notivago
Registered
I read your response as carefully as I could, trying my best to understand your points. I think we have a problem in that English is not your first language, so perhaps you are not phrasing your responses to best advantage.
It seems I am certainly not.
I have finally decided that, to put it as politely as I can, you are drawing conclusions based upon an incomplete understanding of the theory behind ascent rates and decompression.
On the other hand, that is not true. While I am bad at expressing myself in foreign languages, I can understand it very well, indeed I read far more stuff in English than I do in my own language, all the documentation for my profession is in English(I am a programmer), most fantasy books, sci-fi, RPG and so on are written in english as wikipedia is most complete in English, so I always prefer reading in English when possible. I read from 12 to 20 books a year in English from Tolkien to Star War, not including tech stuff.
I can guarantee you that in most cases, if I read something, I understand it. Specially when the matter is not that complicated, as it is the case.
To put it bluntly, I don't think you understood what you wrote about in your response. It really doesn't make sense to me. You are presenting opinions here that I have never seen presented anywhere, and I have done a lot of reading on this subject.
Let me try to clarify then, I think the best way here being quoting the Suunto paper. Forget a second about the NDL time mark, I am talking about ascension here, or rather, Suunto is:
Suunto:Traditionally, since Haldanes 1908 tables, decompression stops have always been deployed in fixed steps such as 15m, 12m, 9m, 6m and 3m. This practical method was introduced before the advent of dive computers. However, when ascending, a diver actually decompresses in a series of more gradual mini-steps, effectively creating a smooth decompression curve.
As you can see, according to the Suunto model, ascend do differ from the traditional way, thus two buddies with Suunto and other model would have to ascend in different ways as gradual ascension and fixed step ascension can't be reconciled as there is no way to ascertain which one is the 'most conservative'.
As you said at the end of your post, you are still pretty early in your education in these matters.
And yet I am noticing stuff that people with years of experience never noticed. That is called a fresh point of view.
Some of the people who have been disagreeing with you have a lot of experience and have done a lot of studying of decompression theory.They have gone well beyond the baby steps you say you are taking.
Maybe they have strode with too large steps and missed a few things, maybe they didn't go back often enough to review what they think they know.
With that in mind, I have to have a great deal of admiration for your self confidence. If I were early in my understanding of a complex theory, and if people who really knew a lot about it were telling me I was completely wrong about what I understood, I would not have the courage to tell them that they were wrong and I was right. You obviously have more confidence in yourself than I would have ever had at that stage in my learning.
That is not courage, I simply do not care being wrong and I am not prone to Authority fallacy, I always challenge authority, always put Ideas to proof, that brings better and faster knowledge than anything.
Take a look at this video, it summarizes much of what I did my entire life:
Noreena Hertz: How to use experts -- and when not to | Video on TED.com
On the other hand, if you ever want to progress beyond baby steps, it might be wise to listen to people who have gone beyond those steps rather than lecture them about why they are wrong about everything.
I do listen, but listening does not equate to take to heart something without criticizing it. I listen, I examine the info, I look for flaws, I try to make people to justify it and throw out what does not make sense still. I'd rather do this here than learn the hard way in the water where I can die.
I can only die by being wrong if I do not correct myself, and I can only do that challenging established knowledge.