Subject: Please, No Hate Mail
    I started reading this journal because of the articles on the Circlotron type amplifiers and I have been an avid fan since. Your two articles on the SRPP circuit helped me finally understand this circuit. I loved the metaphor of the two drivers in the driving instruction car. Many thanks indeed. I have tested this circuit and you are right: it is a push-pull amplifier that can deliver more than the idle current (in both directions) into a load, which alone proves that it could not be a simple single-ended circuit. All of which brings me to my suggestion: please do not give the boors equal air time. Freedom of speech means we all have a right to say what we please, but not that we have an obligation to listen. The second letter from Pickacr (June 2000) is a good example of what I am decrying. It was both ill-informed and rude. In your reply you apologize for your stern tone. Stern? If I am ever audited by the IRS, I want their agent to just as stern as you were.
      I believe you are striving to be hyper-fair and so the inclusion of hate mail. But why bother? No amount of careful reasoning and explanation will change a closed mind. I wish your time and effort had been spent on other letters that weren't arrogant and ill-mannered. You have answered many letters from neophytes who were ignorant, but humble. I believe that informing the ignorant is important and interesting, but slamming, even gentle slamming, of the arrogant is both futile and boring. And none of us want to see this most interesting magazine  get even a little boring.

Jeffery

     I am both intrigued and pleased by the politeness requests from this journal's readers. And I see your point about being "hyper-fair," as I often wondered why so many magazines included hate mail in their letter section. My guess had been that the readers wanted to read them as they were a good read. In truth, I seldom found them so. Recently I was reading a great

little book by F. L. Lucas titled Style. It was written in a more urbane era than ours. (And it comprises an interesting love-hate mood regarding the French: he seems to love French prose style, but not what the French write about.) In a chapter titled "Good Humour and Gaiety," we find the following advice:

   Ill-humoured writing appears to have three main objects. One is to give pain; of that the less said the better. A second, often instinctive rather than reasoned, is to vent one's spleen on paper, and push it at the public. It may be good for the spleen; but less good for the public. A better outlet might have been the wastepaper basket. A third object of cross and irritated writing is to make as many other people as possible cross and irritated also. Pope wanted Sporus and Sappho condemned and hated by others, as they were by him. But contempt and hatred do not seem, as a rule, such valuable states of mind that one should attempt to propagate them; nor is the attempt very likely to succeed. For most of our quarrels, grievances, or hates the world cares little; and posterity will care still less. Even if the persons you attack are really as evil as Iago, or as stupid as Caliban, your readers will murmur, 'Oh, exaggerated!' And they are likely either to yawn, or to laugh at you; unless you are clever enough to make them laugh with you (but, for that, you need humour rather than ill humour). In short, imagine the greatest man you can think of, in a bad temper--does he still, at that moment, seem great? No. Not even were he Alexander. Real greatness implies balance and control.

Amen. We will try to keep this journal in good "humour."

                              Editor