze of all running processes while the snapshot is taking place to maintain any level of precision.
Have you thought about distributed algorithms like the Chandy-Lamport Snapshot algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_algorithm) that take a consistent snapshot and do not require a system freeze?