Mr_Doe

So just for saftey, I will put the following discussion in a spoiler...

So there have been some interesting theories on how shardplate might be made by radiants, and sorry if someone already said this but what if forging shardplate is one of the bondmith's things? At first I assumed bondsmiths helped others form bonds with the spren, but based on how many people seem to be attracting spren, there seems to be no need. Thus the order named "bondsmiths". The mechanic as to how they do this I have no idea on, but their order's name has me thinking... Thoughts? Possible Debunk? WoB? Let me know!

Really? Nothing gets a girl in the mood like killing her father i guess...

I would conjecture that whatever this secret is, it is the key to why the recreance occurred in the first place. Thus he would try to make it happen again.

If the unmade are spren, albeit powerful spren, could it contain one of the unmade trapped in it? That would be fitting to be one of the parshendi "gods" and Gavilar bringing them back.

So you said a lot there without it meaning anything... but she seems to be saying that it is a normal gaussian distribution, and the "linear" values of the horizontal axis correspond to a logarithmic intelligence scale (aka they have been normalized by some method). This way the standard deviation remains a constant of some function. Check out the wiki on log-normal distributions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-normal_distribution As to the whole gunpowder thing, it was mentioned before how difficult mining is on roshar, and you need to mine to get any real amount of materials for gunpowder (sulfur, potassium, etc). And for the medical "problem", it is simple, roshar has no religious biases against unknown medical conditions. So an individual who was sick with an unknown illness becomes a patient and studied, rather than ostricized as a "possessed" person as most cultures on earth would do historically. Look up the history of epileptics, especially in christian societies.

I haven't read mistborn in a few years, but the mists were essentially Preseravtions "body" right? Does that mean that the Highstorms are Honor or possibly Cultivations remains? I kind of like the idea of them being Cultivations remains, remember the part in WoK where they talk about how crops grow better when given water from Highstorms? Sure they just might be nutrient rich but still food for thought.

An interesting thought, however I find it highly unlikely after the things revealed in the preview chapters, I'll just list my reasons. 1) In the preview chapter with Dalinar's vision, Honor (Tavanast) tells him that the Radiants formed from the spren imitating what he had given mankind, aka the dawnshards. Now we know they gave the ability to use surges because of the preview with the parshendi pov. This implies that when the spren started to create "normal humans" into surgebinders that the Radiants were formed to organize them. 2) The name. Why would they be called "The Dawn Singers"? Why not literally anything else? What does singing have to do with surgebinders? 3) In WoK it seemed to be implied that the Dawnsingers were a "civilized" people (however this is not really substantiated since they are mentioned only briefly), and we know from Dalinar's visions that humans were pretty much in the stone age in the time period were talking about with the Dawnsingers. I had previously posted my opinion that the Dawnsingers will turn out to be the Parshendi, but thats another discussion. Regardless this is a topic I would like to see discussed more; who were the Dawnsingers?

Overall I like this theory, but the one problem that really jumps out at me is why didn't Shallan's father take the shardblade?

The second part is a good point that I had not considered, but yeah... lots of implications if it were true. As to the first, I was under the impression that there were two planets and Roshar was one and whatever the other one is called is known to humans as the Tranquiline Halls (see the wiki on shardworlds). I assume that means damnation is the void (space i guess).

Ok, so while this is by no means unanimous, many people agree that the Parshendi are probbaly not the Voidbringers, or at least not without being inslaved/influenced some way by Odium. I had previously posted about who the Parshendi are in http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/6053-theory-dawnsingers-parshendi/ So while it seems at the end of WoK that the Parshendi are the Voidbringers, it is just too convenient, not to mention that it would be giving away a pretty big plot point awfully early. That said, while there are some theories floating around on who the Voidbringers are, I wanted to start a thread with a comprehensive listing of likely suspects. Please post or leave a link to any good theories below and who knows, one of them might be right! Common theories I have seen around the forums so far on the identity of the Voidbringers: - Spren that either belong to Odium or are controlled by him - The Parshendi

Ah, thanks! I didn't see that in my search. However, there the theme seems to be that the Parshendi are both the Dawnsingers and the voidbringers? I assume this was written before the reveal chapter with the Parshendi Shardbearer? Also in response to the how different old english is from english, keep in mind that while we might not be able to read it well, we would recognize words, and given some time, probably be able to read it. A better example would be latin and one of the romance languages, while they appear much different, some words are the same or very close, and general structure is similar.

So in my readings of WoK and the previews of WoR one of the scenes that I kept coming back to was the part where Navani talks about how the Dawnchant is a dead language and no one can translate it any longer (right after she witnesses Dalinar's visions for the first time). However if this was the first language spoken by humans, wouldn't the more current human languages be similar, much in the way that languages resemble their roots in real world languages? The part that really got me thinking was that no one could figure out how to translate it, and though it was only mentioned briefly I got the impression that there had been some effort put into attempts to translate it. Given this, and the fact that the "Dawnsingers" seems such an uncharacteristic title for any group of normal humans we have seen or heard of so far on Roshar, I thought perhaps the references to singing were in fact talking about the Parshendi. This would explain the very different structure of the language, as well as the strange name. In addition it would explain the discrepancy between the ancient, primitive humans we see in the visions Dalinar is sent by Honor, and the fabled civilized "Dawnsingers" of the ancient stories etc. I don't have any actual evidence, but it seems to fit. What do you guys think?

Two points: 1) The things in quantum mechanics about the observer affecting the outcome have to do with the instantaneous collapse of the wave function and some other stuff I'm not going to get into, in short it is for physical reasons (whereas the fictional spren seem to be affected by thought). 2) The discovery made in the TWoK seems to be in agreement with the reveal in the preview chapter with Shallan where she describes spren as "living ideas". This means that the idea is causing the spren to be "locked" into a certain size/state/whatever. This makes sense given what we know about shadesmar so far (it being the cognative realm and home of the spren), it only makes sense that ideas can influence them. The key point in this discovery seems to be the part about writing it down versus just saying it. Both are ideas so to speak, but only the action of writing it down affected the spren, which seems to hint at a larger underlying mechanic that I haven't made sense of yet. lmk what you guys got out of that interlude!