Making Some Adjustments

Yesterday I spent some time with Cynthia Mitchell, a good friend, ex-Wall Street Journal reporter and current Assistant Professor of Journalism at Central Washington University talking about the Borderlands Project. She had a number of good suggestions that I hope to implement over time and one explained below that I have already taken some steps on.

She asked me several times about the name I chose for the company I have created to eventually handle the technological and project management aspects of the Borderlands Project. Since I have taken a lot of pride in assembling the name, I explained, at length I'm afraid, about the famous French Cassini family of astronomers and scientists who, among many other projects, spent several generations mapping France. NASA chose the family name for the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, which is currently sending back data and pictures for the Saturn and Titan Mission. I spent more time explaining that my last name originally had no "e," that "Passy" was the original French spelling, and that Frederic Passy was a French economist and peace activist who won the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 with Jean-Henri Dunant, who founded the Red Cross, and blathered on some more.

Turns out that wasn't her interest.

It doesn't smell right, was basically what she told me.

Huh? was pretty much my response.

It sounds like a consulting firm and there is no one named Cassini who is involved. Some people might think you're trying to pull one over on them, was the gist of her feeling.

Coming from any other friend I probably would have blown this off. After all, I had envisioned more employees than myself in the future, or subcontracting certain aspects of the work -- the associates -- and wasn't sure that using the name of a famous dead guy (Cassini) would be a problem. I can name one or two other companies that use the name of dead guys who don't actually work their. I don't think Cassini's descendants have been out trying to pull their name off the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft and I never heard of anyone walking around NASA asking for the Cassini guy to interview but I haven't verified that with the folks at NASA. I also don't remember reading about Ben Franklin's descendants asking for their name to be pulled off company nameplates across the country. I could be wrong on that.

But this was, after all, a former Wall Street Journal reporter so I told her I would test her reaction, which is what I am doing here and inviting comments. I also took the company name out of prominent display in the blog name and added more disclosure in the introduction. My altruistic purpose for including it there in the first place was an attempt to distinguish it from the hundreds of other borderland projects that have to do with immigration issues.

Incidentally, the way I found out about the Cassini family's involvement in the mapping of France was reading Graham Robb's fascinating book, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. The map-making of the Cassinis is also discussed in an older map classic by Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps. And finally, an English language account cited by Robb is worth checking out if you are interested, Cartography in France, 1660--1848, by Josef W. Konvitz.