That joke is like the Aristocrats insofar as it's an opportunity for improvisation (at as great a length as you can get away with). Also analogously, I've usually heard it as the "'Fuck you, clown' joke" (or just the "clown joke" if you really care about spoilarz).
And in the versions I've heard, the clown calls the guy down to the stage, and asks "Sir, are you a horse's head?" "No." "Are you a horse's leg?" "No." "Are you a horse's tail?" "No." "Well then, it seems to me that you must be a horse's ass!" which is both funnier (to me) and (importantly) longer.
For Draco, you forgot Knowledge: wizard society and Status: Noble and Most Ancient House.
ETA: And Status: Boy-Who-Lived for Harry, of course.
Ch. 68:
Hermione wears makeup? On a regular basis?! Has this been mentioned before, in MoR or canon? Seems somewhat-to-very out of character to me.
ETA: Eliezer has now removed the reference.
Admittedly the comic seems to assume malevolence rather than the more likely indifference...but it's still a comic about a self-improving superhuman intelligence that destroys humanity.
I was more interested in Quirrell's statement about the note. Have we seen evidence before that the lawyer/genie style of not-technically-lying is particularly relevant in the magical world? Veritaserum, perhaps?
Some of the best writing so far.
On the other hand, it also contains this sentence:
Something precious and irreplaceable inside Harry withered like dry grass and vanished forever.
which appears to mean nothing and serve no purpose except to irritate me by reminding me of terrible BDSM erotica.
Why does he follow his whims to play-duel and then kill Bahry instead of quickly subduing and memory-charming him,
Presumably, as I mentioned below, for the stated reason that "'It's been quite a while since I had a serious fight with a serious opponent'" As Quirrel himself said earlier, if you can't have some fun once in a while, what's the point?
And it's a pretty big miscalculation of Quirrell not to anticipate Harry's intervention at the key moment.
I interpreted it that he was just too caught up in duelling-lust, and momentarily eriregrq gb uvf Qnex Ybeq crefban, forgetting how Harry would react.
ETA: rot-13d some stuff which is apparently supposed to be secret again.
Has anyone dealt with bargaining games where different pure solutions cannot be linearly combined (i.e. a non-convex solution space)?
This is also the approach they take on the TV show Caprica.
You forgot the most optimistic of all:
Ch. 49. The throwaway reference to Tenorman Family Chili is awesome.
Don't you think that one's a bit creepy, what with the Nazi-style saluting?
Too many SMBC comics to get all of them in one post, but here are four recent ones:
#1 The Fermi Paradox is resolved with reference to wireheading.
#2 About mind uploading.
#3 A different kind of singularity, and (naive) Fun Theory.
#4 Making fun of aging singularitarians.
The Big Bang Theory, Episode 402.
Sheldon (the most socially atypical character on a show full of them) plans a program of life-extension so that he will last until the Singularity, which he projects to occur around 2060 and chiefly involve the uploading of human consciousness into machines (his roommate Leonard describes the latter as become a "freakish self-aware robot". By the end of the episode Sheldon seems to have given up on the plan as too inconvenient/inadvertently dangerous.
I see no strong reason to believe a meta-analysis should be any more convincing than a single, large, well-designed study.
Does anyone claim it is? I thought the advantage of a meta-analysis was the cost savings of not having to do a new, large study.
I strongly agree that you're more likely to get wrong results out of someone else's code than your own, because you tend to assume that they did their own error checking, and you also tend to assume that the code works the way you think it should (i.e. the way you would write it yourself), either or both of which may be false.
This is what led to my discovering a fairly significant error in my dissertation the day before I had to turn it in :) (Admittedly, self-delusion also played a role.)
Speaking of media for children, I once read that the MPAA will not certify a film as "G" if it contains if it contains morally ambiguous characters, regardless of the sex, violence, language or drugs. Unfortunately I cannot find an internet citation for this (beyond the talk of "mature themes").
Indeed, some of us spend 9 more years in school to postpone this decision. (In case you were wondering, it doesn't help.)
But does it actually punish you for waiting, or just threaten to? (I haven't gotten around to playing Mass Effect 2 yet.)
jim answered quite thoroughly. I'll add that I was hinting mainly at the fact that the BioWare developers knew that most players would, by habit, take their sweet time no matter how many universes were at stake, and planned accordingly.
If your most trusted ally tells you "We must hurry, or we will fail!", a veteran gamer knows to ignore him and go rescue a kitten. If a pop-up window tells you to hurry up or you will fail, you do hurry up. Some messages can only be given on this side of the fourth wall.
Similarly, if you're on a quest to save the world, you do side-quests to put it off as long as possible
I've explicitly made note this fact, that one should do quests in exactly reverse order of importance, in every cRPG I've ever played. Because often making progress on major quests will change the game (lock you out of an area, say, or kill an NPC) such that you can no longer complete some minor quests if you haven't done them already .
Modern designers have finally started to take account of this. In Mass Effect 2, you do almost all of your side-questing while you wait for your employer to gather information about the main problem. Once the party does get started, the game makes it emphatically clear that waiting any more than absolutely necessary is going to severely compromise your primary mission.
Yeah, as JamesAndrix alludes to (warning: extreme geekery), the Dwarves were created by Aulë (one of the Valar (Gods)) because he was impatient for the Firstborn Children of Iluvatar (i.e., the Elves) to awaken. So you might call the Dwarves Aulë's attempt at creating the Elves; at least, he knew what the Elves would look like (from the Great Song), so it's pretty plausible that he impressed in the Dwarves an aesthetic sense which would rank Elves very highly.
I believe D. is imitating the style of Terry Pratchett, who uses small-caps for his "Death" character. The full-size caps are a bit annoying, I agree.
just a sweet quest item
Yeah, having Bacon's Diary equipped gives Harry a totally sweet +1 to all his attacks. And it doesn't even use up a weapon slot!
So, I don't so much mean one year vs. 7+ of in-universe time; I mean one JKR book-length vs. 7+ JKR book-lengths worth of writing. (I.e., is Eliezer shooting for 75kword, 1.1Mword, or something else.) Should have been more clear about that.
I rather suspect that it will be important in the finale
Which raises the question: is Harry going to "win" (defeat QM/bring about the Magical Singularity/generally wrap up the plot) in one year, or seven, or some other number? And is Eliezer going to keep writing that far?
Even so, I would think that having all of them off planet Earth would be preferable to some on it and some off. Inside the Sun, inside some of the ice-moons of the gas giants, and on various random trajectories out of the solar system (not strapped to a probe whose telemetry we know very well, for goodness' sake) would seem to be optimal. Of course this all depends on Voldy's actual ability to put them there.
Then there's the whole issue of traps/alarms. Trapping is probably not worthwhile if you're hiding in highly-inaccessible places, since if your e...
would guess from MoR canon that relativity-compliant signaling is not necessary for a Horcrux to work
Horcruces: the ultimate "spooky action at a distance"!
Fortunately Eliezer gave himself some phoenix-magic wiggle rooom:
The logic had presented itself with a strange diamondlike clarity. Harry couldn't have said if it had come to him during Fawkes's singing...
Upvoted; I think cosmology in particular and astronomy in general is a very important case study of how to make theories and generally become less wrong in a situation where you absolutely cannot make any changes to the thing you're studying. (Of course I'm likely biased because it happens to be the field I'm in at the moment.)
Right, so this is the standard misunderstanding about what it means for space itself to be expanding. These two Wikipedia article might be a good place to start, but in brief: relativity forbids information to pass through space faster than light, but when space itself expands then the distance between two objects can increase faster than c without a problem. (The second link quotes a number of 2 trillion years for the time when no galaxies not currently gravitationally bound to us will be visible.)
I don't think redshifting destroys information.
Well,...
Without getting mathematical: there are galaxies moving away from us faster than the speed of light (and moreover every galaxy outside the Local Group is accelerating away from us). In the future these galaxies will not be visible to Earth-based observers. Similarly the CMB will be more redshifted and hence contain less information. So if you're using a meaning of "event" such that every Planck volume of space produces an event every Planck time regardless of whether there are any atoms there or not, then yes, that number can only go up. But if you're talking about actually interesting things to observe, then it's certainly going down.
I agree, I was just pointing out the flaw in your wording.
Of course, we have no way to create new stars or galaxies of our own
Well, we do make simulations.
Actually, since the Universe is accelerating, the past light cone effectively gets smaller over time. Billions of years from now there will be significantly less cosmological data available.
s stupid moral oversimplification necessary in a mass-market bestseller? E.g., Tolkien
I would say The Silmarillion is not very morally simplistic. Specifically I would call it Black and Gray morality [TVTropes], because I can't think of a single non-God major character who's totally good. (Maybe Luthien?)
I put the link in; thanks for the reminder.
And comments on my top-level posts don't appear in my inbox, only (direct) replies to my comments. Is that different for you?
Ha, I was just waiting for a new chapter to go up to post one.
Haha, I was just going to post the "Harry is Rand al'Thor" theory myself. Clearly the best explanation.
In fact, even in real life, I suspect many one-boxers would two box in the end when they are standing there
My intuition says the opposite: I think many people who claimed they would two-box would one-box in the event. $1000 is so small compared to $1000000, after all; why take the chance that Omega will be wrong?
Aha. I read book 7 when it came out, but had forgotten that. Eminently plausible, then.
To wit: find that stone which I saw earlier and which I now recognise from the design that you showed me!
Ha, great theory. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that the symbol was so obscure that even Voldemort never found it out. (Unless Rowling specifically mentioned it?)
Ch. 40:
Interesting that Harry said "besides Avada Kedavra" rather than "besides Imperius". (I suppose it's that "intent to kill" acting up again.) But I wonder how easy it would be to Imperius someone into being more rational.
According to Rowling's description, the Imperius curse is a lot like Heinlein's slugs: the controlled person keeps all their capabilities, but feels no worry or feeling of responsibility, and they want whatever the controller wants them to want. To make them more rational, the controller would essentially have to do their thinking for them. It's most useful for making someone else into your secret agent.
The thing I find most intriguing about the Imperius curse is that it's possible for someone under it to cast the curse on someone else. And several people ...
What immediately occurred to me (similar to the infamous scene in The Princess Bride), is that if your opponent believes you will have a distraction and a real attack, simply lauch two real attacks, with the expectation that whichever one the opponent takes to be the distraction will succeed. Obviously this requires a greater sacrifice of materiel, but Quirrelmort doesn't exactly seem short in that department.
Yes, that's how it should be.