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Man In The Mirror

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The Conversion of St. Paul, 1767 by Nicolas-Bernard Lepicie I’ve spent the last few months on self-imposed sabbatical to read and write about St. Paul, a guy, as it turns out, I didn’t like very much.   After reading a biography of Charles Manson last summer, I found more connections between Charlie and Paul than I did between other apostle-saints and Paul.   In fact, Paul fits the profile of exactly what he was:   a cult leader.   By force of will and personality, he cajoled, bullied, commanded, and guilted others into following his lead.   When they didn’t do what he wanted, his rage was legendary. The part of the research I became obsessed with was the way Paul changed his life.   There are two stories about his “conversion”:   one where he is knocked to the ground by a flash of light and a voice demanding to know why he is persecuting the followers of Jesus; and two, a quieter, more internal change from persecutor to early Church leader.   W...
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No Strangers To Tragedy

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Courtesy CBS News Two recent stories continue to haunt me, as I’m sure they haunt the rest of the nation. At a Pennsylvania high school , young Alex Hribal, age 16, greeted his fellow students one morning last week by stabbing 21 of them with a set of kitchen knives.   He also attacked a school security officer.   Four of his victims remain in critical condition. Tomorrow, the school will reopen so parents and students can do a walk-through.   The school plant has been cleaned and sanitized of the blood and gore, but the fear, I’m afraid, will be much harder to clean away.   Classes begin on Wednesday, but it is safe to say no one in the community will be the same again. Hribal did not stand out as a troubled teen before the rampage.   Mental illness does not necessarily broadcast its presence to the world before bullets fly or steel flashes, bloodstained and corroded, in a school hallway.   There are sleepers out there, psychologists warn us.   Some...
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Encoding permutations as integers via the Lehmer code (JavaScript)

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This blog post explores the Lehmer code, a way of mapping integers to permutations. It can be used to compute a random permutation (by computing a random integer and mapping it to a permutation) and more. Permutations A permutation of an array is an array that contains the same elements, but possibly in a different order. For example, given the array [ 'a', 'b', 'c' ] All of its permutations are: [ 'a', 'b', 'c' ] [ 'a', 'c', 'b' ] [ 'b', 'a', 'c' ] [ 'b', 'c', 'a' ] [ 'c', 'a', 'b' ] [ 'c', 'b', 'a' ] Computing a permutation: a naive solution In order to motivate the Lehmer code, let’s first implement a naive algorithm for computing a permutation of an array. Given the following array arr . var arr = [ 'a', 'b', 'c' ]; A simple way of computing a random permutation...
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