[Fhsst-physics] Christmas greetings

[Mark Horner]

Hi physics team

I would like to wish you all the best for the holiday season. Happy 
Holidays or Merry Christmas as appropriate.
I was composing my news email to friends back in SA and I wrote a little 
section on FHSST because it does take
up a lot of my time and its been a good year so I thought I'd share it:

In my "spare time I have been trying to get the FHSST physics book 
finished - its now 345 pages - at 1.8 MBytes if you have time take a look
at our new website (I really like it) http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst  and 
on the left you can see the books. Its been rough and its been getting 
me down
quite a lot but I really think we'll make it now. It will be the first 
set of free books written by volunteer collaboration (there are free 
books availalbe on the net
but all the other volunteer collaboration projects have fizzled out - we 
are still going). Anyway - its taken so much of my time I can see why 
the others fizzle - its much harder than you might think.

There have been some highlights though
- we've got book covers and posters now,
- we have a new website,
- we have over 600 pages of total content (120 this time last year),
- we have negotiated with the Shuttleworth Foundation to cobrand our 
content and release it on Wikibooks in January 05 and they'll use our 
stuff in their
tuXlabs (computer labs they've built in about 100 schools)
- we've got our first essays in the books
- our application to be an NGO has been in for a while and we expect to 
be recognised in January or February
- as soon as physics is done we start biology and then computer science 
(for computer science we can use another free book for all the 
programming stuff
and we just need the history, hardware and simple computer literacy 
stuff - so computer science should be written in record time)

Everyone we speak to likes the idea - its just hard to find people with 
time to contribute - but our content will be out there in Jan next year 
and we'll open ourselves
up to the wikibooks commuinity for contributions as well. So if you know 
anyone who might help out please let them know about the project - it'll 
be a world first!!!

Take care,

Mark