happyman

Of all the wild speculation out there, this is always the one that seemed most plausible to me. It falls well within what we have seen from other examples of the Old Magic and seems fitting to boot.

What Windrunner said. At first, the different setting and feel put me off a little, but it didn't last long. It's an interesting story in its own right, and it was definitely not written just to make some extra cash. As for the ending, well, let's just say it didn't wrap up every loose end. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. It means hopefully more books with awesome characters!

I haven't posted for ages, but I couldn't let this one pass. Mormon's as a whole have believed, and most still currently believe, that animals totally have spirits. In fact, some very prominent Mormons (Brigham Young, for instance) even claimed that plants had souls, as well as the planet Earth itself. So what we can infer from Brandon's beliefs would be that he has no problem with animal Hemalurgy in religious principle in the real world. Except, of course, that he doesn't believe Hemalurgy is possible in the real world, which kinda exposes the other problem with this line of reasoning...

I'm guessing that whatever storing Fortune does, it does not affect causality at a deep level. In other words, you can't make the impossible happen. However, since we know that FTL drives are possible, that technique might work! Although I'm guessing that in most cases, Fortune would take the easiest way out that would be good for you.

Yeah, this is a sensitive subject. I knew that the second I made my post in this thread, and if I were to answer it again I would do it rather differently. I don't think it's appropriate for this forum, and this is my last post in this thread. However, I would ask the person who voted me down for expressing my honest opinion in a rather politically incorrect way to PM me rather than affecting my reputation score. If this forum goes down that road, things are going to become rather nasty.

Perhaps most importantly, there is no evidence that "contemporary" fabrial creators could create anything like Shardplate. The closest they have are half-Shards, which seem be much less elegant. Basically, Shardplate, even with its lowered power relative to Radiant usage of same, is still extremely overpowered compared to most fabrials on Roshar. Given the relatively low technology we see in the visions of the past, anything short of some kind of "divine," or at least "disproportionately technologically advanced" intervention seems unlikely to have created them.

Unfortunately, we don't know enough about the boons to see if there are any similar patterns there. This is especially interesting given than in Dalinar and Taragavinian's case, the boon could be the same as (or intimately tied into) the curse.

Well, I hate to say this, but I'm not actually a big fan of our modern categories in this regard. I view them as primarily political constructs made for very specific political and social reasons. The reason for male/female attraction is obvious (and dominant) and subject to an enormous amount of selection pressure. As soon as you step out of that category, you've gone into a realm where evolution just doesn't care any more (except inasmuch as it detracts from male/female reproductive relations), and so the diversity of possible behavior becomes much more open, so to speak.

In some sense, using the spikes makes the best of a bad situation. The spikes exist and the people who were killed to charge them are long dead. However, with them he can maintain more direct contact with his followers, thus turning their ancient sacrifice to the long-term good of humanity. It could actually be considered a very pragmatic approach to disposing of the spikes, actually. Each earring's Hemalurgic charge is so small, so they can't really be used for anything else.

I've wondered about this. I'm not surprised, really. When I first read the line about "three of sixteen," and "broken one," I just assumed it meant that there were three shards (not including Odium) on Roshar originally, and that Odium then came and disrupted their party. With Brandon's later comments about there being three Shards on Roshar, I abandoned it, but reluctantly. Now, though, I'm leaning back towards that idea. After all, it's entirely possible that Odium has never counted as a full shard on Roshar---he may have sent representatives, but I don't think he has ever exercised his full power over the planet.

Especially given the name. I mean, surely Windrunners means something, right? "Riding the Storm" seems like a good meaning for that. Although during my most recent re-read of that bit (yesterday), I couldn't help but wonder if it had something to do with the fact that Kaladin survived being fully exposed to a Highstorm and saw the face in his body.

Hmmm. You have a point about Nalthis, but for Scadrial, I would argue that all having more metal does is let you use your powers longer. You get more power, in the sense it is usually used, by having more Preservation in you. Basically, I think you've hit on an important part of the magic system, but not the foci.

Yet another person saying that starting with book 12 is a terrible idea. I mean, I don't think you'd run afoul of any spoilers---you wouldn't have the foggiest notion what was going on! After 11 books, the authors don't bother to reintroduce anybody in the top two tiers of significant characters. In not like some series, where each book is an individual story---it's one long story the whole way through, and was always intended as such. No, the only plausible way to read the Wheel of Time and understand anything at all is from the beginning. If you decide not to, totally cool. It's a huge commitment.

It explicitly states in one of the books that Aran'gar's tastes hadn't changed so much as broadened. So she's apparently become bisexual. Given the strong memories from his/her past life, combined with the physical responses from the new body, I'd say she's something of a special case.

Oh, no problem. I'm not surprised that this is the case. If the Shard's Intent completely overwhelmed the Cognitive aspect of the Shardholder, I suspect that there would be no Cognitive aspect worth talking about remaining after a sufficiently long time, and this is clearly not true.

The problem of what happens is way complicated, because as stated before, in the real world, the electrons are not carrying most of the energy---the electromagnetic fields around them are. Without taking this into account, there is no sensible realistic model of what would happen to the wires when a field was put around them---the best I can come up with is that the electromagnetic fields which drive the electrons would experience significant time dilation, which would drastically reduce the coupling between the electrons and the fields. This is turn would lead to the electromagnetic fields promptly radiating away in all directions, destroying the signal entirely. However, these conclusions are bound up in other assumptions which would also affect light. The bubbles do not have the correct response to light, and so postulating their response to normal electricity is folly, because at their core, electricity in wires and light are the same thing.

The basic parameter for any orbit, regardless of shape, is the curvature. Since the Allomantic force isn't tied to the mass like gravity is, the mathematics of allowed orbits is complex, but the basic constraints are true no matter the shape.

Thank you for putting in words part of why I didn't like the Quantum Mechanics analogy! In real Quantum Mechanics, it doesn't matter what you did with the measurement once you have taken it---the physical effects will continue to be real. With the Spren, writing the measurement down is what changed the behavior---and that is not the same as measuring it. Now I don't know what to make of that odd result, but it's probably a more fruitful direction for theorists to look in.

...Once again, this doesn't seem like the kind of thing the Nightwatcher would either be capable of or willing to do.

I never put Stormriding into the same category as Dalinar's visions. They just seemed so different. They may be related, though, now that I think about it. In both, the person's body stays in the same place, but their mind moves somehow.

I've been assuming for ages that FTL travel could be used to shine light in corners of the Cosmere that we haven't seen before (or making crossovers between established worlds), making everybody's counting of books/planets to be off. In fact, I think I said that in the "10 Core Cosmere Worlds" thread.

Gold compounder?

Given that Ruin was looking for his body for roughly 1024 years without finding it, and how obscenely rigid TLR, the Kandra, and the Obligators were about protecting it, I would have to say that finding a place where atium is being produced would be extraordinarily unlikely. If such a place existed, Scandrial would probably have been destroyed all in one go after Ruin found it.

In the real world, telegraph and telephone lines are really "waveguides." If you look closely at the physics, most of the energy is being carried by a long-wavelength electromagnetic wave which is "anchored" to the wire (which reduces loss enormously compared to directly broadcasting the energy). Any discussion of the time-bubble effects on electricity would be essentially the same as the ones related to the wavelength shift---which is a real can of worms in its own right. Short answer: I don't know. You'd have to handwave it just like the other light effects were handwaved. A real mess is what it would be.

The key element of such orbits is the radius of curvature of the resulting orbit. My calculations are made assuming the orbit is circular, but any reasonable elliptical/other orbits will have similar curvature, which is what matters most. First, we start with Newton's first law, which says that for any object at any time, ignoring relativity, we have that the acceleration on it is the Force applied to it divided by the mass of the object. Thus (1) a = F/m. In circular motion, the magnitude of the acceleration is constant, and is related to the circumference of the motion by (2) a = v^2/R where, v is the velocity of the orbiting object and R is the radius of the circle. This can be generalized to other orbits by calling 1/R the local curvature of the orbit. Since we are just doing a rough approximation in any case, any value we find for R will give us a reasonable scale on which such orbits could exist. Thus the radius of curvature is given by R = m*v^2/F. For simplicity, lets assume that a reasonable size for something that can orbit is 1 kg and a typical velocity is order 30 mph = 13.4 m/s (this is actually pretty fast). Let the force be on the scale of a typical human push, lifting 100 lbs at the surface of the Earth, which requires 444.520523 newtons of force. Then the radius of curvature would be 0.4 meters. This sounds entirely reasonable, although I'd be pretty scared to have a 30 mph piece of metal going around me at half a meter away. Fiddling with the parameters would probably result in something more useful if you spent some time with it; this calculation was just intended to find the scale of plausibility, which I think I've established.