Typos in WoR (Spoilers ahead)

[alder24]

11 hours ago, DrPhysics said:

This isn't a typo, but it is a physics error that has bugged me for years and would be easy to fix.

One page 612:

If he dismissed his lashing except for one up and one down, there would be nothing to slow him to a stop (air drag isn't that strong). It's newton's first law: it doesn't take a force to move, it takes a force to change how you are moving.

The fix would be for him to stop first, cancel the lashings, then hang in the air.

I see no error here. This is the one example where you can't ignore air drag as that's the only force acting on Kaladin at that moment and it's enough to eventually stop him. It's not that weak to have no effect on Kaladin, it depends on the speed squared - the faster you move, the stronger drag is.

[DrPhysics he/him]

28 minutes ago, alder24 said:

I see no error here. This is the one example where you can't ignore air drag as that's the only force acting on Kaladin at that moment and it's enough to eventually stop him. It's not that weak to have no effect on Kaladin, it depends on the speed squared - the faster you move, the stronger drag is.

Since it depends on speed squared, it's also true that the slower you go the weaker it is. 

It would take hours for air drag to slow him down to what a human would perceive as stopped. 

[alder24]

1 minute ago, DrPhysics said:

Since it depends on speed squared, it's also true that the slower you go the weaker it is. 

It would take hours for air drag to slow him down to what a human would perceive as stopped. 

This isn't a good place to argue about this, but Kaladin is above the cloud layer, at night, with strong wind blowing all around him - he lacks a good reference point and nearly motionless would be perceived by him as truly motionless. I highly doubt it would take hours like you suggesting. 

[DrPhysics he/him]

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

This isn't a good place to argue about this

Good point. If you'd like to discuss it further, lets take it somewhere else. Otherwise, I'll just add this last point.

 

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

but Kaladin is above the cloud layer, at night, with strong wind blowing all around him - he lacks a good reference point and nearly motionless would be perceived by him as truly motionless. I highly doubt it would take hours like you suggesting. 

You might be thinking of a different scene. This scene is from when he is first practicing with his powers. He's still below cloud level (the paragraph before talks about reaching toward the clouds but being afraid of running out of stormlight).

I'm teaching a class on this later today, so I shoved some numbers into the model I built for my students. If he had slowed to a slow jog/brisk walking pace before canceling the lashings, it would take a full 20 minutes before he would be slow enough to perceive it as motionless (abt 0.1 m/s. Humans are really good at sensing motion if we can see anything that might be a fixed point, including clouds, which would be motionless relative to the wind. 0.05 m/s would probably be more reasonable and would double all the stopping times).  Canceling at a fast jog would bump the time up to 35 minutes, then anything faster than that bumps the time up to 45 minutes.

So, it looks like hours was an exaggeration, but if he's worried enough about stormlight that he makes the flight back to camp take the length of a short conversation, I doubt he would wait 20-40 minutes to come eventually to a stop.