How would one legally extract money from partial transfiguration? If you have a large object you want transfigured, is it cheaper to hire the only wizard in the world who can do partial transfigurations, or a team of powerful wizards who can just work on the whole thing? And how often does that happen anyway? He could make money from teaching it, but that’d be slow.
Eliezer seems to believe that wizards are selectively stupid about economics, so you’re probably right about the general issue. They could need to import it because they can’t produce it locally at all.
I think partial transfiguration gains power by being a literal carving device. Normal transfiguration can force an object to take a shape, but they always revert. Partial transfiguration can carve pieces off selectively and have it be permanent. Eg, “the sculpture was always in the block of marble, I just removed what was not the sculpture.” Although you’d need to set up incredible safety protocols. Presumably you’d transform the waste into a non-evaporative liquid while keeping a bubble headed charm on until you finite’d everything.
Harry Potter is his own little subtractive universal CNC machine. He’s infinite axis; he can work on any material; he can work on any size. A mail order service could be a multi-million dollar a year business, depending on how tight he could control his tolerances. This goes doubly so because it’s in 1991 compared to modern day.
Edit: Actually, I suppose sufficiently powerful wizards could do this too. They would just transfigure the whole block of steel into an engine+oil, drain it all, then finite it back so just an engine remained. And I don’t think there’s a big enough market for Harry to work exclusively on sculptures in the sides of the mountains or anything. Drat, foiled.
Slurs? (oh you mean “idiots”? I’d refrain from that in the future; I didn’t mean to be offensive EDIT: later clarified to referring to retarded which I’ll also refrain from using in the future… me not being a native speaker will end up being expensive karma-wise).
Transfiguring a whole mountain would:
a) take more magical energy than most wizards could muster.
b) not extract any resources.
Partial transfiguring has the distinct advantage of not having to transfigure entire objects (such as mountains). Perhaps a spell could also help with actually finding valuable resources.
Besides that partial transfiguration is an excellent break in/out spell (as seen earlier in TSPE) and I do not recall saying that Harry had to stay legal. He’s shown already his ability to disregard the law (again TSPE) if he thinks it’s worth it.
Dumb used to mean mute. Personally, I think that’s going a little overboard with the political correctness, though. (And this from someone who doesn’t use retarded as an insult, or even crazy.)
(Basically unrelated, but: Do you or does anyone reading this know of anywhere online to read lots of case studies of schizophrenics, ideally without selection effects for “interesting” cases?)
No, but my local library has two autobiographies. Both seemed interesting to me, though.
Maybe you could look for internet support groups or forums or something. Stuff people write about themselves is probably more useful than stuff doctors write about them if you’re looking to learn about their thought processes.
How would one legally extract money from partial transfiguration? If you have a large object you want transfigured, is it cheaper to hire the only wizard in the world who can do partial transfigurations, or a team of powerful wizards who can just work on the whole thing? And how often does that happen anyway? He could make money from teaching it, but that’d be slow.
Eliezer seems to believe that wizards are selectively stupid about economics, so you’re probably right about the general issue. They could need to import it because they can’t produce it locally at all.
Also, please don’t use slurs.
I think partial transfiguration gains power by being a literal carving device. Normal transfiguration can force an object to take a shape, but they always revert. Partial transfiguration can carve pieces off selectively and have it be permanent. Eg, “the sculpture was always in the block of marble, I just removed what was not the sculpture.” Although you’d need to set up incredible safety protocols. Presumably you’d transform the waste into a non-evaporative liquid while keeping a bubble headed charm on until you finite’d everything.
Harry Potter is his own little subtractive universal CNC machine. He’s infinite axis; he can work on any material; he can work on any size. A mail order service could be a multi-million dollar a year business, depending on how tight he could control his tolerances. This goes doubly so because it’s in 1991 compared to modern day.
Edit: Actually, I suppose sufficiently powerful wizards could do this too. They would just transfigure the whole block of steel into an engine+oil, drain it all, then finite it back so just an engine remained. And I don’t think there’s a big enough market for Harry to work exclusively on sculptures in the sides of the mountains or anything. Drat, foiled.
Slurs? (oh you mean “idiots”? I’d refrain from that in the future; I didn’t mean to be offensive EDIT: later clarified to referring to retarded which I’ll also refrain from using in the future… me not being a native speaker will end up being expensive karma-wise).
Transfiguring a whole mountain would: a) take more magical energy than most wizards could muster. b) not extract any resources.
Partial transfiguring has the distinct advantage of not having to transfigure entire objects (such as mountains). Perhaps a spell could also help with actually finding valuable resources.
Besides that partial transfiguration is an excellent break in/out spell (as seen earlier in TSPE) and I do not recall saying that Harry had to stay legal. He’s shown already his ability to disregard the law (again TSPE) if he thinks it’s worth it.
MixedNuts meant “retarded”.
… I need a slur to describe how dumb I feel now...
“Slow”? Edit: or no, that’s the same thing, isn’t it. Um. Probably a dumb question, but what’s wrong with “dumb”?
Dumb used to mean mute. Personally, I think that’s going a little overboard with the political correctness, though. (And this from someone who doesn’t use retarded as an insult, or even crazy.)
(Basically unrelated, but: Do you or does anyone reading this know of anywhere online to read lots of case studies of schizophrenics, ideally without selection effects for “interesting” cases?)
No, but my local library has two autobiographies. Both seemed interesting to me, though.
Maybe you could look for internet support groups or forums or something. Stuff people write about themselves is probably more useful than stuff doctors write about them if you’re looking to learn about their thought processes.
Good suggestions, thanks much.
Something oddly relevant that i came across recently, tendency to interpret things too literally:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17372545
It is sort of a stereotype though, so I do not know how real it is.