For those wondering about this:
It has been three hundred and twenty-three years since the country of magical Italy was ruined by one man's folly.
323 years before 1992, this happened:
Etna's most destructive eruption since 122 BC started on 11 March 1669 and produced lava flows that destroyed at least 10 villages on its southern flank before reaching the city walls of the town of Catania five weeks later, on 15 April. The lava was largely diverted by these walls into the sea to the south of the city, filling the harbour of Catania. A small portion of lava eventually broke through a fragile section of the city walls on the western side of Catania and destroyed a few buildings before stopping in the rear of the Benedictine monastery, without reaching the centre of the town.
That's probably also what's referenced later on:
There is much literary wisdom in those stories. It is born of harsh experience and cities of ash.
(though it's pretty likely that in HPMOR-verse, all volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. are caused by Magic Gone Wrong)
There's a good chance that EY didn't want to allude to any historical event. Maybe his writer's instincts to give concrete examples kicked into gear, and he made up a fictional event about a fictional society.
But suppose he did choose to allude to a specific historical event. Why would he choose this one?
He would not choose this event because it was a great disaster with many casualties. According to the Wikipedia article, there is no historical record of any deaths from this eruption, and the disaster is overshadowed historically by the 1693 Sicilian E...
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 95. The previous thread has passed 300 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.
Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: