The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

L. Stafford Betty and Bruce Cordell argue that for the Universe to have evolved to its present state as the result of randomly-determined initial conditions is so improbable, that it is relatively likely that these conditions were determined by an intelligent designer. To the contrary, I argue that since the Big Bang was atemporal, our [...]

Hamlet strikes me as a much different kind of hero than Jesus, Aeneas, Augustine, Mohammed, or Genji. All of these other heroes have had either (A) an affinity for a mother figure or (B) a disaffinity for or vacuous ambivalence towards a father figure. In fact, most of these heroes satisfy both of these conditions: [...]

Let’s see if I can get this straight – Genji lusts after his aunt-to-be, Fujitsubo, because of the resemblance she bears to his deceased mother. The Emperor has dibs on Fujitsubo, so Genji sets his sights on Young Murasaki, the ten year-old niece of Fujitsubo who also resembles Genji’s mother transitively. Fujitsubo is “impossibly young,” [...]

I read that the Qur’an was originally an oral tradition, with its many surah preserved primarily in the memories and recitations of ancient Muslims. It wasn’t until Surah 55 that I discovered some of the mnemonic vestiges of this tradition. Aside from the ubiquitous preface “in the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful,” seven [...]

Can we conceive of a being so great that to disbelieve its existence only leads to absurdity? St. Anselm thinks that we understand “something greater than which nothing can be thought,” and he argues that our understanding of this being is such that we contradict ourselves upon thinking that such a being does not exist. [...]

Here’s a neat little algorithm written in python to merge k sorted lists in O(nlogk) time using a k-element min-heap:
# Lists is an array of sorted lists (arrays):
#   [ [...], [...], … ]
def ListMerge(Lists):
  # The number of elements awaiting merge in each list.
  sizes = [len(L) for L in Lists]
  # Create a heap with a slot [...]

Confessions documents an extremely impressionable man’s tenacious search for a consistent and comforting worldview. Augustine transitions from quantitative hedonism, to Manichaeism, to Aristotelianism, to Neoplatonism, and, as far as we know, ultimately to Catholicism, with the intermittent hiatus in Astrology, Aestheticism, and more hedonism. He is motivated successively by the vicissitudes of youth, by the [...]