The wiki claims- unfortunately without attribution- that Dumbledore offered to be the Potters' Keeper, and was turned down.

I definitely remember this from the third book. The adults are talking about the Potters' deaths in the Three Broomsticks Inn and someone mentions that Dumbledore himself offered to become the secret keeper, but was turned down with insistences that Sirius Black would never betray them.

EDIT: Found it.

"So Black was the Potters' Secret-Keeper?" whispered Madam Rosmerta.
"Naturally," said Professor McGonagall. "James Potter told Dumbledore that Black would die rather than tell where they were, that Black was planning to go into hiding himself... and yet, Dumbledore remained worried. I remember him offering to be the Potters' Secret-Keeper himself."

Can somebody explain to me why Harry was so into House points before Azkaban recalibrated his sense of perspective? It makes sense why most people seek them; you take several dozen kids, split them up into different groups, and soon enough you hear them talking about how they can't let those Gryffindor jerkasses win the House Cup and so on. But it seems to me like you need to identify with your House to an unhealthy degree to take so much pleasure in earning points for it. Hermione obviously has that problem (cf. her speech about House Ravenclaw in ch. 34), but I would have expected Harry to avoid falling into such an obvious trap.

Note that Draco never seems interested in getting house points (as far as I can remember, anyways), so I guess his Slytherin education allowed him to see what the Ravenclaws missed: House Points are just one of those totally useless things you use to incentivize people into desired behaviors without having to give them any real, costly rewards. Like employee of the month awards, and military medals, and lesswrong kar-

...

Nevermind, I think I get it now.

(But seriously, karma at least has an individual tracking component that allows one to gain status in the community; is there anything about house points that would win Hermione or Harry more status than they would if they just kept getting good grades in class, answering questions correctly, and saving victims from bullies?)

This attempted murder was well-planned to evade detection both by the wards of Hogwarts and the Headmaster's timely eye.

Quirrell sure loves his stealth puns. Is there any reason he is not openly telling Hermione about Dumbledore's time turner?

The Defense Professor turned his head down from the sky to regard her; and she saw, in the light of the doorway, that he was smiling - or at least half his face was smiling.

Is Quirrell's half-smile a reference to Robin Hanson's picture?

It's implied in Ch. 38 and all subsequent Lucius/Harry interactions. Specially relevant is the ironic "I prefer to deal with the part of House Malfoy that's my own age", which Lucius understands in a completely different way than Harry intends.

I think he meant that in case of failure, the happy ending will simply become the "false ending" instead of the "true ending". Since we get both either way, there really isn't a difference.

But I'm still confused; why not? What are the benefits of servitude over marriage?

Before McGonagall's stunt, I was worried the marriage would require consummation to be legally binding.

It comes from his 7 point scale for measuring belief along the theist/atheist spectrum.

For pure anecdote, I am a nice guy (I think) who always complained about the "bad boy" thing, and now I am raising a step-daughter from my wife's youthful short term relationship with a guy everyone would still call a "bad boy." My wife is winning at natural selection! As is that jerk :(

Reading this anecdote made me wonder if it would be possible for a group of rational "nice guys" to cooperate with each other, refusing relationships with and shunning women who had previously been involved with and fathered children by "bad boys" even though each one of them would have to sacrifice the benefit they would individually get from entering into such a relationship. The idea being to make having a later father care for a baby sired by a jerk not a viable strategy for women, thus incentivizing them away from that behavior.

(I also thought about what would happen if nice guys switched to a jerk strategy until they were ready to settle down and then switched back, since that mixed strategy appeared to dominate either pure strategy, but then I realized that that would reduce the number of childless women for guys to marry, thus leading to a tragedy of the commons.)

Or any other demographic whose primary defining characteristic is their age group, really.