Mark Monmonier

On E-mail: Electronic messaging is as much a curse as a blessing. Once a quick, cheap solution to telephone tag, it’s now hopelessly polluted by indiscriminate forwards, demanding inquiries from complete strangers, and pleas to scam Third World governments or buy boner pills without a prescription.

Raised to respond gracefully to all letters, I now read less than a fifth of the messages in my inbox. (By contrast, snail-mail, especially if it’s handwritten, usually gets read.) And to the consternation of colleagues who assume we all check our inboxes compulsively, I don't. E-mail is a distraction, and some days I ignore it altogether. Any when not expecting a particular message, I force myself to avoid reading it until after I've finished a chunk of real work.

Listservs are a related aggravation. Some are interesting and even useful, but when the banal chatter gets too frequent, I eagerly unsubscribe. One listserve I can't ditch--admittedly, I haven't tried--is geolist, our department's internal (infernal?) newswire. Geolist can be a real pain thanks to junior colleagues who compulsively forward notices about meetings or books they need to borrow to everyone on the list--no matter how specialized the conference or book. Occasionally I've fantasized about "no" votes on their tenure cases, but we really have made a lot of great hires in recent years, and I'm sure I must do things others find obnoxious. That said, I wish faculty orientation would include a 15-minute session on how to set up a distribution list.

Has anyone developed a thoroughly reliable spam filter? Our IT people seem to think not. But if the escalation continues, there's surely a point at which I'll either freak out or refuse to look at e-mail ever again. Or at least make creative use of Outlook's "Out of Office" Assistant.

Araders of the Lost Arc/Info? Got an urge to collect maps but don’t think you can afford it? Map collecting is not as expensive as you might think—and there’s no need to become one of Smiley’s people to save a few bucks. An intriguing hobby awaits anyone willing to be persuaded that collectable need not mean very old and extremely rare. For a hint or two, click here. Me? I own some maps I enjoy looking at but find books about mapping more interesting. I’m pretty eclectic too—This Giddy Globe (1919) shares a shelf with my first edition of Robinson’s Elements (1953).

Formulas for Disaster? In his preface to A Brief History of Time physicist Stephen J. Hawkings opines that each mathematical formula in a popular book on science reduces the potential readership by half. I'm not certain where the halving comes from, but the theory is plausible: a prospective buyer picks up a book, thumbs its pages, spots an equation, and moves on to something less arcane. An editor who worked with me on Drawing the Line in the mid 1990s voiced a similar concern and banned any mathematical notation.

Although Hawkings' insertion of a single equation, Einstein's famous E = mc², did little to undermine his book's astonishing success, I was no less uneasy about including a pair of mathematical equations in Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection. The first is a summation of trigonometric secants derived around 1590 by English mathematician Edward Wright (1561-1615) to calculate the map distance y from the equator to the parallel at latitude φ as

y = d (sec 1′ + sec 2′ + sec 3′ + . . . + sec φ),

where d is the distance along the equator of one minute of longitude. The second is a more computationally convenient formula serendipitously discovered in 1645 by Henry Bond (1600-1678), who recognized that

y = R ln tan (45° + φ/2),

where R is the radius of the globe that defines the projection’s scale. The two equations facilitated the convenient calculation of projection tables that made the Mercator framework available to mapmakers worldwide. For their utilitarian power, they're quite elegant and worth a glance, even though the theory suggests I cut my readership to a quarter of its potential by including them.

If you're a mathphobe, don't be intimidated by these formulas. The book's about their impact, not their derivation.

On Arcane Academese: As editor of The American Cartographer years ago, I declared war on obscure, needless jargon. Revolutionary computer technology required new terms, but a clear, generally accepted alternative was usually at hand.

Techno-geeks are not the only merchants of gobbledygook. Academics eager to “intellectualize” a weak argument often resort to an elitist prattle that’s the scholarly equivalent of the cantankerous Renault Alliance (another French import). What's the point? By most definitions, good scholarship is a serendipitous mix of persistent questioning, systematic analysis, innovative insight, and obsessive but informed digging—with no need, really, for postmodern lingo.

Skeptic Quoted in The Guardian (London), February 6, 2003, p. 3, "Threat of War: Spy in the Sky Good Enough for Most Experts on the Ground," by Stuart Miller: "Only one specialist approached by the Guardian was unconvinced. Mark Monmonier, an expert in space imaging at Syracuse University, said: 'The Bush administration either has little, or is playing its cards very close to the vest. Of course, what they're apparently looking for is not easily revealed on high-resolution space imagery. So much depends on intelligent inference, but inference none the less.'"