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TrE comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97 - Less Wrong
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I like that Harry's gloves have come off, and he's planning on making full use of transfiguration as a weapon. About time.
Lot's of Quirrellness coming out.
And bear in mind that sulfuric acid is only one possibility among several!
Liquid oxygen, which is also pretty easy to produce or acquire, expands quite a bit when it evaporates, and rapidly oxidizes all of your pretty organic chemistry. If you could ship enough liquid oxygen (transfigured into something else) inside a human, they would burn and explode when the transfiguration wears off.
Botulinum toxin was also mentioned in the fic and is the weapon of choice for DIY genocide.
Pyrophoric substances, transfigured and then finely ground, will start burning in an oxygen-containing atmosphere.
Obtain nuclear weapons material (the hard part) and transfigure several subcritical pieces into iron, assemble them to give one large ball, drop it (or bury it underground), and run.
Certainly not all of these are practical, but all of them sound awesome.
We could just run through the whole list of Things I Won't Work With.
prolonged scream
Thank you for that link. I particularly enjoyed reading about "Azidoazide Azides, More Or Less".
Chlorine trifluoride?
It's been done, in Dungeon Keeper Ami.
I'd like to think that Harry isn't crazy enough to play with ClF3.
(...but we know he is.)
Get Fred and George to transfigure half a supercritical sphere of nuclearbombium each (lasts a few hours), transfigure Freds into the same shape made of lead (lasts maybe half an hour), combine them into a sphere and teleport away with the phoenix that plan undeniably earned. (Yes, I know it was said everyone gets only one chance for a phoenix and Harry failed his)
Also: Metallic sodium and potassium, as well as phosphorus, are quite reactive with human tissue. For bonus points you can make a mixed projectile with two transfigurations, e.g. a core transfigured from ice surrounded by a shell transfigured from sodium, which will explode once the two transfigurations end.
I'm morbidly curious to know what forms of genocide aren't DIY genocide...
The Holocaust, the Bosnian genocide and the Rwandan genocide I would not consider "DIY" genocide since they weren't the result of a single human's actions, but required support from their society. In contrast, a single competent evil (or mad) wizard is, as Harry put it, an extinction event.
So, just to clarify, by DIY you mean one person effects the entire genocide rather than many people personally involved in the genocide, doing the killing themselves. In a sense, the Y in your DIY is singular, and the Y in mine is plural.
Also, my general schema of "DIY" is that it's a cheaper but more difficult alternative to the normal approach--which usually involves hiring someone to do your project for you or buying a ready-made product. Since most genocides tend to be executed the hard way-- you can't buy genocide in a box, although some chemical weapons might come close-- I felt that genocide is fundamentally a DIY project. It's just a ... fun ... project for the whole community, rather than one person. Like building a playground. That kills people. (This is going to a very bad place isn't it?)
I'm able to accept your definition of DIY, though I still prefer to think that genocides require a certain degree of personal agency from its participants and that second person pronouns can be plural.
Fulminated mercury.
Edited to add: Sorry, been rewatching old Breaking Bad. You'd have to trick them into chewing it or something, wouldn't you?
I think the rapid expansion when the transfiguration ends would be enough to set it off.
Well, for the first two of my suggestions, the victim would need to have ingested or inhaled that stuff. So smoke would probably also work. Though I wouldn't want to be nearby in that scenario.