Transfer something into non-toxic gas, wait for everyone to inhale it, then dispel the transfiguration. It’s faster.
spriteless
I have read several reviews on fanfiction.net, and posts here, that say Harry will transfigure a very thin knife out of the tip of his wand and cut off all the Death Eaters’ heads, perhaps while distracting Voldemort with words. While that could happen, I think it would be better for Harry to go for their arms. No arm means no mark, and no pointing wands, but is much easier to survive, especially with magic medicine and the Philosopher’s Stone right there!. Actually, Harry could transmute enough phosphorus to burn so bright as to blind everyone behind him that he cannot see and aim at, and cut off the arms of everyone else for maximum survivability. Hmm, he’d have to permanant the phosphorus transfiguration anyways, though, since he doesn’t want any bits of inhaled smoke to turn into wood inside people’s cells. Sheeze this is complicated...
And it makes Wizarding wars as deadly-scorched-earth as Muggle wars. This has been a theme of the story, so it works that way too. If I can’t think of any more improvements and I don’t see any suggestions here I’ll post this on fanfiction.net tomorrow morning.
I don’t want Draco to lose his daddy by his best friend...
I decided to collect the stuff about these recent updates that confuse me, and when added together two were in the shape of a theory!
“Dumbledore was quite correct,” Professor Quirrell said, shaking his head as though in wonderment. “He was also an utter fool to leave the Hogwarts Map in the possession of those two idiots. I had an unpleasant shock after I recovered the Map; it showed my name and yours correctly! The Weasley idiots had thought it a mere malfunction, especially after you received your Cloak and your Time-Turner. If Dumbledore had kept the Map himself—if the Weasleys had ever spoken of it to Dumbledore—but they did not, thankfully.”
Even Quirrell is confused! Wow!
So… Dumbledore did know all along, just like cannon, and sent the map to the twins for plausible deniability. He can get away with that because he doesn’t mind when people think him a fool. And he really needs Querrellmort to think of him as ignorant so he will play the role perfectly… well Voldemort said he could play chess.
In the last thread roystgnr wrote
Harry figures out Quirrell’s identity almost immediately after Snape casts some sort of “Dispel Magical Confusion”, yet the only character who would have the knowledge and incentive to magically confuse Harry about this is Quirrell himself, who seems to be incapable of directly using magic on Harry or Harry’s magic.
That is totally something I wouldn’t have figured out on my own. Well, the first part. I had just put that up to Harry not wanting to see ill of his friend, but magical obfuscation makes sense too. Oh, but someone else had the knowledge if the first theory is right. Someone who used Legilimancy on Harry in chapter 19 and that’s just when Harry found out about it!
If Voldemort (or whatever created both Voldemort and Harry) consideres Potter the same person as himself, then “I do not intend to raisse my hand or magic againsst you in future, sso long ass you do not raisse your hand or magic againsst me.” is a tautology and always true.
Ancedotal Evidence suggests that the first, most important skill, is being able to admit you are wrong. Taken to far though, and it results in an useless humble platitudes. Paired with being able to look at the universe around you to find what is right, I think it is enough enough to recreate everything. I would go so far as to say that Bayes’ Theorem is just a mathematical formalization of those two ideas.
My first thought was that if everyone with a low happiness level had already committed suicide it would bump up the average happiness. I mean, the dead don’t answer those polls.
Killing the unhappy to make sure everyone is happy is an amoral solution, is my conclusion from a utilitarian perspective. Yep. Don’t do that. Engineering peeps with higher happiness set points seems the moral counterpart, but we can’t do that yet.
stack exchange network too.
Thanks for the link. I have been reading peoples faces for awhile, but there’s a second or so of lag, and I can miss things.
It seems it is ensuring at each link no one has motivation to report wrongly, rather than noone would mess up.
That’s like saying people are being too rational. Get better at second guessing. Get better at being rational.
Inadvertent trolling is impossible, trolling is in intent. If your own reaction is similar to being trolled, it is a the genuine emotions trolls try to create through dishonest means… also it makes it seem like you are trying to paint yourself the victim which would make a real troll happy but a non-troll sad. Well, it would also make someone who dislikes you happy, and someone who wants two way communication without signaling that you are wounded and deserve special reprimands sad. I don’t want to make you angry, I want to have a conversation.
The magick hypothesis can be tested, can’t it? I mean, at this point it seems to me either magick is false, or there is a conspiracy to prevent it from being proven true, like all the White Wolf World of Darkness games have. Some settings have several competing conspiracies to keep the masses ignorant of the nature of reality, some have a big monolithic one. It affects the availability of that hypothesis, for me, at least.
If bits of magic were already discovered and incorporated into science, would that count for the skeptics or magicks? The way herbalism and alchemy have been eaten up by chemistry, skeptics kept pace with the abilities traditionally handled by wise old people and shared the knowledge for many. If, say, life auras were found, skeptics would want to use the knowledge of that too. If auras do not respond to machines we can build, we’ll train animals, like aura sniffing dogs as well as gunpowder and drug sniffing ones we already have. The fact that it looks like we are using familiars to find poisons does not deter us now.
What, exactly, is it that makes skeptics so infuriating? Is it mostly the way to point out a link to someone saying something snarky and then walk away, instead of conversing? I know I find that infuriating when someone says something snarky and acts like the conversation is over. I can’t sit through creationism movies sometimes without wanting to punch through the internet when they make a joke about apes having human chests and leaving the subject implying because it’s funny then it is not a valid point that humans and apes are related lets move on. rage rage rage...
Hello welcome to less wrong please don’t mind if we obsess and fail to notice you’re upset like aspies it is the culture here. :P
So is this to differentiate the n-dimensional calculus used to model quantum phenomena from the reality of a laboratory?
You know, in Middle School choir I had hymns alongside this song. It was actually the first time I thought about being an atheist on purpose, not just through neglecting to go to church.
So it is a fail in both effectiveness and efficiency. http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_ferriss_smash_fear_learn_anything.html
Face your fears or they will climb over your back—Odrade in Frank Herbert’s Chapterhouse: Dune
I find that some of the charts used to plan software and to turn English into logical constructs match my thoughts more closely than the English itself.
Took it. It’s been awhile since my last IQ test so I did not answer that one, and I don’t think I’m gonna be in the top 50% at all.
“What’s further north of the north pole” is easier to say than “perception of time is a function of entropy, we just have more memories in the direction of greater entropy, the big bang is like how a sphere gets taller quickest on the leftmost point going right.”
Indeed, I had assumed that was what Lord V did to hold the school hostage, but it seems that doesn’t mesh with how transfigurations are made permanant.