completeconfusion

Forking Wikipedia – this was a message to a Citizendium list (Citizendium is a proposed fork of Wikipedia by Larry Sanger et al) but applies to other competitors to Wikipedia – and I hope there are many that flourish.

Re: On Transversality -- Communication Between Different
Levels Of Experience on Citizendium

I've long advocated a "Simpleopedia" in addition to Wikipedia (which could link to the latter, or Cit http://citizendium.org/.) Not merely for the less educated, informed, or younger students, but as a quick overview which could also serve as an introduction in case that's all that's needed. It's another question, however, as to Whether Cit [http://citizendium.org/] should start by undertaking this task, too. If it would be an effective initial marketing tool for Cit, then sure. Otherwise, maybe one thing at a time makes more sense.


Re: Fork Viability, and establishing beachheads.
I wanted to retail my experience with three different similar (non Wikipedia) projects that I won't name, one of which was in fact a fork of Wikipedia. None worked out. (Forgive me if this has been discussed elsewhere - I'll be quick.)

Cause of the other failures (imho): It's difficult to fork all articles all at once as soon as anyone wants to add a single sentence, at least until the new project gains enormous momentum. The danger is that the small changes in your fork will be swamped soon enough by the as yet larger project with a larger community; and that many of your forked articles will for this reason gradually become inferior, dragging down the project as a whole.

Deliberately focusing your volunteers efforts on only some articles for a while so that your forked articles will both supercede and continue to supercede the originals is, experience tells me, necessary. Not for ever, but for some while.

Meanwhile, Cit could accumulate proposed additions to future forks, and notes on what could be added. When these accumulate to a very substantial change in the article, and it's clear that volunteer interest will sustain and update the forked article ever after, then it can be safely forked.

Premature forking that results, eventually, in many inferior articles within Cit that will drag down the search engine reputation of all articles, including the dazzling ones, is the easiest way to sink Cit (imho, and experience.)

The bonus is that concentrating efforts where possible, for a while, will ensure at least some search engine attention comes to CIt early on.

This is analogous to establishing a new species - which doesn't tend to happen everywhere at once, but in small relatively isolated "island populations" at first, and only then spreads throughout a geographical range.

There are suggestions now that maybe, after all, we do have some Neanderthal genes, now. Not proof. PMID: 16895447 but there may be better sources.

My interest relates to the established link between artificial light and breast cancer, etc, etc. I'm curious to know how long our genes have had to adapt to more extreme seasons and the varying lengths of daylight that come with them. I wonder if some of the (genetic) differences between ethnic groups re breast cancer and other chronic disease including diabetes might relate to how close to the equator ones' ancestors were.

Maybe Northern Europeans have some built in protection from the chronic illnesses that photoperiodeffect.com discusses, because we at least had some time to adapt to more extreme light variation with the seasons - and since Neanderthals went North first, just maybe we have kept some genes that help one adapt to variable photoperiods. This would account for some genetic variation affecting vulnerability to these illnesses, perhaps.

I'm a sucker for impossible stories. If we aren't willing to believe anything that turns out to be impossible, then we'll never allow ourselves to imagine what really is possible - such as that too much artificial light can cause breast cancer.

But, just when I thought my own site that discusses that and more, photoperiodeffect.com might be the strangest news story of the year, or maybe the decade (since I'm saying that most chronic illnesses, and its a long list, are caused by prolonged use of artificial light); I read what really must surely be the strangest news story of the decade, and it comes from the highly respected New Scientist magazine which reports that the drive has been prototyped, tested, and supposedly, it works!?

The drive described below doesn't conserve momentum, in any way that I can discern. That's not right. Is the Universe a larger system than we think? I hope it works (I was cheering for telegraphy, too) but seriously, if you can't bet on Newton's Laws, just what sort of bar bet can't a person lose?

Relativity drive: The end of wings and wheels?

- New Scientist, 8 September 2006, by Justin Mullins, issue 2568

"Traditional forms of transport are just so last century. New Scientist meets the man who would replace them with pure radiation
....
Roger Shawyer has developed an engine with no moving parts that he believes can replace rockets and make trains, planes and automobiles obsolete. "The end of wings and wheels" is how he puts it. It's a bold claim. Read Shawyer’s theory paper here (pdf format)." http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/av/shawyertheory.pdf

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19125681.400-relativity-drive-the-end-of-wings-and-wheels.html

That last link is just a stub article, but there's more at Wikipedia, under the title of EmDrive. Typical of Wikipedia, because it's exciting, it's recommended for deletion, of course. Another article is at Eureka. The inventor's rather spare site is emdrive.com and I'm guessing he might not be thrilled that I bought relativitydrive.com and .org today.

Quoting from Shawyer's Paper: "The technique described in this paper uses radiation pressure, at microwave frequencies, in an engine which provides direct conversion from microwave energy to thrust, without the need for propellant.
The concept of the microwave engine is illustrated in fig 1. Microwave energy is fed from a magnetron, via a tuned feed to a closed, tapered waveguide, whose overall electrical length gives resonance at the operating frequency of the magnetron."

But I can't help thinking that it might be made more efficient, by using baffles in the interior of the chamber (I may be wrong about this, my Relativity is rusty at best, and it isn't easy to test in your own garage, since the forces involved are small.) The diagram below is meant to be a cross-section showing a baffle arrangement that might (or might not) help. Below is another diagram of a different arrangement that might be a better bet. Anybody want to be the first on their block to have a share in a Relativity Drive Improvement patent? Oh, come on...





Or better:



Of course, because resonance is key, the size of the baffles might have to be exactly half the proportions of the chamber, and you might then have to halve the wavelength to get thrust from both baffles and chamber. This is vaguely similar to using overtones when singing, perhaps, and other resonance phenomena. Or maybe baffles just can't work.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm vastly surprised even that such a thing as an EmDrive (or Relativity Drive) MIGHT work, if that's so. But it ain't April and it's in New Scientist. They aren't easy to hoax. The British government is funding it, based on an independent evaluation of the effect.

So how does anyone judge the truth of news stories as bizarre as the Photoperiod Effect or a Relativity Drive? I suppose, the same way we evaluated the telephone, telegraph, airplane, nuclear bombs, etc. If it works it works. Likewise if more darkness helps your diabetes, why then it does. Still, Newton's Laws predate even Newton...

Who wants to live in a world without surprises, anyway? Even if the story's false, it's good mental exercise to take Lewis Carol's advice and try to believe four or five impossible things before breakfast.

This was published elsewhere a while back, I'm reposting it here, together with an update at the end:

N.B.! THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS SPECULATION AND NO LEGAL CLAIM OF CRIMINAL ACTIVITY BY MANAGEMENT OF ANY LEAGUE , TEAM, OR SPORT IS MADE IN THIS ARTICLE. NO DEFINITE CLAIM AS TO THE STATE OF MIND, KNOWLEDGE, OR INTENTIONS OF ANY PRESENT OR PAST MEMBER OF MANAGEMENT OF ANY LEAGUE OR TEAM WITHIN OR WITHOUT THE MLB IS MADE HEREIN.

I'm beginning to think that while there's something to "moneyball", it's not the real story. Sure, stats help you select players and always have, but all the hype may (also) have largely have been a useful cover story for the real bargain hunting: namely consciously going out and finding young players with merely good stats who weren't taking steroids, but were likely to do so, or who had just begun to - who therefore were going to be a whole lot better than their stats would make you think.

Seems to me, speculating, that Billy Beane was in an excellent position to watch that economic process take place, understand it exactly, and exploit it thoroughly. It would be hard to argue that he has uniformly avoided hiring or retaining all players who might use steroids.

So what did Billy Beane know and when did he know it? He's said what he lacked as a player was (paraphrasing badly, from memory) "that he had real skills that excited the scouts but lacked the will to do whatever it took to be a really good baseball player." We now know (as he presumably knew way back when - unless my timeline is way off, and maybe it is) exactly what "whatever it took" cashes out to - performance enhancing drugs that were known to carry real risks by then. Certainly, unlike a certain Californian governor, Beane wasn't willing to do whatever it took to his body pharmaceutically to have a truly spectacular career at any price - that much seems clear in any case - but in struggling with this question, or once he was in management, Beane may have realized that he had some very valuable economic information about just which undervalued players were in fact likely to become stars. With regard to that timeline, Billy Beane's debut in the majors was in 1984 and his last game in 1989.

Perhaps his consolation prize for knowingly watching less highly talented cheaters pass him by and get the biggest headlines and longest careers as players, was to proceed directly to management and cash in this knowledge. ("Assuming any major league player has ever used steroids during this, earlier or subsequent periods.") As the old saying goes, the fox knows many things, but the porcupine knows one big thing. Steroids, and just whose stats were about to climb skyward thanks to them, were a big thing to know about back then "if anyone in baseball has used steroids to enhance their performance." Very big, if you were building a ball club on a relatively small (but still multi-million dollar) budget.

The key realization in this, would be that players who hadn't taken steroids but were now started, or were about to, were the greatest bargains in the marketplace, with the greatest hidden upside possible, unreflected in their known stats. Maybe Billy Beane was the first person to both figure that out, if he ever did, and then to discern the extreme economic value that seemingly small bit of knowledge represented. Maybe he still hasn't, or hasn't consciously figured this out to this day. But if I were a betting man....

That doesn't mean that there's nothing to sabremetrics. Not at all. But on base percentage (under whatever terminology) isn't a new concern, and the new stats and studies may actually have been very much the smaller part of the moneyball story. Or, the renewed value of novel statistical studies may have come about precisely because steroid use had altered so many trends and made traditional expectations, once better founded statistically, had become somewhat obsolete. (See initial legal claim.)

Maybe congress should have called one more witness. But then again, pardon my cynicism, but perhaps that's precisely why they didn't call on a bunch of prominent management figures to testify.

A REPLY TO UNPUBLISHED OBJECTIONS/QUESTIONS FROM DAN AGONISTES (danagonistes.com):

With it's concentration on OBP, pitching accuracy, and so much more, I agree that there's much to moneyball - but I do wonder whether it's a full and adequate explanation of Billy Beane's success. However we have to keep in mind that what was privately known by some or many experts but kept private as a business advantage can't be directly known. We don't know this sort of thing except by, say, looking at prices paid for various types of pitchers to see what knowledge has been discounted, or not, as in any other market. No doubt much proprietary knowledge about baseball development was neither very uncommon nor widely broadcast. I do begin to suspect that a flurry of publicity over moneyball may in part at least have been a good cover for the real bargain hunting, which was looking for players whose performances were just about to get pumped up. Also, as I'll argue shortly, statistical study of baseball skills development can hardly help but incorporate knowledge of what are in fact the consequences of steroid use "if indeed statistically significant numbers of developing baseball players have ever taken steroids" - last clause applies to whole paragraph.

I don't think Billy Beane or anybody else had to push steroids - the carrot of multi-million dollar contracts and fame was surely more than sufficient for many players “if indeed any have taken steroids”, and these humongous incentives were already in place. Not to mention that the legal implications from civil suits spurred by later medical problems by anyone pressured to take steroids could obviously have been massive, too. Plus, and this is very important to note, I'm not saying he or anyone else in management isn't ethical (as ethical as other non-whistle blowers at least, and there are hordes of those) much less a criminal, or performed any act that would now be criminal. I'm only saying that he or they may have realized just how important that key data point, steroid use, was in changing all the other data points; and figured out that this meant that the real, spectacular bargains in the marketplace were those players whose known stats reflected no steroid use and who were middle-of-the-pack or a bit better - but who had recently started to take steroids seriously, or whose known attitude or associates suggested they would or might soon "assuming any steroid use at all" - quoted fragment applies to paragraph as a whole.

In fact, to exploit this for economic advantage, it might only have been necessary to invest broadly in players from places where steroid use was known to be relatively low, such as colleges without a high priority on athletics in general or baseball in particular. The purpose of such a strategy being to scoop up players who hadn't yet been exposed to a lot of steroid use, or seriously considered it. Conversely, a related strategy would have been, or might still be, to investigate carefully and avoid all players who were longer-term steroid users since their stats and market price had already "discounted" that steroid use, giving them a much lower upside under modern conditions (as well as a possible health and injury downside.) That is, there would be no further large "bounce" from steroid use available to such long term users. Thus, paradoxically, one could economically exploit the trend toward steroid use efficiently by actively avoiding some steroid users – namely the long term users - or even all steroid users, in effect counting on the fact that at least some of there still pure players might start using on their own. Economic profit lies in the upside, after all.(Literally so, since "economic profit" is a technical term within the field of economics to designate above-market profits, and that's how I'm using it here). To summarize this "steroid avoidance" strategy, players who have been taking steroids for some while and don't have a further upside possibility from now deciding to live "better" through chemistry are, relatively speaking, worse investments in the long term.

Of course, sabremetrics, etc could have discovered and exploited such trends, partially at the very least, with or without having explicitly discovered the underlying variable of drug use - but too many people in the industry knew precisely what was going on for that to be an entirely credible claim, I suspect. And who better to explicitly notice the economic and career consequences of drug use than a talented player who was deprived of the shining career it looked like he was going to have, in no small part because of widespread steroid abuse by so many others who didn't care as much about their future health? That's a description that may well fit Billy Beane, a first round draft pick in 1980, to a T. One has to imagine that watching that happen to one's career hopes would have stung deeply, "if indeed anyone in baseball Billy Beane knew or knew of ever took steroids during this period." Billy's a very bright guy by all accounts, I suspect he knew just what had happened to his career "whatever that was", and I also suspect his being bone lazy or ill-omened despite his talents wasn't the backstory to his unspectacular career. Maybe I'm wrong - it's very difficult to vouchsafe what other people thought or knew and kept largely to themselves, but I do believe a good argument can be made that he was in a position to know these things and that if he did, the consequences over the last decade or so would have been similar to what we've seen. See beginning legal claim.

Whatever anyone knew, it's no doubt true that a certain amount, maybe even a very large amount, of the hidden upside that moneyball-type statistical investigations have uncovered and exploited has in fact been made up of diverse markers of steroid use (such as, say, paradoxical increases in stats when players move up to a higher class of league), together with novel trend changes caused by steroid use "if steroids have been in use." Whether or not anyone ever discerned that as an underlying cause wouldn't have prevented the economic exploitation of such secondary trends once they were unearthed. An obvious possible example of a novel change in trends - is increased injury. This could perhaps be a factor explaining why it's now true that early pitching talent is heavily discounted because injury is pretty likely to erase that early promise, or injury-related changes in trends might only affect hitters to a large degree "if steroids have ever been used."

In horseracing, drug use leads to a sharply increased risk of injury (harness racing being one historic response to that risk, one may speculate, but see the initial legal claim again.) This risk comes about not so much because of direct damage to the body as indirect injury, since performances are pushed over the redline with erratic consequences. Nature likes to work within what structural engineers would call "margins" and drugs work in good part simply by overriding these safety margins, enforced by fatigue and otherwise. If you push your fighter aircraft over the redlines on the dashboard dials and outside its secure "performance envelope" more mechanical breakdowns occur, not just to moving components of the engine, but also to passive restraint mechanisms that are the avionic equivalent of hamstrings. The same sort of injuries have likely been happening in baseball "if indeed steroids have been used in major league baseball at any time." I think it would be difficult indeed to argue that today's players are markedly more robust, and less susceptible to injury than previous generations. (Lawyers are a leading cause of double negatives.) It would be somewhat confounding to medical science if steroids have nothing at all to do with recent injury trends "if indeed steroids have ever been used by major league baseball players." (Lawyers are a contributing cause of quotation mark usage.)

A large economic/investment change from widespread steroid use in earlier career stages "if any players have taken steroids early in their career or otherwise" would be a trend toward more drop outs from injury of talented players who don't reach the majors at all, shorter careers for first draft picks than in earlier times, and a consequent advantage for those teams making broader investments in many cheaper players rather than making very heavy investments in a very few highly performing young players who are now more likely not to have a career at all (or to be passed by egregious drug abusers.) A strategy of broader investment sounds somehow familiar, to me, and might to the reader. (Quoted fragment applies to the paragraph as a whole and by implication, to each sentence of same.)


In case this article disappears from everything2.com, I might mention, with the greatest respect to Everything2, that I will be posting articles of mine censored from everything2 (about twenty percent of the articles I've written for them so far) at my blog at completeconfusion.com. Revisions and fuller versions of articles and late additions to bibliography will also be posted there for similar reasons - censorship always has a degree of predictability, so I do self-censor some of what appears under my rubric at everything2 in advance of publication there; needless to say. I don't mention this self-censorship as a slight to everything2 in any way at all, since this is of course an all but inevitable consequence of any external restraint on speech.

I'm very grateful to Everthing2. Everything2 is a private concern with every legal right to censor what appears there by elimination as a whole, for any reason whatsoever, which I recognize and respect fully. I'm grateful for the opportunity to publish many things at everything2.com, as well as being glad that the internet is large.

Initial message similar to first part sent July 12, 2005. First published here and on the web July 14, 2005. Last revised July 14, 2005.
Russell Johnston
This article may be found at:
http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2005/07/steroids-and-moneyball.html
Note that this address is confusioncomplete, etc not completeconfusion, etc. Suitably confusing, eh?
completeconfusion.com however does redirect to the above site at blogspot.

* * * * * * * * * *

The Update is some support from a recent article (excerpt):

Drugs: Sports' Prisoner's Dilemma
By Bruce Schneier (WIRED)
02:00 AM Aug, 10, 2006

The doping arms race will continue because of the incentives. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. Consider two competing athletes: Alice and Bob. Both Alice and Bob have to individually decide if they are going to take drugs or not.

Unfortunately, Bob goes through exactly the same analysis. As a result, they both take performance-enhancing drugs and neither has the advantage over the other. If they could just trust each other, they could refrain from taking the drugs and maintain the same non-advantage status -- without any legal or physical danger. But competing athletes can't trust each other, and everyone feels he has to dope -- and continues to search out newer and more undetectable drugs -- in order to compete. And the arms race continues.

Some sports are more vigilant about drug detection than others. European bicycle racing is particularly vigilant; so are the Olympics. American professional sports are far more lenient, often trying to give the appearance of vigilance while still allowing athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs. They know that their fans want to see beefy linebackers, powerful sluggers and lightning-fast sprinters. So, with a wink and a nod, they only test for the easy stuff.
For example, look at baseball's current debate on human growth hormone: HGH. They have serious tests, and penalties, for steroid use, but everyone knows that players are now taking HGH because there is no urine test for it. There's a blood test in development, but it's still some time away from working. The way to stop HGH use is to take blood tests now and store them for future testing, but the players' union has refused to allow it and the baseball commissioner isn't pushing it.
In the end, doping is all about economics. Athletes will continue to dope because the prisoner's dilemma forces them to do so. Sports authorities will either improve their detection capabilities or continue to pretend to do so -- depending on their fans and their revenues. And as technology continues to improve, professional athletes will become more like deliberately designed racing cars.

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71566-0.html?tw=wn_technology_medtech_11

Remember those old plastic "pearls on a string" necklaces that just snapped together? Put nuts or bolts on plastic strings with a socket glued to the bolt and the male end to the string. You can still rotate the nut or bolt before "unplugging". Even if you unplugged only the moment before installing the nut or bolt, that would help with the following situation:

Spacewalkers Add to Orbiting Space Junk

This week the Atlantis astronauts made their own contributions to the space debris in low orbit: a couple of bolts that escaped from the addition they were connecting to the international space station.

To engineers, this isn't funny. Many of those pieces of space junk can kill astronauts, puncture satellites or at the very least scratch up expensive space shuttle windows.

"It's one of these problems that is growing in seriousness," said William Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corp. in Los Angeles. "It's really the small things that will get you."
http://www.physorg.com/news77471460.html

Admittedly, the problem is limited, as far as the present space station is concerned. It's in a low orbit, and because smaller objects dropped from it have greater surface area by weight (mass) they will slow as they collide with atoms and plasma, and drop into lower orbits and then into the earth's atmosphere.

Construction elsewhere in space, not just in higher, polar or more elleptical orbits, but at Lagrange points, etc, might have to be cleaner, however; else more substantial hazards might result in time.

Five years since 9/11, and my contribution is to post an article about torture in the U.S., and the philosophical and legal underpinnings thereof, at http://logictutorial.com/torture entitled: “A Modest Contribution to the Philosophy of Torture”. I regret the necessity, it would be better if we had decided either to be honest or not to torture; perhaps then I would have published today an essay concerning only the horrors of extreme Wahabism.

A couple of other notes on the five-year anniversity:

1) The woman who checked the terrorists through security in Boston has committed suicide according to the Oprah Winfrey show, today. A pity, since security was a deliberated joke everywhere at that time. Like the aimless Ack-Ack the Brits threw up at German bombers at night during the Blitz in 1940, it was only ever intended to reassure passengers, for business reasons.

2)Apparently some torture techniques have now been dropped by the U.S., mostly as unhelpful, such as waterboarding: “Death threats, waterboarding, profound deprivation issues, heat, cold, denial of medical attention -- those are now abandoned. ....One of the dark moments in the so-called war on terror, as I disclosed in the book, along with all the other stuff, is that we threatened Khalid Sheik Mohammed's children to get him to talk. According to those involved in that incident, he pretty much looked them straight in the eye and said, "Fine, they'll be in a better place with Allah." Once you threaten someone's children there's pretty much nowhere else to go in terms of building the kind of relationship where they at some point tell you things that you really need to hear.” - Salon, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/09/07/suskind/

Decent, the above, esp on voicemail tips. My 2 cents: The way to point out freeloaders is by praising them fulsomely for utterly trivial contributions, contextually making the point that they did nothing. If they're stupid, they'll actually be pleased. But be careful - smart, truly twisted individuals may just be smart enough to put you at the top of their shit list. Then again, if they're that smart, they already know you're on to them and you're already on top of their shit list, for that reason alone.

But if you really want to know how the real world works (rather badly, really), here's a very funny
tojan horse video

Joel said: at (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/24.html)
“The annoying thing about everything that comes out of Harvard Business School is that the conclusion is so infuriatingly wishy-washy. “Expanding your self-awareness, situational awareness, and ability to adapt your leadership style increases your overall range of effectiveness as a leader,” they say. What a bold thought.”
quoting:
Sean Silverthorne: “Is it better to be loved or feared?”
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5464.html

My 2 cents:
I not only think this paragraph says specific, important things, but that each of them is unintuitive:

1. "expanding your self-awareness" = always blame yourself first, think three times before even suggesting anyone under you might be wrong. If you are the one who's wrong and you go after a subordinate just once, even mildly, your leadership of that person may well be compromised for as long as both of you work for the same organization.

2. "situational awareness" = DON'T focus (you're the leader, you simply can't – go ask someone else to focus on what you've decided was important, or critical.) "SA" was originally fighter pilot talk for keeping an eye out for missiles while fighting and talking and dropping bombs, etc.

3. "ability to adapt your leadership style" = there's no one way to lead, and there's no such thing as a leader with just one way of behaving, so be ready to behave differently on a dime, always. This really means not having “a” leadership style. Sure, be predictable when that works best, but be unpredictable when necessary, to break the mood, or just to ease troop boredom. It's so hard to learn one way to lead that almost all of us stop there. DON'T. Keep learning different ways to skin the cat, no matter how good your results have been.

The Harvard author doesn't like to "write dirty" by ever referring to the real world, but his message isn't vague, merely encrusted in academic jargon. That's how you get to Harvard (I've only visited.)

The link above points to a perfectly correct article telling you not to market "in general". Instead "focus on a smaller group."

I'm visually oriented though, so I've always thought of this marketing principle in military terms: “establishing a beach-head.” (Think D-Day, in WWII.) You must have a small territory that you've conquered. Once you have that, expanding that territory enormously is actually far easier than taking the (relatively) tiny beach-head in the first place. Think of it this way: dropping one hundred thousand soldiers by parachute scattered all across France, Belgium, and Germany on June 6, 1944 wouldn't have resulted in a German surrender within a year, it would just have wasted lives.

So find a need that's genuinely unmet, then make sure your product really meets it, as the article I've cited above says.

I'm facing this problem with an out-there health site called photoperiod.com that I'm constructing (it's hardly there as yet). I want to persuade a lot of people that humans didn't evolve under electric lights, and that extending our daylight hours with artificial lights can, decades later, lead to just the chronic health problems we are now seeing in industrialized countries (including weight gain.)

More than one group makes a tempting to target, but I'll likely start with a truly tiny one: sufferers of the obscure genetic illness Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), and work my way up to diabetes and hypertension. The need is greatest for EDS. There is no treatment of any kind for it now except joint splints and an electric wheelchair when that becomes necessary.

But be warned: you may find the best small group is unreachable, or unconquerable for reasons that were unforseeable, or at least, unforseen. In the case of EDS, the general ignorance of the fact that genetic illnesses usually are determined by environmental variables (such as the most prevalent genetic illness, celiac disease) may well prevent easy acceptance. As well, it usually takes sufferers of this illness many years to simply get a diagnosis. They may feel that accepting the idea that an environmental variable could strongly influence the course of the disease is tantamount to saying they aren't truly ill, or that they don't actually have a serious genetic illness – a diagnosis they probably fought hard to obtain; and which in many cases their families resist. I don't know yet either way, therefore, I'm looking hard for my next prospective beach-head location, too.

In other words, there is no guarantee that your first planned location for a marketing beach-head won't turn into a Dieppe disaster (a WWII reference again.) So have a couple more possible beach-head locations in mind. When you start to succeed, reinforce that success with everything you've got. Testing a few small beach-heads at once can yield success; but it's better to make a list and and then focus on one at a time until you get a success. What's all but certain is that broad, unfocused marketing won't work very well at all.

If EDS is a non-starter for photoperiod.com, then I think obesity will be my next target. There are lots of treatments, but none that aren't very difficult for patients to follow, or extreme – such as surgery.

Originally written to a friend with back spasms:
No doubt everyone you've talked to has their own treatments for back problems, but you can add my two cents to the pile, no reply necessary:

I used to have recurrent back problems, but haven't since I've been observing a natural night (real darkness and lots of it, at consistent times - a la Carlos Castaneda, actually, and a lot of new science too (chronobiology).) The reason may be that the collagen (intercellular glue as you'll know) we make at night in darkness seems to be different, and stronger than the stuff we make during light. So consistent hours, and more darkness when you sleep (red light is okay) might help, strange as that might seem. But the science is new, one's improved metabolism with more darkness might also be the cause, not differences in collagen formation, if darkness is helping my back as I think it is. And of course, it's new science, so I could be wrong about all this and report back problems tomorrow.

I'm starting what may seem to be a fairly crank medical site at photoperiod.com on this, but one citing lots and lots of studies (eventually.) (Warning: very much under construction, most links won't work.)

Also, I might mention that I have found that in the past when I had any sort of leg problem, I got in the habit of using my back too much and that's when problems with the back became likely. Reminding myself to use my leg muscles whenever possible helped quite a bit. But of course, your problems, and their causes, may vary - again, no reply necessary.

Today I'm experimenting with Writely and finding that with litecable, Web 2.0 is really Molasses 2.0 Back to Open Office which removes those extra line breaks from text files very easily, it turns out.

Russ