My grandfather saw me do this to a book once and told me the story of an Eastern mage who avenged himself by leaving the king who beheaded him a wondrous book with pages stuck together - but they were poisoned.

Never did this again...

I see no reason why bacteria can't survive like this.

Why don't ordinary photons spontaneously collapse into black holes? You should get a singularity if the energy density in any region of space is high enough. But you can pick an inertial reference frame such that any given photon has arbitrarily high frequency (and thus energy) due to blueshift. Since any inertial reference frame is as valid as any other due to relativity, why don't all photons collapse under their own weight?

Some other techniques to add to the list:

• Hypnosis
• Biofeedback
• Spaced repetition
• Fast mental arithmetic
• Speed reading

There's also variant on Tulpas called a servitor, which is a hallucination of something inanimate instead of an intelligent companion. I've been wondering for a while if a notepad servitor or something could improve one's working memory.

What do you mean? (I ask because I am more used to other kinds of web resources - mail lists of petitions, interactive maps, culinary recipes - about which I would have said that the signal-to-noise ratio is good enough. Maybe you mean discussion forums in particular?)

...which probably means that we should ask Vaniver or RichardKennaway to edit the wiki pages...

I would caution away from a bias towards "the current situation seems vaguely bad, therefore Something Must Be Done." There are lots of people still getting use out of LessWrong. I think it would be unfortunate that a bias towards Doing Something over Leaving It Be might cause a valuable resource to be ended without good cause. If the site can be reinvented, great, but if it can't -- don't hit the Big Red Button without honestly weighing the significant costs to the people who are still actively using the site.

(I briefly searched, to see if there's an article on LW about the idea of a bias towards Doing Something. It would of course be essentially the opposite of status quo bias; and yet I think it's a real phenomenon. I certainly feel like I observe it happening in discussions like this. Perhaps the real issue is in the resolution of conflicts between a small minority who are outspoken about Doing Something, and a large silent majority who don't express strong feelings because they're fine with the status quo. This is an attempt to express a thought that I've had percolating, not a criticism of this post.)

Great idea! When everyone has inhaled the gas Harry can truthfully say in parseltongue that if he dies, everyone present will die (because that would cancel the transfiguration).

Edit: This work well with all the early foreshadowing about how transfiguration is extremely dangerous. In Ghostbusters we establish early on that you're not supposed to cross the streams because that is extremely dangerous. And then, at the end of the move, when all is lost, what you do is to deliberately cross the streams.

Can we each propose a non-transfiguration solution? Even if it's just a rough idea. I feel like we're getting stuck on transfiguration, and a bunch of those require very precise handling of things 10 feet away (such as death eaters) or significantly big things (Harry's body parts). Hermione struggled to get the stunning hex right on the first try, and I feel Eliezer will categorize "transfigure this very precise, remote thing" as a "new magical power".

There are all sorts of ways to fight using partial transfiguration. Many of the obvious ones mentioned so far are too slow (tunneling through the ground, nerve gas), suicidal (micro black holes, antimatter, unununium, critical mass of enriched uranium, nitroglycerin, etc.) or too complicated.

only a fool would attempt a plot that was as complicated as possible, the real limit was two.

On the other hand, Dumbledore took the shotgun approach to plotting. Let's take the best of both worlds.

Then the obvious answer is chain lightning! Transfigure the air into ions in a path connecting the Death Eater's necks, including LV. This will likely go unnoticed since air is invisible. It might take a few seconds, but Harry can stall in Parseltongue. Then transfigure a cross section of the middle Death Eater's spinal cord into pure electrons. You should be able to generate considerable voltage with minimal mass/volume/time. Repeat for the other Death Eaters. This gives us the possible instantaneous effects of:

• Blinding flash/deafening thunder
• Concussive shock
• Electrocution
• Combustion
• Death

To all present Death Eaters simultaneously, while not killing Harry outright, plus

• Paralysis
• Death

To the targeted middle Death Eater. Suffering even one of these effects will disable the other Death Eaters long enough to repeat the procedure. The initial strike will reinforce the ion channels, Harry won't have to rebuild them.

Of course I'm assuming partial transfiguration doesn't require Harry to actually aim his wand at the target, but is limited in size. I'm also assuming he can transfigure air, which is not clear from the story so far, as others have mentioned. But really, air is just atoms like everything else. A partial transfiguration should work. Aim should not be required. Contact should not be required. Just partially transfigure a ray of air into air in the intended direction, and terminating with the intended effect.

Beisutsukai
The Way of Bayes
Getting What You Want
Future Thought
Man's Final Invention
Intelligence: Evolved, Explained, Engineered
Friendly AI: Engineering God
Thinking is a Skill
The Science of Wisdom
The Art of Reason
Metapsyche
The Case for Reason
I Will Teach You to be Smart
Reason for 21st Century Humans
The Dawn Age