The correct requirement is that you need an endorsement from someone authorised by arXiv to give endorsements. These are people in research institutions that arXiv approves of. Once you have an endorsement you still face the arXiv moderators who can turf your work out or move it to a category such as “general physics” that nobody looks at. Endorsers live under the threat of loosing their priviledges if they allow something in that is considered inappropriate by the moderators so they usually only endorse people they work with.

This system means that some indepedent researchers who have published in peer-review journals cannot use the arXiv, yet some weird and wonderful papers from people who work in research institutions do make it in.

And thanks, Lauren!

Don’t worry about those ‘trolls’. If they knew how science evolves and the many critical aspects in which great scientist of the past were being far fetched or – to be blunt – wrong in many ways they would probably doubt simple things like gravity, evolution ( can you imagine a world were evolution is discredited ? ), shape and age of the earth, etc.

For instance, Dirac’s function isn’t actually a function, but untill Laurent Schwarz had Distribution Theory figured out it was the best that could be done. It’s just the way science work. It’s a complex of arguable truths, but to be dismissed according to scientific standards, and not just “ahhh, I wish we knew better!”.

I like your posts, keep it up!

http://www.graphviz.org/

And some useful python bindings:

http://code.google.com/p/pydot/

It is not quite what you’ve posted, as it is not interactive, but the networks created are publication quality.