The terms of the challenge state that she can’t tell anyone about it before or after the duel or it goes to the Wizangamot. So, no, presumably she can’t tell Harry about it.
Heck, she might have severely injured Draco by accident, rendered basic medical care, and then just left, because she can’t tell anyone. If someone found Draco unconscious and half-dead later, and they figured out Hermione did it and left him, that would look like attempted murder.
Especially when the person in question has been fighting a lot of bullies lately AND is royally pissed off.
It’s possible that H&C never did figure out an effective lever. In that case, he might have given up on Memory Charming her (requires the target’s defenses to be lowered, at least in the case of an experienced Auror and possibly for a very pissed off first year) and just oblivated her. If he’d managed to memory charm her, I don’t think she’d have been so freaked out. She also wouldn’t have ‘lost track of time’, she’d have had a perfectly reasonable legitimate excuse put in place.
Also, have we seen Quirrell use Legilimancy at all? If we have, that’s an argument for H&C not being Quirrell, because if you’ve thoroughly read someone’s mind you it shouldn’t take that many tries for a groundhog day attack.
When you’re going to Obliviate the target anyway, there’s little downside to letting some frustration slip through. I don’t think that necessarily counts as a screwup.
I think you would need a remnant of the destroyed dementor itself, not just a cloak a dementor happened to be wearing when you killed it, and I don’t think dementors leave anything behind when you kill them.
The fact that the light was impossible to Finite suggests that Harry did tap the energy of the acorns. It’s implied that the magical cost to the creator of making a potion is a minor cost to reshape the components. So, the potion taps the light stored in the acorns, and Harry’s magic is tapped only to do the reshaping. Probably most magical potions use the magic of the magical ingredient to do most of the reshaping work, so the user only has to invest a tiny bit of magic, while a potion not involving any magical ingredients might require much more input from the creator for the reshaping. That would explain why Harry is drained, but also why the light can’t easily be dispelled.
The other critical limitation on potions is that you must known the stirring pattern and the recipe in general. Figuring out the stirring pattern is the sort of thing that gets you permanently turned into a cat. So, Harry does not have god-mode because he doesn’t have the time or expertise to do all the potion experimentation necessary to invent new potions without blowing himself up; he’s limited to potions with known (but possibly obscure) recipes.
Just because every potion in the two textbooks Harry looked at involved magical ingredients doesn’t mean all potions require a magical ingredient. As I read it, Harry found the potion he used in a more obscure book suggested by Prof. McGonnagal or Flitwick, probably something like a wilderness survival guide. Converting acorns into a beacon would be pretty helpful for getting found by search parties.
Does that include biology? If so, I will be rather annoyed that no one warned me.
If you go straight from undergrad to a PhD program, you won’t have a Masters on record, which means you’d have to drop all the way down to applying for bachelor’s level positions.
Plus which, if you’re not going to leverage the PhD, why would you spend an extra four years of hard work and low pay to get it? Just get a Masters instead.
Having a graduate degree somehow makes my resume look less attractive than just having an undergrad.
In many cases you have to pay PhDs more. If you can find someone who can do the work who doesn’t have a PhD, you save money by hiring them. In many fields, there is much more need for people to do Masters level work than to do PhD level work, so there are more jobs available at the Masters level.
grad or professional schooling can be more time/effort/work than it’s worth.
A PhD in biology in the program I mastered out of involves working anywhere from 50-80 hours a week, takes 5-6 years, and typically pays around $30k a year at best. If you could have instead made $50k at a real job, graduate school has an opportunity cost of $100-120k.
Graduate school is bad for you. Most of my friends are in graduate school and they are noticeably less happy and more crazy than they would be otherwise; one friend is going gray at 27 from stress. I was chronically depressed almost the entire time I was in graduate school, and it only went away when I graduated.
One of my fellow teaching assistants last semester was a first year graduate student, taking two graduate level core curriculum classes, trying to start up his research, and also trying to be a teaching assistant for biostatistics when he had never taken any statistics. Both of my fellow teaching assistants this semester are just getting Masters, but they’re both taking two classes, TAing biostatistics, and trying to finish their Masters theses.
Do undergraduate research first before making any decisions about graduate school. PhD programs are almost entirely research. You take some classes at the beginning, which weeds out the idiots, and then the entire rest of the program is research. If you don’t thoroughly enjoy research, you will hate graduate school.
My standard advice is to not do a PhD unless you have to (because the career you want requires one).
It looks like they’re meeting on Sunday: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/6bz/meetup_houston_tx/
I will be back this Saturday! The last two weekends I had a friend’s birthday party and then was out of town.
Hrm, is there a preferred place to continue the discussion from the meetup online?
Also, is it cheating to abuse Ruby’s built-in Bignum type to solve Project Euler problems?
Hot diggity damn. I missed the announcement of the last Austin meetup and thought I was going to have to start a chapter myself. I will definitely be there.
What evidence is there that H&C isn’t just Quirrell wrapped in an illusion?
There’s no need for Hermione to have cast the lethal hex. She wins the duel, then the real perpetrator stuns both of them, hexes Draco, and then memory charms Hermione into thinking she did it. However, if that’s the case, unless the perpetrator then used Hermione’s wand to cast the hex, checking what spells her wand had cast would reveal something fishy.
Why are we proposing the H&C is not clever and powerful?