Chaos Cat (loves this thing in particular)

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

Yes, it technically produces more waste heat than the cold that was put in the ice, but all refrigeration and air conditioning is just moving heat around, usually from a place that directly affects you more to a place that directly affects you less. You aren't camped out behind the freezer, probably (don't camp out behind the freezer in a heatwave), so the slight increase in your home's ambient temperature is more than canceled out by the decrease in your personal body temperature allowed for by covering yourself with ice water or ice.

Also, creating a mild negative pressure system in your house will help water evaporate faster than the current humidity level allows for by itself. Evaporation is a function of temperature (heat makes water evaporate and also hotter air holds more water), humidity (water evaporates more when there's room for more of it in the air, and less when there isn't), and air pressure (water evaporates more, even with less heat, when the air pressure is lower).

What this means is that if you lower the air pressure, some water will evaporate even if it doesn't already contain all the heat necessary to make it do so, and it will pull the excess heat to make a phase change right out of whatever it's sitting on.

If that's you, then you'll feel an active coolness that is the water on you snagging some body heat from you and launching itself into the air as a gas.

You feel this when there's air blowing by you (air pressure lowers as it travels faster), and when the air pressure is lower naturally (the low pressure system of a storm actually arrives and the temperature goes from hot and muggy to cool), and when the air pressure is lower artificially (like with a fan in one window blowing out, or with air going up a chimney).

Air conditioners work on this principle, forcing coolant into expansion so it sucks up the nearby heat, and then into compression so it releases that heat elsewhere.

If you have a chimney, then putting a small decorative fountain in it, or even just a bowl or tray of water in it, will make the water evaporate and pull heat out of the situation and send it up the chimney, making the local immediate area cooler.

Do I think an older student could put in another students name for them…

Basically, No. But also Yes.

“To ensure that no underage student yields to temptation,” said Dumbledore, “I will be drawing an Age Line around the Goblet of Fire once it has been placed in the entrance hall. Nobody under the age of seventeen will be able to cross this line.

This insinuates that the Cup is not altered itself. If it deems a younger student 'most worthy' it might choose them over an older one. This poses a danger if some youth managed to break past the Age Line themselves… but I don't think it allows an older person to put someone else's name in:

“Anybody wishing to submit themselves as champion must write their name and school clearly upon a slip of parchment and drop it into the goblet,” said Dumbledore. “Aspiring champions have twenty-four hours in which to put their names forward. Tomorrow night, Halloween, the goblet will return the names of the three it has judged most worthy to represent their schools. The goblet will be placed in the entrance hall tonight, where it will be freely accessible to all those wishing to compete. […] The placing of your name in the goblet constitutes a binding, magical contract. There can be no change of heart once you have become a champion. Please be very sure, therefore, that you are wholeheartedly prepared to play before you drop your name into the goblet.

The Goblet judges who is most worthy to play for their school. That isn't necessarily the one most eager. It is the one most 'worthy' - by whatever metric the Goblet measures from. It is possible to put your name in, regret it but still be chosen.

BUT - and this is my own reading of it - I do think he is quite serious about the 'magical contract' part. Someone must write their signature, their information and consent (be 'wishing') to the contract for it to bind. Even if it is only in a moment of bravery.

You can't sign a contract for someone else - it'd need to be a complex, believable, complete forgery. And there's like... magic involved.

So I don't think an older student could hop over the Age Line and pop someone else's name in for them. It isn't that simple.

“Seeing things, eh? It was a skilled witch or wizard who put the boy’s name in that goblet. …” […] “Because they hoodwinked a very powerful magical object!” said Moody. “It would have needed an exceptionally strong Confundus Charm to bamboozle that goblet into forgetting that only three schools compete in the tournament. … I’m guessing they submitted Potter’s name under a fourth school, to make sure he was the only one in his category. …”

Bamboozling the goblet wouldn't have been needed if all it took was an older person writing Harry's name on a piece of paper.

The Goblet had to be confunded, made to forget things, made to believe in a new school - and I'd assume made to believe that Harry's name was being written and dropped in by his own willing hand. A complex forgery to an altered, confused Goblet.

So No, I don't think all it takes is an older person. But if they were skilled enough to do it like Barty Jr...? Then Yes.

And I don't think that is impossible for an 'Older Student' to do - Barty Jr himself is sort of an 'Older Student'. He lost his ability to think, learn and practice magic only a couple of years after he graduated.

He isn't some super experienced wizard, he's basically a teenager in a 30yr old body! But is evidently extremely talented. His daddy says he got 12 OWLs. Wowee.

I think---for the reasons mentioned above---that there is no contract in play for Harry.

They think there is. Because his name was put in the goblet and the goblet chose him. Application and acceptance.

They think this because they are shit magical theorists and also because most of them don't believe for a second Harry didn't have a hand in it.

But if Harry didn't consent, himself, to that entry of his name, then who is the contract with? Not him! There's no agreement for the binding magical contract to attach itself to.

I think Dumbledore is lying here. I think Dumbledore knows there's no contract binding Harry. And he's keeping his mouth shut.

Why? Because this is the sort of technicality that weaves itself neatly into the tapestry of magical obligations and the unravels everything when it's pulled out.

Harry is participating in the tournament, but he isn't a part of the tournament.

And this is where the fine details of the magic involved work to protect him.

The thing is, the acceptance of the binding magical contract is the mechanism by which the risks are allowed. You might die in the tournament. You accepted the risks.

But if you didn't enter the tournament, those risks aren't supposed to apply to you.

I've gone on at length before about how I think Dumbledore has written the wards and other protections on Hogwarts to keep its students alive. How I think the amazing array of coincidences that allowed so many people to be petrified rather than killed by the basilisk was a result of Dumbledore's directing the protective magics of Hogwarts to arrange things such that every student stays alive.

Cedric, by knowingly and willingly entering a possibly-fatal tournament, exempts himself from the protections of those wards.

Harry doesn't.

Cedric is allowed to die in the tournament. Harry isn't.

Harry later describes his duel with Voldemort in language indicative of a belief that he was in over his head and surviving by luck, not skill. He's very overmatched, fully as much as Cedric who was ambushed and killed before he had time to raise a wand.

Voldemort obviously isn't able to kill him, but that's as much because of his own decisions as any defensive artistry on Harry's part.

Voldemort chose to stage a duel with Harry. He chose to give Harry his wand back. He chose to showboat, clearly angling for Harry's submission in such a way that Harry's refusal means Voldemort can't just kill him without losing face, because it would be an admission that he can't make Harry submit. All of this gives Harry time to have the wand core battle thing triggered, which gives him a field---mental determination and endurance of pain---in which his skills overmatch Voldemort's.

And the resulting victory happens to give Harry some ghostlike spirit-copy allies, that scare Voldemort and give Harry advice on how to escape.

And beyond all that, if Voldemort had killed him then, it wouldn't have taken, because Voldemort's used Harry's blood to resurrect himself, which incorporates Harry's blood protection into Voldemort, letting Voldemort bypass to some extent its protection of Harry, but also functioning as the same kind of soul anchor that a horcrux is: the thing that would allow Harry to survive a second application of the killing curse years later.

Voldemort's tendency to be greedy and careless about it is the sort of personality flaw curses work wonders with, as multiple defense against the dark arts professors have shown. The castle wards nudging him to act in certain ways thoroughly on point for him is the same mechanism as the arrangement of coincidences that let Harry and Ron escape having their memories wiped by Lockhart, or had Colin Creevy choose to lift his camera to his eye and take a picture at that precise moment to avoid being killed.

I think Dumbledore knew that you can't have a binding magical contract without the participants consenting to be bound, and he kept his mouth shut about this to let Harry participate (enabling Voldemort et al to play their hand) while staying safe (he isn't subject to the agreed-upon risks because he hasn't agreed to them).

I have always wondered why Dumbledore chose to announce the age line to the students in the first place. It does nothing but downgrade the ban from an actual rule to a bypassable enforcement mechanism, creating a situation where you're functionally allowed to make an attempt at circumventing the rule and also allowed to succeed at it.

He delegated his authority and the rest of the organizers' authority to a magical barrier that has no authority beyond zapping people.

This has the effect of making sure Harry didn't put his name in himself, which would have subjected Harry to that binding magical contract and released him from the protection of the wards whether it was the name he put in or the name Barty put in that the goblet chose to elect to competition.

Note that the actual phrase involved is "The placing of your name in the goblet constitutes a binding, magical contract." Specifically, having another student place it for you, even if you willingly write your name on the paper and willingly submit it for consideration via that assist, fails to fulfill the stated requirements---and I suspect that any competent magical lawyer would be able to argue, if that weren't actually a programmed-in exclusion factor, that the specification of what constitutes a contract were falsely communicated.

In other words, since Dumbledore has told Harry (and everyone else, including Barty) that only personally putting your name in will activate the binding, then a person who has not done that could be held to have been tricked into the contract via false information of what counts for it, and get the whole thing thrown out. (I think magical bindings tend to be more brittle the fewer "outs" they have, and that tricking someone into a magical contract renders it prone to breaking either easily for the bindee or disastrously for the binder.)

Therefore Barty, who has been functionally told that placing one's own name in the goblet is what it takes to make the contract binding, gets Harry entered into the tournament but fails to get him subject to the binding contract, either by accident or because he believed it wasn't important. Thus the Hogwarts wards protecting Harry are not rendered moot by Harry being bound into a contract that allows him to risk dying, and they are in full force to protect Harry during the confrontation with Voldemort.

And Dumbledore deliberately declined to bring up that detail, letting Harry, the tournament committee, and Barty Crouch all think that Harry was bound to participate, enabling them to require him to participate and letting everything happen as whatever shady movers and shakers meant them to, right up until Voldemort tried to kill Harry and was outplayed about it.

You're sick. You recognise the symptoms from your crew, you have radiation poisoning. The astrophages that were protecting you and powering the ship are gone. You couldn't find the leak in time to stop it. And now you're dying out here in space, alone.

The life support systems on the ship are shutting down. Everything is shutting down. Your planet will die– your entire star system will die. They'll never know how close you came to saving them.

You think about Grace. Is his ship dying too? Or is he on his way home, none the wiser to your fate?

Maybe you're fighting until the end, or maybe you've 'made peace' with it.

And then you hear knocking, on the outside of your ship. Furious, desperate banging on the window. Your friend, your lab partner, your first contact, has come back to save you.

"schoolboy grudge "

and didn't do it after she accidentally overheard you reminiscing with incredible nostalgia about those times, and that the

"innocent man "

in question just snarled that the attempt on your life by being torn apart by a wolf

She couldn't stop staring at him.