Rambling

Writing a blog is hard. I need practice so I'm going to ramble a bit.

First, I'm very pleased that Blogger has improved their comment spam detection. Every time I made a post I'd have to come back a day or two later and remove a bunch of pointless comment spam.

Second, I told my daughter that someone claims to have a proof that P ≠ NP. She replied “Well, now we know that N doesn't equal 1.”

I read through the proof and I confess that I don't get it. On the other hand, I think I want to get it, so I'll have to learn some interesting things.

Here's another thing I don't get.

`` E8 is any of several closely related exceptional simple Lie groups and Lie algebras of dimension 248''

``a simple Lie group is a connected non-abelian Lie group G which does not have nontrivial connected normal subgroups.''

``a Lie group is a group which is also a differentiable manifold, with the property that the group operations are compatible with the smooth structure.''

``a non-abelian group is a group (G, * ) in which there are at least two elements a and b of G such that a * b ≠ b * a.''

``a connected space is a topological space which cannot be represented as the union of two or more disjoint nonempty open subsets''