Footnotes to a Conversation, January 27, 2025

“Any time I feel lost, I pull out a map and stare. I stare until I have reminded myself that life is a giant adventure, so much to do, to see.” – Angelina Jolie

The Cognitive Life of Maps

I stumbled across an ad for The Cognitive Life of Maps by Roberto Casati. What an intriguing concept, particularly in a week where the Gulf of Mexico and Denali were granted new names. Here is the description of the book; perhaps it will set you to thinking about how we design and use maps.

“In a sense, maps are temporarily alive for those who design, draw, and use them. They have, for the moment, a cognitive life. To grapple with what this means—to ask how maps can be alive, and what kind of life they have—is to explore the core question of what maps are. And this is what Roberto Casati does in The Cognitive Life of Maps, in the process assembling the conceptual tools for understanding why maps have the power they have, why they are so widely used, and how we use (and misuse) them.

“Drawing on insights from cognitive science and philosophy of mind, Casati considers the main claims around what maps are and how they work—their specific syntax, peculiar semantics, and pragmatics. He proposes a series of steps that can lead to a precise theory of maps, one that reveals what maps have in common with diagrams, pictures, and texts, and what makes them different. This minimal theory of maps helps us to see maps nested in many cognitive artifacts—clock faces, musical notation, writing, calendars, and numerical series, for instance. It also allows us to tackle the issue of the territorialization of maps—to show how maps can be used to draw specific spatial inferences about territories. From the mechanics of maps used for navigation to the differences and similarities between maps and pictures and models, Casati's ambitious work is a cognitive map in its own right, charting the way to a new understanding of what maps mean.” [MIT]

“By their omissions, all maps leave room for the imagination, and for dreams.” – Gavin Francis, Island Dreams

Gardenlust

I’m enjoying dipping into Gardenlust by Christopher Moore that describes, in words and photographs, 50 gardens designed in the 21^st century.There are gardens that adhere to geometrical principles (an inverted pyramid beside a flat-topped mound with precise mathematical proportions), an aloe farm in South Africa with flowers ranging from bright blue to coral-red, and a desert garden in Dubai with over 45 million petunias and geraniums, a castle made out of dried lemons, and a peacock of pink petunias with a tail that stretches far downhill. [Hachette Book Group]

A Checkered Past

There are so many different ways to keep count without resorting to a calculator – on our fingers, a tallystick, an abacus, or a checkered cloth. “In the Middle Ages, the monarch’s accountants would use a chequered cloth as the basis for their computing of royal revenues, moving counters from square to square. This process gave us the name of the office of the ‘Exchequer’, as well as the idea of ‘checking’ for accuracy.” [Susie Dent, Word Perfect]

Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I also post occasional articles on other dates, including frequent book reviews and travel tales.

If you share my love of nature, check out EcoFriendly West, an online publication encouraging environmental initiatives in Western Canada, and Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces.