Quirrell's Parseltongue statements could use a close reading.

I cannot be truly killed by any power known to me.

This could just mean that the Pioneer horcrux prevents him from being "truly killed".

And your girl-child friend sshall be revived by me, to true life and health

This seems quite explicit. Quirrell thinks that he can bring Hermione back to life.

Harry: You already have an idea for what you want from me. What is it?

Quirrell: Your help in obtaining the Philosopher's Stone.

(Not in Parseltongue.) Quirrell later asks Harry in Parseltongue to promise to help get the Stone, but he never says in Parseltongue that help getting the Stone is what he actually wants from Harry.

I do not intend to raisse my hand or magic againsst you in future, sso long ass you do not raisse your hand or magic againsst me.

Does this rule out Quirrell transferring his soul into Harry's body (wiping out Harry's identity and reuniting with the Tom Riddle groundwork that he laid in Harry's mind)? Because without this line, that would be my leading hypothesis for what Quirrell actually wants Harry for.

Counter-evidence: Harry produces blue and bronze sparks at Ollivander's.

As long as we're sticking necks out, though:

• Definitely: The horcrux technology uses the ghost phenomenon. Specifically, by causing the violent death of a wizard under controlled conditions (i.e., murder) it's possible to harness the powerful burst of magic to make a ghost of the living caster instead of of the dying victim: a backup copy. A ghost may be static data rather than a running instance, but hey, so is a cryo patient.

• Definitely: Baby Harry was overwritten with a horcrux-backup-copy of Voldemort. Voldemort didn't plan on childhood amnesia, though, and much of the information was erased (or at least made harder to access consciously). The Remembrall-like-the-Sun indicated the forgotten lifetime as Riddle. Remnants of Voldemort's memories are the reason Harrymort has a cold side; his upbringing in a loving family is the reason he has a warm side.

• Mere hunch: In chapter 45, the Dementor recognized Harry as Voldemort and addressed him by name: "Riddle".

• Mere hunch: Voldemort may have chosen to impress his horcrux in a living human in order to try to get around the "static data" problem. If it had worked, he would have forked himself -- there would have been two fully functional running instances of Voldemort, all the time, plus twelve hours a day worth of Time-copies.

Amazon's first pages look interesting - any chance you have an e-copy? Bittorrent is proving useless.

Thanks! (Ugh, papers that talk about fMRI results.)

But for what it's worth, my own case study confirmed the claim as well.

You might be interested to know that SSRIs appear to kill romantic love, in addition to their other effects. Thus half of the engineering problem has been solved, modulo the difficulty in obtaining these drugs.

Pity that this suggestion is a few years late for your own (unstated) predicament, of course. But don't worry, you'll get through it the old-fashioned way in time.

The Weasleys aren't a good example if that's what you're trying to show: they're shown rendered poor and unable to replace Ron's wand despite this being a known near-lethal danger and badly injurious to his studies; it'd be like breaking your glasses and your family being too poor to buy you replacements because school tuition has to be paid - anyone who told you that obviously your education can't be expensive because you're actually there...

I don't recall any mention in canon of Hogwarts even having tuition.

A family with only a single low pay government job for income generally can't afford to put seven children through seven years of boarding school each. If Hogwarts had the tuition and board costs of top boarding schools in Britain, the Weasleys would be spending more than a hundred thousand pounds a year on the four children they're putting through school simultaneously.

Considering they have a pretty captive market, if Hogwarts wanted to maximize revenues, they would probably have to be well outside the means of a low pay government employee to put seven kids through before they reached a point where they started losing more money due to lost students than they were making in increased revenue per student.

And following incentives to preserve a status quo doesn't require a conspiracy. If the students and the faculty both don't want something, nobody has to conspire to keep it from them.

There was something that has always been bugging me. It's actually several things I don't understand.

When Snape says "You almost died today, Potter", what does he mean? Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker, but I can't understand that part. My best guess is that Snape got so upset with what Harry said that he almost killed him in his rage. But that seems very counterintuitive to me.

Second, Snape had possibly changed after his conversation with Harry? Does this mean that Snape took Harry's words and thought that Lily is actually not worth his love, after all these years? That's my best hypothesis, but I find it very weird.

Third, did I actually properly understood that he still loves her, after more than 11 years have passed? This is very unrealistic, people get over things, and I suspect that either EY is being unrealistic here, or Snape is simply lying.

Edit: I retract the last part. Still, this does not mean that now I believe this to be realistic, but rather that it might possibly be realistic. Also that EY could indeed have decided to just go with the canon, and I see good reasons for that.

I'm feeling thick at the moment - can anyone explain this passage?

'His gaze grew more distant. "Oh," Severus breathed, "he was very cunning indeed..."'

Perhaps he's just reflecting on how ingenious Voldemort's method of concealing the Mark was, but he's had almost twenty years to reflect on that privately. It seems sounds to me that Voldemort included some sort of charm that forced the Death Eaters to divulge a fake explanation of the method whenever it seemed like someone was getting too close to the truth in order to keep people from digging any further. That explanation fits with Quirrel playing "one level higher than you", but I am wary of looking for cunning plots hinted by every full stop in the text. It just seems like a bit of a strange thing for Snape to do at this point.

I would say that's more reflective of ignorance than incompetence. Though failing to sufficiently inform themselves about dangerous muggle technology would be incompetence at a meta level.

Harry didn't learn, no. But is that an advantage or a disadvantage? To go back to Chapter 76:

"It's strange," Snape said quietly. "I have had two mentors, over the course of my days. Both were extraordinarily perceptive, and neither one ever told me the things I wasn't seeing. It's clear enough why the first said nothing, but the second..." Snape's face tightened. "I suppose I would have to be naive, to ask why he stayed silent."

Now, yes, this separates Snape from Dumbledore. But Dumbledore is not the protagonist. Harry is the protagonist. And what Snape can learn from Harry's actions are:

Harry Potter will tell him the truth; Snape can trust Harry Potter. -or- Harry Potter is a brilliant plotter; so good that even at age eleven he outclasses both Voldemort and Dumbledore with his ability to fake being honest and trustworthy.

If the first is true, Snape can put his trust in Harry, where he cannot trust Voldemort or Dumbledore. In a world where the prophecy clearly declares Harry Potter a power that ranks with Voldemort, isn't the obvious power to align oneself with the one who you can trust? When looking at the future, do you want it dominated by someone who let you wallow in foolishness and pain for their own advantage, or someone who treated you as you would wish to be treated? (Well, it might just mean the boy doesn't have enough guile to win, of course, but that suggests merely not burning your bridges. You're already in the other camp, after all . . .)

If the second is true, the only sensible course is to make oneself as useful to Harry as possible, because Harry is unstoppable.