"I, Carl, shall describe everything"

• Systema naturae
• Complete, consistent and hierarchic classification
• Reactions in Paris
• Can systematizing be scientific?
  • Yes, if open for revisions

Three kingdoms: Rocks, plants, animals. Classify every object that exists, not just life. Stuff not to be in two kingdoms at once.

Never visited tropical areas. Did not know how rich biodiversity was.

Reactions mixed. Old-school to want to "put everything in boxes". Others adulated him.

Is systematizing really good science? Sure, if it's open for revisions, because you can learn about little-known members by inferring from the class they belong to. Also he revised his own work multiple times.

Whale? He never saw one. But it was found they belonged better in mammals, so Linnaeus moved them there.

• What is life? 1944
• Question of entropy
• Life = retained order
• Order is upheld by information (memory) plus energy

• Life stabilizes itself, far from any thermodynamical equilibrium

  Building block of life must be terribly complicated. Protein discovered, must be it! Not quite correct, actually DNA, but he had the right idea.

Life retains order: when entropy increases e.g. a room gets more chaotic, you clean up, put stuff in their proper place. Everything you do, such as standing straight, is an instance of reversing entropy.

When you die, you no longer reverse entropy. Come back to your corpse in three weeks and it smells: entropy has done its work, which was blocked while you were alive.

Universal entropy is universal deadness.

The Enigma machine. How to use the concept of entropy to decode messages.

Other important results

• All life is cellular (modular)
• No current ongoing creation of life
• Photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation
• The details of sexual reproduction
• The complementary structure of DNA
• All life functions basically the same – "The Central Dogma"

Final summary

• Life is not any longer a deep problem for physico-logical scientific analysis
• There are, however, still plenty of interesting problems. For example: How do complex organisms manage with such few genes?

I was reading a Reddit thread about how it's supposedly so difficult to learn coding with #adhd. (I can't find it now.)

I find coding the ideal activity – constant stimulation, nonlinear problem-solving, and it suits an incremental work style like when you distract yourself from a sub-problem in favour of another. But I recognize that it's demotivating when you start out and don't know anything.

It's fun once you have most of the fundamental computer concepts in hand, but how do you get there?

My story was incremental and accidental. I never decided "OK I'm going to learn programming" and sat down with a textbook. That wouldn't have worked.

My story was more a transition from simply being a "power user" to deploying more and more advanced solutions to fix problems or get things done on my computer.

Things like installing mods for video games. Writing direct HTML for a profile page on one of the pre-Facebook social media. Mass-renaming a folder of songs to satisfy my perfectionism.

A big shift came with installing Debian GNU+Linux on a MacBook. The process of setting it up had a lot of unexpected roadblocks. Even more so for ricing it (customizing it the way I liked it). Luckily I didn't know that ahead of time. It was just one problem or one minor irritation at a time.

Somehow, I picked up shell scripting, regular expressions, Git, #emacs… The rest is history.