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Gondolinian comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119 - Less Wrong
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Hopefully the apparent time limit on the Philosopher's Stone isn't going to get worse over time. Harry also hasn't considered that it may only be good for some finite number of permanent transfigurations. He's going to try to use it many more times than it probably has been used in a very long time.
Good point. A time limit of 3:54 does seem too arbitrary to be hard-coded.
At least he only intends to use the Stone as a stop-gap measure for fighting death until he is able to properly end the world.
[edited]
3:54 is 234 seconds, which is exactly 1/400 of 26 hours, which happens to be Harry's extended sleep cycle. I have no idea if this is significant, but just throwing it out there.
It's also almost exactly 368 and 2/9 uses per siderial day, the actual period of rotation of the earth without reference to the sun.
It would've been exactly that figure about 5,300 years ago.
Based on that timing the stone was Gilgamesh's pearl
And guess who steals Gilgamesh's How-the-Old-Man-Once-Again-Becomes-A-Young-Man plant? That's right, a snake.
Ain't numerology grand?
So the Stone was created to be used no more than 400 times a day. This allows for the prediction that someone with a normal cycle should be able to use it every 1/400 of our normal days, or 216 seconds.
The limit might be the result of limited capacity rather than design.
Well, in seconds it's 234, which looks slightly less arbitrary.
Waait. Did whoever made it even use our time units?
Fair point; I didn't think of that. Does anyone know of a unit of time in which the equivalent of 3:54 would be a Schelling point of some sort?
Time Turners use units of one hour, so at least some kinds of magical items use our units.
Can you use the time turner in different increments, and possibly with a different maximum, if you fully understand hours are arbitrary? This sounds exactly like partial transfiguration.
(Alternatively, you go back some fixed amount of time for every grain of time sand in the turner, and you could build one of other increments by using a different quantity of sand.)
How does Time Turner select reference frame? What if you use it in the orbit, will you see Earth rotational angle jump by 90°? Assuming the reference frame is fixed to Earth surface, going sufficiently far away will give you FTL which can be used to create arbitrarily long time loops. Assuming it is not, what happens if you are moving at relativistic speeds (relative to Earth) and use the Time Turner?
EDIT: We not even need to consider relativity - what if you are flying on a broomstick (constant speed) or on a moving train and use Time Turner? This experiment is simple enough and can reveal a lot.
DO NOT MESS WITH TIME. Obviously if you attempt to use it in the stated way something very bad will happen.
3'54" is almost 71 halakim.
Edited to add: which, according to Babylonian time (see the same article), is almost the amount of time it takes the Earth to rotate one degree.
Using the time it takes Earth to rotate one degree gives you 86400 seconds in a day /360 degrees = 240 seconds. But the length of the day has been getting larger as the Earth slows at a rate of about 1.7 ms/century wiki
To find when one degree was equal to 234 seconds, we can find when a day was approximately 234*360 degrees = 84240 seconds, or approximately 127 million years ago. Putting the creation of the stone right in the middle of the Cretaceous Period.
Coincidentally, this also solves the issue of how the T Rex got away with such tiny arms. They had wands!
Well, seconds have been used since the Babylonian time period. However, we also don't know how carefully Harry measured the recharge time.
Wikipedia disagrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second#Before_mechanical_clocks
There are a lot of older units of time listed there, but none of them seem to fit.
Huh. That's fascinating. I had apparently wrongly assumed that because it had the same division into 60 that it also was as old. Apparently not.
Carefully enough not to round it up to 3:55. Presumably, it's within a second.
It occurs to me that this limit means Flame could, in theory, have been using the stone flat out for five hundred years without anyone catching on. 56 million people died this year. If the stone was used to save as many of them as possible, at random, then with only moderate use of magic for coverup purposes compared to shit we already know the magical world is pulling of, that is just going to be utterly undetectable. "Here have a second chance at life. Also a magical compulsion to keep your mouth shut".
So what would he have been doing? Saving victims of accident so that they end up being fine after a small hospital stay? Miraculously curing terminally ill people? I find it unlikely that he could do anything else with long-term benefits without anyone catching on. But yeah, I like that alternate character interpretation of Flamel.
Unexplained recoveries are a real thing. Everyone just shrugs and celebrates, or maybe credits God or the ginko biloba. It's been Flamel all along.
Mostly, resurrecting dead children. The population used to be lower, but kids also used to have piss-poor odds of making it to adult-hood. In terms of QALY, this would have been the best use, and if a child goes missing from a sickbed only to wander into the kitchen feeling chipper and fine, noone would even think twice.
Hrm. Maybe it's exactly one Atlantean time unit? Unsafe to assume that the units we are used to are the same units that the Stone's maker would find natural.
X to 1 stellar day as 366.24 stellar days to 1 mean year.
X = 235 seconds, 3:55.
Almost.
The more natural 365.24 is even worse.
We really want something like 370. That takes us back to the late Cretaceous, and I don't think that EY wants to push things that far back.
Another close figure: The sidereal day is 3 minutes, 56 seconds shorter than the solar day. If the solar day has a negative leap second, the difference is 3'55".
I do not know what some terms mean, but I think that is not another close figure, that is the same figure.
I mean, close to 3'54".
If the sidereal day and the solar day mean what I am guessing they mean, your 3:55 and Lumifer's 3:55 come from the same place.
No, what he did was divide the sidereal day by 366,24 and got 235 seconds, so there would be as many Stone's periods in a day as there are days in a year.
Yes, and my claim is that that is what you did too without knowing it. Think about what sidereal and solar day mean, and how you would calculate one from the other.
I Googled 3:54 and found a Quran verse:
And the disbelievers planned, but Allah planned. And Allah is the best of planners.
I googled "234 seconds" and found out that, apparently, the Philospher's Stone needs to post everything to the totalwar.org forums and, moreover, already got warning points for that. Who knew? X-D
Very appropriately, Google gives 3'54" as the length of these songs:
Timeless by Reece Mastin
Touch the Rock by Gent Mason
Sweeter than Fiction by Taylor Swift
Also, 'Lore of the Ancients', 'Particle Brain', 'Limitless Skies', 'A Lesson from Teacher', and 'Sacratus Bellator' Overclocked Remixes
The stone was created at a time before the invention of minutes and seconds. The Atlantians likely didn't have 24 hours per day, 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute.