Learned Hangul (just the script, I have no intention of learning Korean ever). Not worth much of bragging, since it is indeed very easy, "a writing you can learn within a morning" - though it took me considerably longer.

My primary motivation was to have a sort of private semi-secret script to write my notes in, and something where syllables will be organized in blocks, which theoretically helps reading (though one has to read a lot to internalize the whole shapes to achieve this).

I have some relevant observations:

• Hangul might fit Korean language perfectly, but is really, really unsuitable for a "random European language". Not only there are many consonants missing, but the syllables cannot have an arbitrary coda, and arbitrary consonant clusters are right out.
• The above point can be remedied somewhat by (re)using historical (obsolete) letters, but:
• Historical letters have almost none computer support.
• Arbitrary consonant clusters have none computer support, since:
• There are standalone "jamo" letters in unicode block U+1100, but most applications cannot deal with them, requiring to use precomposed syllables insted
• Even if I could use standalone jamo, font support does not go beyond initial consonant+vowel+(fixed set of) final consonant cluster, anything else just displays overlapping and utterly unreadable letters.
• Syllables consisting of consonant+vowel are nicely readable, but:
• Syllables witht he structure CVC(C) are less readable, requiring bigger font size, which kind of defeats the point of readability. Especially if one wants to use morphematic writting, as opposed to phonemic one - which was my original intention, to keep the word roots unchanged.
• Thus, Latin script at smallish fontsizes tends to be more readable than Hangul at twice the fontsize.
• Korean input methods under X11 leave a lot to be desired. Especially if you want to type something that does not fit Korean phonology, you are basically out of luck.

Considering all this, I indeed do use Hangul as my private semisecret script, and intent to continue doing so.

Let's make sure we're talking about cryptographic hashing functions.

Let's say I make a prediction that Barack Obama is a werewolf. I don't want anyone to know I've made this prediction, because otherwise the Secret Werewolf Police will come and eat me, but I do want to lord it over everyone after the fact.

I take the string "Barack Obama is a werewolf" and I put it through a hashing function, (for purposes of this example, the hashing function MD5). This produces the output 37ecb0a3164e6422bedc0f8db82e45ec. The original string about Barack Obama is not recoverable from this output, because MD5 is a lossy function, but anyone else putting that string through the MD5 hashing function will get the same output. The hash output is like a fingerprint for the original string.

So if I put 37ecb0a3164e6422bedc0f8db82e45ec in a public place a year before Barack Obama transforms into a werewolf on live television, after the fact I can give people the original string and they can verify it for themselves against the hash output.

I use a Chrome plugin for most tasks that involve basic encoding of text values. (If I'm honest, I mostly use it for rot13, and more exotic uses aren't that common). There are also online hash generators for different hashing functions. Some popular hashing functions for this purpose are MD5 and SHA1.

Does this answer your question?

I am starting to think that Lord Voldemort planned to commit suicide by proxy. Being without any personal aims, totally bored, without any happiness, surrounded by idiots, no chance of improvement - yet he cares about the world, at least somewhat, and realized that the original plan of playing chess with Harry would not alleviate his mood anymore anyway. And he has a better, happier and (age adjusted) more intelligent clone running around, so it is not like he will cease to exist altogether.

So he told Harry where to find Memory charms, prepared the plot, got the Stone (for Harry), made Harry take the Vow to keep his recklessness in limits, let him keep his wand and put him to the Final Exam.

The problem is that if he planned to be Obliviated, the plot was extremely complicated and relied on too many factors that could have gone wrong. So perhaps LV just threw the towel and said to himself, darn, let's Harry try whatever he can think about to do with us, and if he fails, well, it's not like I cannot try something else in some decades.

Thinking about AI boxing - note that it is Harry who represents humanity, his core values and goals were not changed that much by the Vow, they were just formalized.

It is LV that has goals that are mostly what we'd agree about (`ensure the continuous existence of the world'), but he has very different values and no moral constraints. In short, dealing with him is like dealing with an Unfriendly AI or an Alien mind (like Sorting Hat).

So this is more like a clash between Unfriendly (or better, Indifferent) and a Friendly AI, where the goals are more or less compatible, but in addition the FAI keeps human values. And the UFAI got there first and is more powerful.

The rational way if your goals are compatible is to cooperate - however, Harry's values almost ensure that he will defect given the chance. And LV knows it, so the rational action for him is to defect (=kill) as well.

I shall take no chances... in not destroying the world...

Oh my... did Voldemort just magically imbued Harry to do his best to put the whole world into time-frozen stasis in the Mirror?

Though revealing this to LV would not do any good - there is a failure safe mode, namely killing Harry, and if LV learns what he did (apart from pointing out his own stupidity), he has all the motivation to kill Harry right now.

hypothesis: Voldemort is pretending to lose.

Everything he said and did about Hermione is true - he wants Harry to have restrains and a sidekick (and a true friend, but his is an emotion he knows not). He knows that Harry has the best chance to defeat death, and so the best course of action is to move to the background to live a safe, boring life, now with his horcrux network, new body with who-knows-what capabilities, Harry being one of the very few things in the world that can hurt/kill him. So if Harry will think Voldemort is finally dead...

Against this hypothesis speaks the fact that Voldemort acts in a really stupid way - he surely must be aware that Harry might notice it. And he did not set up any plausible reason why he might act stupidly.So why would he be playing suddenly two levels down?

Hypothesis: The mirror (or the whole room) connects universes. More specifically, there is only one mirror, stable in the multiverse (quantum, mathematical, magical or whatever) of compatible universes. A compatible universe is such an universe where the mirror exists, i.e. most probably the one that did not branch off before the end of Atlantis (or boltzmanned into existence a moment ago).

Looking into the reflection, your (magical) brain picks the image from a different universe, the one that matches your CEV most closely.

Nothing can hurt the mirror, unless the measure of the universes the action is performed in is a "significant portion" of the multiverse - otherwise it just dissipates.

The map shows gibberish, because, well, there is everybody and nobody in the last room...

Time travel isn't fully computable, but that doesn't mean it can't be approximated, that you can't make hacks giving the impression of time travel to people inside the simulation.

It might even be possible that attempts to abuse time travel (like the one done by Harry at the beginning when he tried to factorize primes using the Time-Turner) raise an alert in the simulation, freezes the simulation until an operator manually inputs an acceptable solution ("don't mess with time" being the solution hand-crafted by the operator).

I haven't re-read the fic in a while so this might be a stupid question, but does QQ know about Partial Transfiguration? I can't recall him being present/conscious at any point Harry uses it. That would be a power the Dark Lord knows not, right?

If Harry judged that whatever Quirrel was planning was X-risk level dangerous, he could try wandlessly Transfiguring a few micrograms of antimatter, destroying both of them (along with a large chunk of Scotland) in the process.

Harry and Quirrell are about to enter the room containing the Mirror of Erised (desire), which shows the viewer's deepest desire. It contains the philosopher's stone, and (Ch. 104)

Her notes said that something dangerous might happen if the Stone stays inside the mirror too long.

So, what is Harry's deepest desire? There are several candidates, but I think a strong contender is a Quirrell who isn't evil. Transfiguration can only create things that already exist. It is plausible that being seen in the mirror, modified as it is by the magic of the Stone, counts as existence for this purpose. So, Harry's win condition is: transfigure Quirrell into redeemed Quirrell. Due to the destructive interaction of their magics, this would require disabling Quirrell and then getting someone else to do the transfiguration.