Iraqi forces enter Mosul

By -
The Iraqi army announced today that their forces have entered Mosul.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Man In The Mirror

By -
Image
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...
Keep reading

Rules For Real Life

By -
Image
This week, I stumbled upon a remarkable artist:   Sister Corita Kent .   She was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, but grew up here in Los Angeles.   At the tender age of 18, she entered the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary , a group of Catholic women who, among other things, ran the Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood (now the campus of the American Film Institute).   In the heady days following the Second Vatican Council , the sisters had the temerity to re-evaluate the way they prayed, ministered, and lived, which upset Cardinal James Francis McIntyre , the archbishop of Los Angeles.   Given an ultimatum to conform or disband, the women voted to become a lay community and a nonprofit organization.   Facing declining revenues and financial hardship, the college closed its doors in 1981, but Sister Corita had already made a name for herself in the art world.   Corita ran the college art department, and specialized in creating serigraphs, or silk sc...
Keep reading

Encoding permutations as integers via the Lehmer code (JavaScript)

By -
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...
Keep reading