On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 23:44:33 -0700, Roy Lewallen
wrote:
can you explain it to me? Richard?

Hi Roy,

This Richard could with his books, but I doubt you meant me (that's
why the FCC assigns call signs).

So, given my toe-hold of ambiguity....

The explanation was offered by my posting quoting Poe:

"The error of our progenitors was quite analogous with that of the
wiseacre who fancies he must necessarily see an object the more
distinctly, the more closely he holds it to his eyes. They blinded
themselves, too, with the impalpable, titillating Scotch snuff of
detail; and thus the boasted facts of the Hog-ites were by no
means always facts -- a point of little importance but for the
assumption that they always were. The vital taint, however, in
Baconianism -- its most lamentable fount of error -- lay in its
tendency to throw power and consideration into the hands of merely
perceptive men -- of those inter-Tritonic minnows, the
microscopical savans -- the diggers and pedlers of minute facts,
for the most part in physical science -- facts all of which they
retailed at the same price upon the highway; their value
depending, it was supposed, simply upon the fact of their fact,
without reference to their applicability or inapplicability in the
development of those ultimate and only legitimate facts, called
Law."

Of course, this was encumbered by more commentary from Poe, and as
this group has such difficulty in reading English, then perhaps the
nuances were lost to the greater appreciation of what was being said.

I will hit the hi-lights:

The term "wiseacre" hasn't lost its currency over the course of 165
years, but I suppose many english (lower case) readers probably have
lost track of the meaning of "minute" to presume it is only a unit of
time.

"... the wiseacre who ... must necessarily see an object the more
distinctly, the more closely he holds it to his eyes. ... the
diggers and pedlers of minute facts, ... their value depending ...
simply upon the fact of their fact, without reference to their
applicability ..."

To translate this Classic Comix edition of Poe into techno-jargon:

"Current Drop" accounts for less than 1dB in the far field.

To boil it down further for those who parse only Anglo-Saxon

BFD

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC