So, as some of you already read when I accidentally leaked my own blog post, my last day at Speaking of Faith was last week. Here’s an excerpt from the completed post on SOF’s blog:

But, the question remains how to say goodbye? Sometimes the best thing to do is look to those you admire. Included above is the last panel from the last comic strip of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. It doesn’t exactly say goodbye, which is perhaps part of why I love it.

Apparently leaving your to job to pursue other adventures is the thing to do these days (go Colin!), and I’m not about to miss out in the fun — or the uncertainty and anxiety that comes with it. So what now?

Well after finishing up work last week in D.C. I bussed it up to New York City for a few days, which is where I’ll be moving at the end of this Summer. Some friends and I will then begin work on the yet-to-be-pinned-down thing we’re calling The Notion Collective, and my lovely partner Ariel is also coming — to head to graduate school. All very exciting news, of course!

But in the meantime, I’ll be in the Twin Cities doing what I’ve been doing so far. MNKINO is still up an running (in fact our next screening is next week), and we have a few exciting things planned for the WBSC this summer.

And, of course, I’ll also be enjoying spring/summer in the Twin Cities. So who wants to go to the beach?

Note: Crap, this is what happens when you attempt to draft blog posts on vacation — forgetting to hit “draft.” Stay tuned.

Update: You can now read the completed post on Speaking of Faith’s blog.

Howard Zinn at the O’Shaughnessy Theater last year. My thoughts on Zinn’s passing, Obama’s first State of the Union address, and Black History Month in “The ‘People’s Historian’” on SOF Observed.

Being Serbian, I never learned to hate the Croats, as many did. I rather felt sympathy as a Croatian town waved goodbye to us in flames. In 1995, Croatia successfully executed their plans. Ethnic cleansing. We left our homeland, my heaven on earth.

We’ve been more actively seeking submissions for the Speaking of Faith blog, and so far the results have been wonderful. Check out this stunning photo essay “Attachment and Destruction” by Goran Vrcel.

Calvin and Hobbes: Math Is a Religion

I’m a total sucker for anything Calvin and Hobbes. (And leave it to Mr. Gilliss to provide a transcript for a comic strip!)

speakingoffaith:

Trent Gilliss, online editor

Some good clean humor to start the day, direct from one of my favorite comic strips via a tweetmeme.

For those who can’t easily read the word bubbles, a transcript:

First frame
Calvin: You know, I don’t think math is a science. I think it’s a religion.
Hobbes: A religion?

Second frame
Calvin: Yeah. All these equations are like miracles. You take two numbers and when you add them, they magically become one new number! No one can say how it happens. You either believe it or you don’t.

Third frame
Calvin: This whole book is full of things that have to be accepted on faith! It’s a religion!

Fourth frame
Hobbes: And in the public schools no less. Call a lawyer.
Calvin: As a math atheist, I should be excused from this.

speakingoffaith:

Live Interview with Professor Adele Diamond
Time: 2:00 pm CST
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada)

On the heels of Krista’s morning interview with Matthieu Ricard, we’re going to live stream video of her conversation with cognitive researcher Adele Diamond. The live video will only appear real-time and then we will substitute it with higher-resolution produced video at a later date.

speakingoffaith:

Between Order and Mystery
Andy Dayton, associate web producer

The title of this slideshow, “The Myth of Order,” is in reference to a statement made by James Prosek, our guest for last week’s program:

Nature really is chaotic. The real myth is the one that the Natural History Museum promotes in its collections and in its family trees and genealogies. The real myth is the myth of order.

Interestingly enough, earlier this week one of our podcast listeners alerted us to a New York Times article by Carol Kaesuk Yoon that adds another perspective to the naming and ordering of nature. While Prosek’s words lament a loss of nature’s magic to the rigid confines of Linnaean classification (named after the “father of taxonomy” Carl Linnaeus), Yoon’s essay mourns the loss of popular interest in taxonomy:

In Linnaeus’s day, it was a matter of aristocratic pride to have a wonderful and wonderfully curated collection of wild organisms, both dead and alive. Darwin (who gained fame first as the world’s foremost barnacle taxonomist) might have expected any dinner-party conversation to turn taxonomic, after an afternoon of beetle-hunting or wildflower study. Most of us claim and enjoy no such expertise.

And, she relates this loss to a divestment from the natural world:

We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live in the midst of a mass extinction, of the rapid invasion everywhere of new and noxious species, entirely unaware that anything is happening.

I find it interesting that these two perspectives on taxonomy can seem completely at odds, while at the same time come from the same sense of wonder in the face of the nature. Perhaps these two viewpoints evoke a need for balance: without some system of naming we’re limited in our ability to understand the natural world, but pin everything down too neatly and we lose the life that makes nature so attractive and — as Prosek might say — mystical.

(image: A plate depicting the characters used in Linnaeus’ classification system, from Order from Chaos: Linnaeus Disposes.)