I agree with Faith and Parasomnium that the vocabulary and concepts used in this forum shoud be broken down and made accessible to the lay person. This forum is for lay people, it is a "popularization" of real issues.
When discussions are filled with technical vocabulary here, it makes it opaque for those outside the field. It's not a matter of 10 minutes or even 1 or 2 hours of reading to get up to speed on these terms. And when some brave soul DOES venture in to ask questions or try and tackle the problem, or TRIES to understand and make responses, this leads to spinning off topic.
So maybe we can all do a better job in making things accessible to each other here. This is a public forum, and the purpose is to publicly discuss things. It's at the lay level.
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And with that said, I'd like to extend a thanks to many of the scientists who post here that are more than willing to break things down to lay levels. Mick, Wounded King, and Mammuthus come to mind immediately... Quetzal was really good at this too, etc. etc. etc. I think they did a good job of speaking at the lay level where appropriate (and also good at choosing the appropriate times to speak very technically, like when addressing a technical question posed by a colleague).
Ben
P.S. I actually think rr's point is MUCH more idealistic and not related to the issue of being off-topic here (but rather it's about how scientific publication and dissemination of information works), so I'm choosing not to address it here. B
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