Lamont Cranston Gives Mother Innocent a Home

In the last installment of our exciting radio drama, we learned that I was innocently occupied absorbing blatant Madison Avenue attempts to get me to nag my Mom and Dad to buy a brand-new RCA color TV, whilst said parents were happily enjoying the nostalgia of listening to The Shadow in the other room. Fans of The Shadow were well aware that perhaps the most famous identity our hero used to conceal himself was that of Lamont Cranston, a "wealthy young man about town."

This posting will talk about an important superpower possessed by Lamont, err... I mean the Shadow, umm... I mean BioFabric shadow links.  I introduced shadow links in my last posting, so if this is making even less sense than usual, go check that out first. But with that intro under our belts, let's pick up and continue working with the Les Miserables network from last time. Here it is again, in the non-shadow, default layout version:

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It almost seems as if Lamont could be a name that shows up in the network along with Valjean, Gervais, and Labarre, but unfortunately he is not in there. Someone who is present, however, is Mother Innocent. She shows up over on the left near the bottom of Valjean's edge wedge.  Here is a close-up:

Click on picture to enlarge

One important feature of BioFabric node lines is that they are only as long as they have to be to get the job done. The node line starts when the first incident link is drawn, and ends once the last link is drawn.  This feature is actually what gives the non-shadow version of the network its distinctive shape. 

So, it turns out that Mother Innocent is not that popular. (Or maybe she is? I have not read the book, nor seen the play or the movie.)  She has only two connections in the network: one on the left end with Valjean, as shown above, and one with Fauchelevent, as shown below. The following detail shows the right end of Mother Innocent's node line. That's Mother Innocent's node line coming to an end in the lower right of the figure, after having the link to Fauchelevent laid down. She doesn't get to have her name in lights over there on the right edge, because she expires before she gets there:

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So this is something to keep in mind when looking at a default layout BioFabric plot without shadow links: not every node ends up having a presence on the right/upper edge.  If it turns out that a node does not have any links to another node that has not yet been seen in the breadth-first search layout, the node line will quietly disappear before it shows up on the right/upper edge. Of course, that is also true of all those nodes with only one link; see e.g. Gervais, Isabeau, and Labarre in the top detail. But it can be easy to forget in the case of nodes with two or more incident links. Without shadow links, you will get empty row gaps on the right edge instead of a dedicated labeled "node zone".

So what happens when you introduce shadow links? Well, every node now gets a home on the main diagonal. That's because even though the "real" links got drawn somewhere over on the left, the shadow links, by design, are drawn as part of the dedicated node zone that appears on the diagonal. Below we show Mother Innocent's node zone in the shadow link version: she does not have any new "real" links (i.e. below the diagonal) to offer, but her links to Valjean and Fauchelevent show up as shadow links above the diagonal:

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And note that all the other one-link worthies I mentioned above (Gervais, Isabeau, and Labarre) also appear here on the diagonal. So this is another compelling reason to get comfortable toggling to the shadow link display: it guarantees that by scanning along the main diagonal you will be sure to encounter the entire inventory of nodes.

So, just remember this important superpower of The Shadow Links, because Lamont Cranston can indeed insure that Mother Innocent has a home!