Dear Ulic Interesting description about Gold - we invite you to post something about where in print there is a description of Gold's work to allow interested parties to gain access. You made two excellent points from our point of view. First, that with extreme competency comes a license to deviate (do whatever the hell you want (subject to ethics) as long as it works). Secondly, nothing is more irritating than to be in the presence of a blind pilot who is attempting to be (fill in any genuis' name here) by displaying the deviancy without having first developed the fundamental competency. We point out in Whispering muliple times that the specific criteria that identify the point in the unconscious uptake process at which the modeler may move safely to a conscious effort to codify the patterning is precisely when the modeler can reproduce the effects that the original model gets consistently and with the same quality and in the same time frames. This is the protection against the grotesque forms you correctly identify as inappropriate (minimally). All the best, Carmen and John