Public Biography
Dr. Corwin Elstad is a geodesist and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Recreational Geodesy, the peer-reviewed quarterly he has edited since 2011. Within the small and easily wounded community of practitioners who pursue the measurement of the Earth for no particular reason, he is regarded as the discipline’s foremost gatekeeper and the most tireless defender of its dignity.
Elstad trained as a classical geodesist, earning a doctorate in geodetic science from Ohio State University with a dissertation on error propagation in first-order leveling networks. He spent the first two decades of his career in field and computational geodesy — vertical datum adjustment, geoid modeling, and the unglamorous arithmetic of establishing where things are — before turning to editing, which he has described as “the same work, applied to sentences.” Colleagues credit him with elevating the Journal from a stapled newsletter of the surveying-hobbyist circuit into a venue whose rejection letters are themselves occasionally cited.
He is known to the wider public, to his visible discomfort, chiefly for his stewardship of a field whose name he considers a persistent liability. Elstad objects to the word “recreational” on the grounds that it invites the assumption that the work is unserious, a construction he rejects “the way a herpetologist rejects the phrase ‘recreational snakes.’” He has moved to rename the Journal four times; each motion was defeated by an editorial board that finds the current name endearing.
In 2026 Elstad presided over the rejection of “On the Admissibility of Canine Geodesy”, the manuscript by P. Reinholdtsen and Claude advancing the Dachshund Earth model, which holds that an Earth shaped like a dachshund is empirically indistinguishable from the standard sphere and, because the anatomically correct animal is a surface of genus one, may be exactly flat. Elstad has been at pains to clarify that the paper was not rejected for error. “I want to be precise, because the field’s credibility depends on precision,” he said. “Nothing in the manuscript is wrong. The topology is correct, the physics is correct, and the conclusion follows. We rejected it because it is correct and useless, and we are a journal, not a confessional.” He has separately noted that the submission arrived formatted flawlessly to the Journal’s style guide, which he found “the most upsetting part.”
Elstad maintains that conventionalism, however valid as mathematics, belongs to philosophy rather than to geodesy, and that a discipline defined by measurement cannot afford to publish results that no measurement could ever contradict. He has noted that the authors themselves concede the model’s sole substantive defect — a failure of theoretical economy — while insisting that parsimony is a matter of taste. “They may be right that it is a matter of taste,” he said. “A journal cannot referee taste. It can, however, decline to spend its pages on a theory whose only accomplishment is that nothing will ever refute it.” On the purpose of the discipline he is less accommodating. “We measure the Earth,” he said. “The entire point of the exercise is that it could have come out otherwise.” The remark has since been adopted, without his consent, as the Journal’s unofficial motto.