Also, the white keys are far from being an arbitrary set of pitches. Very roughly, they're chosen so that as many combinations of them as possible sound reasonably harmonious together when played on an instrument whose sound has a harmonic spectrum (which applies to most of the tuned instruments used in Western music). I don't mean that someone deliberately sat down and solved the optimization problem, of course, but it turns out that the Western "diatonic scale" (= the white notes) does rather well by that metric. So it's not like we'd particularly want to change the scale for the sake of making either the mathematics or the music sound better.
The next discussion thread is here.
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 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.
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.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
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: