I'm not sure I understand. What I meant was that--tongue in cheekishly--it's as if there was a culture of people who get off on making and discovering connections between things. Hawking and Burke are good explainers and famous for it, so if you fell asleep in science and history class because the professor was boring, having things opened up makes you feel less of an idiot. You get a rush. My eyes always glazed over in high-school math classes, but then somebody loaned me a copy of _Godel, Escher, Bach_ and my teenage mind devoured it. As a teenager I got the impression that Calculus was something only brainiacs could understand and that I was too dim to grasp it, and then my Dad gave me his old, 1969 reprint of _Calculus Made Easy_ by Silvanus P. Thompson (F.R.S.) and things started to make more sense. Today I might be in a crowd and mention Hofstadter, Burke, or Silvanus and there'll be someone who's eyes light up, and you instantly know that they're not just aware of them, but are excited, too.