happyman

OK, now I want to see an Augur or Malatium misting train to become a forger, because that we be an awesome cross-over.

I think the instinctive argument is the best. An awful lot of what we do as humans is instinctive and never reaches the conscious mind until essentially after the fact. This includes a lot of purely physical things like walking, running, obstacle avoidance, etc. I suspect that physical speed, like pewter, has necessary secondary powers which began to encroach into the cognitive, but only slightly.

If you thought getting kidnapped by Vasher was bad... Well, I've said too much already. Suffice it to say that you won't regret finishing the book.

This is a spoiler for Warbreaker, but I think it is relevant here, so I'll put it in a spoiler tag.

My question is, how does the well know how long a year is? And did it change when Rasheck started playing solar-system pool with it? For the numerology, 16=2^(2^2). However, 1024=2^10=4*16^2. So is it the ten or the four or the sixteen that is important? Edit: Also, Voidus, that shouldn't be 16^(-2). 16^(-2) is 1/256. You meant 16^(1/2), or the square root of 16.

Also true. It seems just as likely that Feruchemists would deliberately compete with publicly known powers. (Or at least with the knowledge that the powers are possible.) It's just fun to think about. Also, imagine some really depraved sports team which figured out just the right bit of hemalurgy...

If it worked that way, you could also probably get away with doing other things, like drinking poison and storing the effects (and then either discarding the metalmind or reducing your intake noticeably). Actually, I'm kind of wishing Subsumers could affect all kinds of metabolism. It would have a lot of interesting effects.

I'm willing to bet that Steel and Iron Allomancers can learn to distinguish physical metals. After all, seekers can distinguish burning metals. How, I don't know.

People have speculated about interesting interactions between sports and the Metallic Arts on Scandrials. Cheating using Allomancy/Feruchemy is usually brought up. I think this is a good example of how something like that could work.

I think that King of Nowhere got the answer pretty much right. There are lots of reasons the southern folks wouldn't have been able to make the trip. Lack of resources is easily the most likely. Lack of motivation comes a very close second. The two together are extremely potent. As for technology: we have no idea how advanced the source population of the people on the south was to begin with. We know that the part that became the final empire was relatively close to getting gunpowder and was otherwise beyond "medieval," heading into "Renaissance", but that says nothing about the south. Real-world comparisons between widely separated areas show that absolutely nothing forces the different parts to be in sync. Typically to the detriment of the folks who start out behind.

I actually think that a good argument could be made for the year being the time between weepings, rather than the planetary location with respect to the sun. The main reason most people care about the seasons on Earth is the weather---most places change weather at least a little bit with the seasons, and very practical needs (like planting and harvesting) follow. The weepings would be far more obvious to people on Roshar than little details about where the sun rises, and in many ways would make a more natural calendar. Put another way: If the Weepings and the location of Roshar on its orbit around its sun are not correlated, I would expect the Weepings to win in terms of measuring time. If they are correlated, then the whole argument is moot, and the two definitions of "year" are the same.

I would say it's fairly easy to see how Odium isn't evil...as long as it's paired with something else. Here is an online dictionary definition of odium (emphasis mine): 1 : the state or fact of being subjected to hatred and contempt as a result of a despicable act or blameworthy circumstance 2 : hatred and condemnation accompanied by loathing or contempt : detestation 3 : disrepute or infamy attached to something : opprobrium So not all of these relate to notions of justice, or the like, but they could. In most people minds, it is possible to do something so awful, so terrible, so wrong, they must be punished. Odium would then be a good thing, at least for everybody else.

I also suspect that horses came with humans to Roshar. They stick out like a sore thumb among all the weirdness that is Roshar flora and fauna. This goes for chickens as well. Either that, or something very strange happened in Shinovar, where these animals can live naturally.

This. By the time of TFE, it's pretty clear that nothing was left. It's important to note, though, from the annotations, that Brandon doesn't consider Ati evil, even at the end. (He also thinks that the protagonists did the right thing stopping him. Brandon doesn't go in much for the pure, undiluted evil so much as he does having people make bad decisions.)

I suspect that the relationship between forms is more complex than just parent-child. The real world is not easily modeled that way, as many programmers could tell you. In other words, there should be sub-forms, but they probably also partake of unrelated forms in a complex way.

I suspect that the mind enhancement probably tips it a bit more in the Seer's favor. They have a better chance of understanding the shadows, I suspect, even if there are a lot of them.

I mean, you think that it's a long way to the corner drug-store, when let me tell you...

Even better, all of this could be inferred from canon. Marsh explicitly said he had atium when he met Elend at the Pits, and he was present and involved when Sazed explained compounding (particularly age compounding). It's a simple enough step from there!

I think Vin's example of defeating Atium is a pretty solid counter-argument. Vin found a way to see into the future even though she wasn't burning anything, and that defeated Atium, in a seriously awesome way. I don't see why another metal that gives you a little look into the future can't do a similar thing. By the way, I think if it was a Seer versus Electrum misting, the Seer would win, all else being equal. The other benefits are quite nice. So no, I don't think Electrum is overpowered.

In a case like this, I have to say that in many ways, the text keeps its aura by not being fully known. It also simplifies the world-building in constructive ways. There is also the problem that familiarity breeds contempt, which is far too true. We may be better off just imagining it. That is, I suspect that the subject of the in-universe Way of Kings would not generally interest most of the readership. The little bits we do get are interesting, but they are filtered by both the true author, and the in-universe speaker to be relevant. In short, I think that the book is best kept at a slight distance, for its own sake as well as ours.

In the real world, forces of all kinds not only stack, but stack linearly. I see no reason why allomantic forces would be different, especially since we have a canonical example of exactly that.

In real-world terms, Augurs, with proper use of their powers, could be some of the most well-adjusted, confident and balanced people on the planet. It would be painful, I imagine. My limited attempts at doing this (reading my journal) certainly can be. In practical terms, though, it could actually be very useful. I mean, talk about self-help...

Part of the reason I didn't want to get into this too deeply is because I think that at some point, we have to just say "magic" and leave it at that. Brandon may not have meant the dynamics to be magical, but it is very hard for us humans to get dynamics correct. Those of us who can get it correct rarely bother in everyday life because it takes far, far too long to think through. I don't know if Brandon thought through it carefully enough, but I doubt it. It is a hard problem without significant training, and not one I would want him to stop to do every time he wrote a scene in a book. For the current discussion, the relevant fact is that, in rawest form, pushing off a coin with a fixed force would, in the real world, produce the same acceleration, regardless of whether it is fixed (and passing on the push to something else, hopefully the whole planet) or accelerating. Thus a lot of what we see with Allomancy wouldn't make any sense. If we have to make it make sense, though, we could note that our normal instincts are deeply subconscious and relatively well-adjusted to the world we live in. We often hold back, in the real world, due to safety and control concerns that our conscious mind never bothers with. This may explain why Allomancers experience things in a way that makes them relatively safe and which makes sense to them, regardless of the multitude of minutia they would have to get right to describe it "physically."

Sadly true. You can work (mentally) like a bear and still gain weight.

Motivation poster: Denth lost a friend and colleague, but managed to make a skilled lifeless out of it. He turned lemons into lemonade. Can you?