Twenty Two Endeme Characteristics

In my work with EndemeSets, I have found that 22 EndemeCharacteristic?s with perhaps two more MetaCharacteristic?s seems to be a sweet spot for the number of characteristics that combine to form a useful EndemeSet.

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I have no idea why 22 characteristics works so well. Here are some guesses:

• The EnDeme concept is very combinatorial in nature. The number 21 has lots of combinatorial significance. So 22 is 21 plus 5% slack.
• Alphabets for spoken languages often have 22 letters (Hebrew), or 22 commonly used characters (English), and an endeme is really just another kind of word.

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What if you need more than 22 endeme characteristics?

If you have an endeme set that begins to exceed 22 characteristics then you probably have two endeme sets conflated, or you have a EndemeList.

For example if you were trying to use the endeme set on the BusinessTalentEndemeSet page for football players for an NFL team, you might start adding things for various kinds of physical intelligences such as 'balance', 'speed', 'size', 'intimidation', 'taking pressure', 'quick thinking' etc. and you would soon run past 22. In this case you would divide out the endeme set into two, perhaps one called MentalBusinessTalentEndemeSet?, and one called AthleticTalentEndemeSet?, or something.

As an example of the second situation, if you started adding various more precisely defined skills to the EndemeSet like 'filing', 'bookkeeping', 'running meetings' etc. you would soon run past 26 items. What you would then do is cull your EndemeSet and identify those items that were core EndemeCharacteristic?s, and other items that needed to be in a list each item of which would have a profile defined by those core items. For example, if you had culled 'Running Meetings' out of this EndemeSet into an EndemeList, you might end up with the first entry of the following EndemeList:

EndemeList

 Job Function        Endeme
 ----------------    --------------------------
 Running Meetings    TOH-BEAS-KQLPCNGI-RDMU-VJF
 Writing Programs    IDP-CRNQ-GSATBLUM-OEVF-KHJ

Cool. Just like XML generalised HTML, your Endemes generalise the concept behind the GeekCode.

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