This is also a test for using fetchmail through a gateway at fx0 the old box to the new box fx1.
But thought all day on this business, implied by Dwayne's post about wiki. Science is a very strange business on the level of accessibility. At some point what is written for a mass audience is no longer really science, rather it is about science, and that point seems to be missed.
It is a little like art in this respect. At some point, the discourse level necessary to maintain a level seriously compatible with the subject is lost. So, imo at some point the reader has to step up to plate and say in effect, yes, I will get myself into a position to discuss this maybe not as a peer, but a godamned well informed audience.
Most people are not interested in developing that background, and yet they believe in some vague democratic idea that all knowledge should be accessible---then procede to resent the specialist as forming somekind of anti-democratic elite. (There is no spell checker or corrections in this version of unix mail, so bare with...).
Such a resentful attitude is completely misplaced. Sure some individual scientist or mathematican should write on their subject at a popularly accessible level, so that such an ideal audience can be formed from reading such works. That was indeed a deep sentiment in the early 20th C giants and many of them did write such books. I've spent at least tweny years rooting those sorts of works out of their historical hiding places and they are beautiful to read, but rare. Hilbert's Geometry and the Imagination, Boyer's The Concepts of the Calculus, Courant's What is Mathematics, and Henri Lebesque, Measure and the Integral, are amoung them.
In any event, what I have found is that few of my science friends are as well informed about science in a general way as I am, simply because they never submitted to a similar regime of general study. They may knock my socks off on the details of transposons in corn genetics, but they have nothing to say about the missing mass problem in cosmology. In other words they join everybody else, once they step out of their subject. In turn, my buddy in radio astronomy has never heard of the gene meta-regulatory system but by god can he talk on magnetic transduction and amplification of the weak signals from cosmic background radiation.
What I really want to say is that school is never over. You simply have to learn how to educate yourself to a level that you desire or can tolerate. It is endlessly humiliating. And I want to add, the specialist is often the worst offender of this general principle of education.
So, imo the whole basis of a democratic society is not to find the common mean, but to endlessly violate it.
Well, I've run out of wine, and run out of rant...
CG