I...what....Harry Potter...the Rational Scientist!?

[Tev]

Right, so I got linked to a little bit of Harry Potter FanFic today. I'm going to toss out there that I've still not read the Harry Potter books. Mostly what I know of the story has been fed to me by things like movies, internet blurbs.....squealing girls, you know that sort of thing. But a friend of mine passed this my way and for some reason I...just...can't...stop....reading.

Anyway, you people need to check out this Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality thing so that I don't feel alone in this little nerd hole I've fallen into.

Look! Excerpts!

At once the small tabby cat morphed back up into a robed woman. "I'm sorry, Mr. Potter," McGonagall said, sounding sincere, though her lips were twitching toward a smile. "I should have warned you."

Harry was breathing in short pants. His voice came out choked. "You can't DO that!"

"It's only a Transfiguration," said McGonagall. "An Animagus transformation, to be exact."

"You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signaling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualize a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?"

McGonagall's lips were twitching harder now. "Magic."

"Magic isn't enough to do that! You'd have to be a god!"

McGonagall blinked. "That's the first time I've ever been called that."

Then again, Harry was standing in a bank that literally stored your money in vaults full of gold coins guarded by dragons, where you had to go in and take out coins out of your vault whenever you wanted to spend money. The finer points of arbitraging away market inefficiencies might well be lost on them. He'd been tempted to make some sort of snide remark about the crudity of their financial system...

But the sad thing is, their way is probably better.

On the other hand, one competent hedge fundie could probably own the whole wizarding world within a week. Harry filed away this notion in case he ever ran out of money, or had a week free.

You're mine now, Harry thought at the walls of Diagon Alley, and all the shops and items, and all the shopkeepers and customers; and all the lands and people of wizarding Britain, and all the wider wizarding world; and the entire greater universe of which Muggle scientists understood so much less than they believed. I, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, do now claim this territory in the name of Science.

Lightning and thunder completely failed to flash and boom in the cloudless skies.

"What are you smiling about?" inquired McGonagall, warily and wearily.

"I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution," explained Harry. He was carefully memorizing the exact words of his ominous resolution so that future history books would get it right.

"I have a distant feeling that I ought to be doing something about this," sighed McGonagall.