Lurker > MasaomiHouzuki

also important: https://i.imgur.com/JC1rtZi.png

So to point out some things:

Quirrell can't change someone else into a cat or anything, transfiguration isn't arbitrary and free transfiguration (changing anything into anything else) requires contact between the wand and the target..

Quirrell might be able to get the jump on her, he has various invisibility spells + stealth mechanics (it's not exactly specified what they are, just makes him hard to detect both physically and magically), I think if he knows he has an adversary, it would be extremely in character for him to not engage unless he has a gigantic unfair advantage.

Other than the killing curse, he also would hex people 50 ways in the space of a second (he knocked out basically all of slytherin house alone, including several auror grade students without anyone noticing except by inference). A duel between Quirrell and a super experienced auror was described as like a rainbow of curses, counter curses and barriers etc.

It's pretty hard to say what he'd use other than the killing curse, except maybe like, dunno guns or whatever's the most effective (most effective assuming that it doesn't depend on anyone else). He's very straightforward, and what's terrifying is basically he decides not to murder most of the cast at the start.

<I>You can argue about whose spells will affect who endlessly but the gulf in physical abilities between these two characters is just way too much for it to really be relevant.</I>

This wasn't even argued. You made a bald assertion without evidence. Now, maybe Eva CAN resist mind control or whatever, but you need to like talk about it instead of merely asserting it.

For quirrell it's not a single spell, various spells have homing capabilities (for example, there's a modified stunning hex that can track a target once that quirrell doesn't know, patronus can track, the spinning drill hex can track to a certain amount). I believe he has done the "taken out an entire room of aurors without any perception on the part of others" feat (which NORMAL aurors are capable of doing to regular wizards in HPMOR btw) so you're going to have to be more specific on what level thos martial artists are.

PrinceKaro posted...

Yeah, well Harry is someone he has known well for a long time.

Here he has to fight someone he never met, who has using spells he has never seen, all while trying not to die from blows dealt by someone with superhuman strength and crazy anime speed.

being a big brain mastermind does not necessarily translate to being able to think on your feet in active combat, and he will need time to come up with a plan, and this is time he does not have. Eva is someone with spells that can one-shot literal gods, I don't care what kind of shields you have up they are not gonna hold out for long.

I mean, he's pretty quick at coming up with new plans on the fly, considering that he, like, orchestrated the invasion of magical Britain and also was one of the best duelists in all of Britain.

<I>
Considering Eva highly skilled in mind control magic as well, I would expect she also knows how to effectively defend against it.</I>

This sentence is full of weasel words, not "Eva can and has defended against mind control magic in ways X Y and Z" or "Eva has mind controlled someone to do extremely precise things" . Like, maybe she, maybe she can't. But this sentence literally gives no information about the how or the way.

I don't know if this going to be counted or not, but Quirrell in HPMOR has thousands upon thousands of horcruxes, and so long as one of them exists, he can possess a person freely (since he enhanced all of them with the resurrection stone.

Anyway, not that I think this needs to be said, but he passively has a lot of shields on (because paranoia) and also has Wizarding durability (which is not precisely specified, but not exactly human in the fanfic)

As for his intelligence, when he needs to kidnap Harry near the end of the story he does the following:

1) Obviously remove Harry's wand, invisibility cloak and time turner
2) Ask him every 5 minutes in Parseltongue (in which you cannot lie) if Harry has betrayed him
3) Obviously has a gun on Harry the entire time
4) Has a dead man's switch to murder all of Hogwarts if he's ever incapacitated or killed
5) Explicitly set it up so that any time turner usage would result in a time paradox, so no time turner help could come

There's probably several more things that he did that I don't remember, but that's the gist of it.

SmartMuffin posted...

Per Wikipedia, there are only 6 states in the US that have at least one city of over 1M residents. Here they are, along with their deaths per capita:

New York (1659)
California (163)
Illinois (571)
Arizona (249)
Texas (94)
Pennsylvania (532)

Among those states, you can easily see that Texas has far and away the best outcomes. It's not even close. But sure, keep insisting that Texas is the woefully mismanaged state with all the problems.

I think the most important metric here is time from first known case of community transmission (plus some fudge factor for "purposefully not testing to make it seem it's all fine") to time to first government action. Once you do some funny math by assuming a 3 day doubling = double the number of cases, is Texas still impressive?

California had the fastest response yes, but I would guess that its initial load would be much much much higher than Texas due to the largish Asian population (I haven't looked this up, if Texas has a comparable population then I'm just flat out wrong about this)

where is futarchy

I think Nate Silver looked at the data and said that mask mandating states have around 15%~ reduction in transmission rates (or about as much as 20~ish F increase in heat) compared to note mask mandating states

soruce: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1276240972062613505

Note that since it's correlational, it's more like "this passes the laugh test" levels of evidence rather than "this is confirmed science".

I *think* I remember some study of doctors, where they train super hard and definitely try to have a close to 100% adherence rate (replace masks every couple of hours as it gets harder to breathe, N95 masks fitted properly), you get around 30% transmission reduction.

So masks do help, using them properly does help a lot, but I think given what we know about super spreader events (i.e. in places where people sing, shout or talk in confined places) I do think that Gyms are substantially more risky than, say, running in a park, going to the beach or of course staying home.

Of course, and this is speculation on my part, viral load for many diseases reduces the severity (because it takes about a week for the immune system to ramp up to max after infection), even if you do catch COVID, the mask would probably at least halve, maybe 1/8th or 1/16th your viral load, which would make the symptoms much more likely to be mild (although note that even healthy people with little to no symptoms have damage in lungs, and some people who were like marathon athletes report being winded after climbing stairs months after the infection). So there probably are other positive effects from mask wearing that don't show up in raw case count statistics (we probably have to wait two or more weeks to see these even show up)

I would say that wiping down surfaces is probably security (pandemic? cleaniness?) theater, since if the virus persisted on surfaces we would probably see transmission rates much much much higher than we actually do. So seeing gyms do it doesn't mean that much. Although IIRC the virus lives on metal for a pretty long time, so ironically for weight lifting this is one of the few cases it might help.

If you do have harder trouble breathing, you might need to change your masks more often, as your breath causes the mask to "fill up" with your breath juice. Sweatbands might also help.

SavageInTheBox posted...

Blaming the government for the spread of coronavirus is idiotic. We know by now that people will blame Trump for literally anything, but this is entirely on the people. Containing the virus would have been near impossible anyway, but it certainly hasn't been helped by the average American. This virus has revealed the utter and near unbelievable stupidity of a lot of people.

For comparison, I'd say New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea and mayyybe Singapore are counterexamples. Which means that only about like 2% of all countries seem to have dealt with it well (way more if you only count first world countries, since they're probably the only ones rich enough to even consider having programs in place). If people think America is *exceptionally* bad they're going have to give concretely bad things. (The FDA must be destroyed)

And IIRC only two... types(?) of organizations have been ahead of this: International Tennis Tournaments and Furry Conventions have both purchased pandemic insurance after they saw SARS was a thing.

it's going to sell at least one copy due to a world famous streamer with a reference to canines in their handle

that's right

inugami korone |