Reef Fish wrote:

> How do you DEFINE a "reverse profile" in a multilevel dive where the depth
is ever-
> changing during the dive?
>
> MY ANSWER is "I don't know", and I have given this problem
> many years of hard and serious thought.

That's my answer too.  A reverse profile is a concept that comes from the
days of square profile dive planning, when it could be defined.  As near as
I can tell, it has no common definition and, I suspect, can't have one in a
multilevel diving world.  Fortunately, the most recent information on the
subject seems to conclude that there's nothing special about a reverse
profile anyway, that the prohibition against them was simply one of those
tweaks you mention, applied before there were computers to apply it to.

> That is merely an ACTUAL CASE showing that as long as we are
> using dive computers in a MULTILEVEL, REPETITIVE diving
> senario, as typically on liveaboard diving, even the SIMPLEST
> addition "rule" to incorporate into a Haldanean or Buhlmann
> algorithm is nothing more than a TWEAK, not necessarily related
> to the ORIGINAL IDEA, be it "reverse profile", "micro-bubbles",
> "silent bubbles", or "noisy bubbles".

I've seen you comment on such tweaks before and generally find no reason to
disagree with you.  You seem, however, to be of the opinion that factoring
in micro bubble analysis is simply another arbitrary tweak, with emphasis on
the word abribitrary.  Of all the "tweaks" I've seen, this one seems the
most likely to have some validity, particularly in light of recent
announcements of a computer that will measure bubble formation in the blood
stream directly, in real time, during the dive.  While it may not have a lot
to do with the original ideas on which the Haldanean or Buhlmann algorithms
are based, this does not mean that algorithms based on bubble theory,
whether based on doppler testing or real time readings, won't be better (or
that they will be).

Lee