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He may not be good, but he is good at research.
I think being non-vegetarian is less evil than being a morally inconsistent non-vegetarian. If you would have moral trouble being introduced to your food (or raising it) then you shouldn't be eating it.
The status quo is preferable when other option is of unknown goodness and irrevocable.
As the sword killed 90% of those who touched it, Vhazhar could have, upon reading the records, discovered that the sword only allowed to survive those who help increase the CEV for sentient life (and thus slaughtering a ridiculous number of Cohen-esque "heroes").
It seems that most the discussion here is caught up on Omega being able to "predict" your decision would require reverse-time causality which some models of reality cannot allow to exist.
Assuming that Omega is a "sufficiently advanced" powerful being, then the boxes could act in exactly the way that the "reverse time" model stipulates without requiring any such bending of causality through technology that can destroy the contents of a box faster than human perception time or use the classical many-worlds interpretation method of ending the universe where things don't work out the way you want (the universe doesn't even need to end, something like a quantum vacuum collapse would have the same effect of stopping any information leakage in non-conforming universes).
This makes the not-quite-a-rationalist argument of "the boxes are already what they are so my decision doesn't matter, I'll take both" no longer hold true.
True, however assuming the cannon limitation on apparition distance and broomstick speeds, he could search the UK pretty quickly, followed by Europe.
In this instance Quirrel probably realized something of the problem with good and powerful wizards could not cast Patroni and thought that Harry's absolutely odd way of thinking of things might be able to solve it. It would make sense that he should do this quickly as his plans to turn Harry into a Dark Lord might get in the way of this.
Well, what would Schiner be like with the Eye of Vance? When you can easily protect yourself from non-movie-plot problems through magic coupled with amazing situational awareness, the movie-plot problems get to be what's left (not to mention that the wizarding world seems to breed movie-plot villians).
On the topic of Mad-Eye, as it has been established that Mad-Eye can see everywhere, why doesn't he go pick up Bella while she is weak?
Given that the magical community didn't seem to get into mathematics much, and provably strong crypto needs a ton of math, I could see how they never went beyond Caesar Ciphers.
Who knows, free Transfiguration works but seems to conserve mass, broomsticks work, but have effects similar to the standard reactionless drive+inertial dampener (and you can make a "reactionless" drive if you can shake masses about fast enough in curved spacetime paper)
Either that or Portkeys take some difficult preparation and have a limited lifetime in which they will work. Requiring a trip to the target location with a lifetime limit of as little as a day would not stomp over any of their uses in cannon or in MoR up to this point IIRC. This would of course preclude Dumbledore from having Portkeys on hand to go to Diagon Alley.
Just because corporations don't have a nuclear arsenal at their disposal doesn't make them all that less dangerous if they get to the hyper-optimizing arena. Just look at the various megacorps in scifi. A sufficiently powerful megacorp can make just as much trouble by conventional means through standard demolition, police (and para-military) action, and through environmental oversights (look at the fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico).
Overall you did a great job explaining the mathematics of unsupervised categorization but you missed one point in your end-matter.
The initial Monera classification was not a bad category at the time because when it was created there wasn't enough data to split out different subcategories. All the researchers had were a bunch of fuzzy spots wiggling under a microscope. You touched on this in the Amazon.com example. Just because the categories you have now are good for your current data doesn't mean that they will remain the same with further data.
It seems most of the "Hazards" outlined in the article are caused by the information causing the Doublethink machinery that maintains the receivers' social model to have to work harder. This isn't so much the information being harmful in of itself as the internally inconsistent models being harmed by factual information.
To be fair, building a solid-fuel rocket from memory wouldn't be too hard as it's all of 2 materials and rather simple in shape. Depending on how much knowledge of the subject free transfiguration takes he won't need anything more than his making of buckystring.
He could time-turn himself to allow for self-monitoring of the experiment.
The more trusting Harry may be an artifact of his being terrified. He got played on his dislike of the Dementors to get him in there. Once the shit hit the fan he was running terrified and taking whatever solution appeared to him. In this case Quirrelmort sounding even slightly reasonable (remember he's been talking to himself to keep the dementors off) would be accepted. I'll be interesting to see what happens when he gets back to civilization.
It seems that messenger Patroni don't have quite the anti-dementor effects that a local Patronus does. This would make sense both for the reason people go into Azkaban and for the reason that Harry didn't feel any different from the sending being around.
Depending on your philosophy on dating the Shadow Question could be more important. Lorien's First Question "Why are you here" would also be a good thing to know in reference to the dating site itself.
I think you're looking for the difference between Sentient and Sapient. The problem is that they are often conflated to make an awful mess of things.
Possibly it's an illusion or Someone Else's Problem Field (Perception Filter) such that the evil is still there, most people just don't see it because they don't want to.
Exactly. It doesn't replace sleep, but (according to the US military study) removes all the "can't concentrate", "can't stay alert", "uncoordinated", and "stupid decisions" effects of no sleep.
Exactly the sort of quote I was looking for. The philosopher is asking about absolute truth, the engineer only cares about finding parameters for a model of reality that works well enough for what you need it to do.
Harry may be a compulsive secret keeper, but he also uses the scarlet letter technique a bit too often and Quirrel probably realizes that.
Cycle analysis is basically drawing out a graph (nodes and edges) of what beats what. For standard Rock-paper-scissors you get a graph that looks like this:
ROCK -------> SCISSORS -------> PAPER
^-----------------------------------------------|
In systems that aren't balanced like the sword and armor problem here you can use it to decide what choice to make by giving each node a probability value based on how many people in game use that and then the best choice would be the node with the greatest (sum of probabilities on outgoing nodes) - (sum of probabilities on incoming nodes).
I'd say a good engineer would reply: No observation is true, but truth doesn't matter if it works.
That looks like what I got. It'd be interesting to do a cycle analysis like you do with Non-transitive Dice.
This is the correct equation for any attack pair. Now just need to do a 16-16 table to see what wins over what. I'll do it during lecture tomorrow.
I'm thinking that the author, like most of us, really believes that if you know what's happening you might have some marginal chance to avoid the effects of these tactics, even if he claims otherwise.
The sense of doom may just be a filled-with-fantasy Harry brain's interpretation of the Voldemort-emotion/proximity as opposed to the pain that cannon!Harry felt. MoR!Harry already has a far different view of things due to his fiction reading (just look at his interactions with Hermione), why not a different mapping of an unnatural sense?
It also could be that the Basillisk has some sort of genetic memory (or DNA-based cognition ala the Super Happies!) such that the monster in the book is not the original monster but rather a great-great grandwhelp of the original monster. This would allow any heirs to kill their specific monster while the line (and thus memories) are preserved.
(This is of course all predicated on Slytherin realizing that his descendents may be nasty enough to keep knowledge from others by any means possible).
I use VLC's playback speed (fine) options. Right now I'm taking a few recorded lecture classes and I can get them up to 1.4x without any difficulty in understanding or comprehension.