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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 28, chapter 99-101

Imps as can't be seen or heard or remembered, even while they're eatin' yer face.

It's probably a reference to Worm (which has a character called Imp whose superpower is to selectively stop other people from noticing or remembering her).

1Desrtopa11y

I'd say their mention also raises the question of how trolls were able to secure the top third spot for most dangerous predator over them. Or even dementors, for that matter. A threat you don't know to run away from until it's too late is worse than one that you can't defeat, but can easily escape. Possibly a single imp will eat its fill from a human being without ever doing fatal harm. But a few Imperiused imps would be an absurdly deadly weapon.

Open Thread, April 2011

chris_elliott14y80

I think people on Less Wrong might enjoy my personal favourite Ted Chiang story "Understand", about nootropics. It's also been made available in full on Infinity Plus with permission, here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm

Open Thread: Mathematics

chris_elliott14y60

Disclaimer: I am not a probabilist.

One possibility would be some combination of the book Probability With Martingales by David Williams, and the lecture notes of James Norris available freely online here and here, depending on your taste. As the names suggest, both of these develop measure theory with probability theory in mind. Section A of Williams's book and the first set of Norris's notes cover basic measure theory, and sections B and C of Williams's book and the second set of Norris's notes cover more advanced topics (conditional expectation, Mart... (read more)