happyman

It is a puzzle. Maybe it has more to do with their fundamental urges and mindset than it does with their biology? Somehow they find creating a new Inquisitor satisfying, whereas they no longer find the "standard technique" fulfilling? (From Marshs' description of his spiking, this seems likely.) My mind is now wandering to some really odd quirks inquisitors would have if this were true.

Wow. That is a seriously good point. I wonder if Brandon has ever considered the effects of this. It takes the term "Need to Know" to an entirely different level...

I agree with this. I just take it one step further and say that we don't need a new word---we just use the term 'tap' with modifiers to make it clear how much is being tapped. If it's more than 100%, we can assume there will be loss, but that doesn't affect the action in most scenes.

This is a curious case. Did he perhaps ask for intelligence, and the curse was that it would be balanced by stupidity? That sounds like a seriously scary curse. It'd frighten me to death.

Word of Brandon says that Szeth will have a focus book. Also, it won't be one of the next two. I think we can safely assume that Szeth will survive a bit longer.

Controlling Shardplate with extra skill sure sounds like a Radiant power to me.

I just meant this book. I suspect that some of the other interludes will be important/meaningful as well, long term.

This is true. If Roshar ever wants to develop vending machine technology, they had better get on the ball with their currency. Either that, or use Fabrials which can sense gem types. My mind goes to weird places sometimes.

I would actually use the term "wolf" for eating really fast, but it's not a technical term. "Over-tap" is probably the best we can do, although I'm not sure it's needed. My point is that it's just another type of tapping. In fact, most of the Feruchemy we see happening, especially in the siege of Luthadel, is "over-tapping." Extreme over-tapping is how Feruchemists pull off most of their useful stunts.

Given the nature of Endowment, I personally wonder if it isn't that she destroyed her memories so much as that she gave them away, or put them into something else. Perhaps memories can only be given to a person? In that case, Vasher is probably carrying a heavier burden than we realized.

I've heard many claims that this is true. There is certainly strong evidence that humans have a hard-wired "language acquisition module" which only works efficiently in childhood. Languages obtained as an adult are apparently stored differently. Thus the term "Native Language" actually means something quite specific to most people, regardless of what languages they have learned later in life. The only exceptions would be those without language (which often have a hard time obtaining any language) and those with multiple languages, or the truly bilingual. Since I seriously doubt that "alingual" folk could learn to Awaken at all, the interesting case is the truly bilingual one. If the cognitive aspect really is the "magic filter," I consider it entirely likely that in Warbreaker, a character who was truly bilingual could use any of their native languages to Awaken.

I'm guessing that in practice, the term for "Using Feruchemical attributes faster than you stored them" will be "Tapping an enormous amount of x". Just saying. My reasoning is that flaring is a discrete state in Allomancy; either you are not burning, burning, or flaring a metal (or using duralumin). With Feruchemy, you tap at a low, medium or high rate, but there is no transition between these states. It's like trying to come up with a technical word for eating really fast.

Oh, OK then. That's not a lot of information, but it's more than we had before, so the speculation seems a little less extreme. I don't have much to say beyond that, because I tend to not do much with the more speculative topics.

Except Dalinar has been using Shardplate for years. He mentions some of the oddities in passing, but they don't surprise him, even if he knows that that behavior is unusual for anything but Shardplate. If it had been a standard feature, surely he would have mentioned it that way as well (e.g. "Dalinar focused his thoughts on regaining his balance, and the Shardplate responded in its usual way")? Instead, it's a mysterious event that happens halfway through the fight with the Chasmfiend which he doesn't question because he is waaaaaaay too busy afterwards.

IIRC, Sazed outlines the whole thing in the Chapter bumps in MB3, including (among other things) explaining exactly why Ruin chose Vin to get spiked. Rereading those bumps is a great way to review what we know of the Metallic Arts, Ruin and Preservation.

Technically, in our world, light falls when dropped. It just doesn't drop very far under human-livable circumstances. Doesn't say much about the Cosmere, of course.

I think one thing you have to keep in mind is that the safe-hand restriction is not quite as debilitating as you think. The hand has to be covered, but you are allowed creative ways to actually use the hand. In some cases, especially lower-class, the women just wear a glove. Very few functional limitations with that.

I see a lot of speculation in this thread, but not a lot of hard facts. We are these ideas coming from? The only hard facts I know is that the Shadesmar representation is an in-world artifact. Do we have Word of Brandon on any of the rest?

Don't forget that when Breath is transferred, the cognitive intent matters a lot, as does the Command. It's possible that the default behavior is healing, but if you know the right Commands, it can become "Restore a half-Returned baby to life" instead.

My guess is that the terms don't refer to whether there is actual loss or not, but what the fundamental mechanism is behind the magic. The fact that Feruchemy experiences some "friction" (possibly due to an enormous number of other things) doesn't change the fact that its fundamental job is moving attributes around rather than taking them from Preservation (Allomancy) or diminishing their returns indefinitely (Hemalurgy). In Allomancy, the fact that you are drawing power from outside yourself is inherent to the system. In Hemalurgy, the loss is inherent in the way the system works. With Feruchemy, there is apparently some loss in the transfer, but that is not the essence of the magic. It may just be limitations due to the way human bodies work.

Sorry if I came across critical. That's pretty much what I am trying to do too.

I think that part of the difficulty we have with all this is that the society is relatively artificial. This isn't a criticism at all; given the events of HoA, it makes perfect sense. However, it does produce some oddities, such as the nature of the religions (any religion which doesn't deal with the fact that the world went from "barely livable" to "terrible" to "twitching corpse" to "burned" in about two years, and then went to "Garden of Eden" in about five minutes, would be rather unlikely). I get the feeling that their society is in an expansionist phase, fueled by Sazed's restoration of all of humanities prior knowledge and the relative peace and prosperity brought on by the new-found richness of the world. However, given the richness of the Elendel basin, most of this expansion has been focused inward rather than outward, with the Roughs being a place where people go for social rather than economic reasons. This inward focus has produced relatively large amounts of technology and a higher population density within the Elendel basin, along with the supporting infrastructure. This would would include other cities, which would be much like our modern metropolises; there is no modern city that doesn't have a dozen smaller incorporated regions around them which are technically independent but which are economically and socially dominated by the major city. In fact, when people say where they are from, they typically identify by the nearest major city unless more detail is needed. That they form a single society is really not surprising. The events of HoA would have required an enormous amount of cooperation between the different groups, and so a certain uniformity is to be expected. That the Terris stayed somewhat aloof is also not as surprising as you may think; they were the only remaining sizable group in the caverns that retained any kind of "ethnic" identity after 1024 years of the final empire. The remaining groups can be attributed to the so-called Founder effect, where influential people in a relatively small population become dominant by sheer chance. That there haven't been any wars is also not that surprising; there is no need. They conceive of themselves as a single nation and they have absolutely no rivals that we know of for resources. As for the Koloss, I admit that's a bit of an oddity. It will be interesting to see what Sazed did to them, and why. They're something I can't quite place yet.

"Feruchemy" being used for Compounding is really using Allomancy to fuel Feruchemical characteristics. Feruchemy without Allomancy is end-Neutral. Allomancy is end-Positive, and through a clever loophole can be used to fuel attributes normally attributed to Feruchemy.

You aren't remembering it wrong. It's just that the characters were wrong in some if their conclusions. In WoA, Vin believes that TLR created the emotional allomancy weakness as his personal back door. In HoA, though, Sazed says (and the other characters independently realize) that it seems to be inherent to the Hemalurgic process itself. Given what Brandon has said about it, it seems likely---it leaves the person's soul mangled. This apparently opens a back-door into the mind, perhaps through the spiritual realm (are emotions spiritual?).

These are all very good points. In technological progress, it's typically about feasibility and usability. Given the technology we see in Alloy of Law, refining Aluminum should soon be both feasible and usable. It's gonna happen sooner rather than later.