The new ward

After a few silent months of absence silly inspiration struck and so here we have "The New Ward".  Obviously whatever you recognize is owned by JKR ;-)


She wouldn't tolerate this anymore. She already spent hundreds of pounds in repairs in less than a couple years and could not, well, would not face such expenses again, especially as she wasn't the one responsible for the damage. Yes, yes, in the end she was always refunded but it was a matter of pride and principle now.

And this is the reason she is spending another Sunday in her office in the Department of Mysteries, hidden between old books and sheets of parchment full of notes and diagrams.  Harry and Ron already got preoccupied and tried to get her to spend her Sundays in a better way, "Just sleeping them out would be better" was Ron tactful input to that discussion. She assured them that she needed to do it, that she can't let her Dad gift get ruined as she promised she would not repair it by magic and tinkering too much with it the muggle way would ruin it in the end.

But today would probably be the last Sunday she will spend in this project as the results of her test run of last night were finally a success.
She used a mild disillusion charm on herself and tried her new ward while walking up and down some of the darkest and most drunkard laden streets of London (just don't let Harry and Ron knew about this or she would not hear the end of it) and no one ever got in contact with her, even when she started running straight toward the most drunk of them, they just got more alert, looked straight at her and then moved out of her way.

Yes, the new ward was ready, it was a portable ward combining a couple common charms, a little tweaked Notice Me Not (that now could be really called Notice Me Now) and a wide spectrum sobering charm good against most of the attention lowering causes like sleep, alcohol and drugs. The nature of magic itself would take care of the other main attention thief, no cellphone would work when hit by the ward, at least until it would stay in the affected area.

It was good enough she decided, now she could go home and finally apply it on its intended target. No, no one will ever bump on her car anymore. She may even end up publishing something abut her new Wake Up And Look At Me ward.

Choking to death

It seems that Saturdays are favorable to writing, so here we go again with "Chocking to death".


No copyright infringement intended.


It is all Ron's fault, as usual, i'm chocking to death and it is all his fault!

It all started when we were dating, Molly and my mother became friends, good friends. It's funny to note that it was born from Molly's interest for the muggle world and its working.   After watching her kids spending more and more time there and even having one of them probably going to marry a muggleborn like me she needed to know more, a lot more about us, especially about the practicalities of everyday life. She never asked her husband as she knew that Arthur was more obsessed about muggles than a real expert and wanting a more reliable source she turned to my mother.

They started small, mostly having tea or lunch at my parents' home then visiting muggle London with the excuse of tea or lunch.  After a while Molly was able to venture there alone, using public transport to go where no safe apparition points were available.
Following our breakup they didn't let their friendship die (me and Ron staying friends helped too) and they still love to spend their free time together, something Molly has plenty of now that most of her children left the Burrow.

And that bring me to my current impending death: i'm here in my flat, laying on the floor and chocking to death while on the phone with my mother. She just told me about the last muggle question Molly had for her, it was about some creature muggles get answers for every question they have and for that it should be a magical creature she noted, reminding her about sphinxes, even if only by contrast and wondering how it keeps its nature hidden. I got curious and asked my mother if Molly knew its name and the answer that she know the name but not the species, and the name was Google.


A.N.
Ok, maybe it would work even without the hints about their failed relationship, but i really can't do that ;-)

Starting again... from the basics

Ok, i'll give another shot at this blogging thing... starting from the basics.  And what is more basic than Math ?  I love math and you can find it everywhere.  So here we go with a little collection of funny and / or deep math quotes about it (i can see you are relieved that i'm not going for some math lesson):

"Math is like love — a simple idea but it can get complicated." R. Drabek

"Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peas' cods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data." Thomas Henry Huxley
Quite a poetic explanation of the famous IT acronym GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

"1 is equal to 2 for sufficiently large values of 1." Unknown author

"There are things which seem incredible to most men who have not studied mathematics." Archimedes
This can be applied to most arts/sciences/technologies, and to some degree it should be that way, as we can't really know everithing, on the other hand we should know the basic principles (math again ? ;-) ) so that we'll only found those things hard, not impossible.

"If there is a God, he's a great mathematician." Paul Dirac

"Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul." Sofia Kovalevskaya

"Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics." Dean Schlicter

"In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it." Georg Cantor

"A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas." Tsutung Chien

"Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer." Edsger W. Dijkstra
Math, language and programming all in one sentence... bliss.

"Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game." G. H. Hardy
Oh, how was i shocked and excited the first time i've formally met that kind of demonstration and how i loved to do that in the following school years.

"If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?" David Hilbert
One of the best books i've ever read, "The music of the primes" by Marcus du Sautoy is about the Riemann hypotesis, the thing i love about that book is how it speaks about the drive the matematician involved in this search have.