Chaos

Thanks Silverblade and everyone who wanted to know more about me. (I'm changing the way people should submit their answers. I think featured members should just post these directly in here!) 1. Provide a picture (if you are comfortable with that). Have some JAPAN PICTURES. Okay, those last two are obviously not me, but Japan is weird, so I wanted to show you. 2. Provide your real name (if you are comfortable with that). Eric Lake 3. Which book is your favorite and why? This is tough! Oathbringer beat Words of Radiance for me. As for non-Brandon books, I'd say Foundation's Edge. 4. What have been your main contributions to the community? What are you known for? I'm one of the three co-founders of 17th Shard. Originally my mandate was just in running the forums, but I have a hand in basically everything the Shard does. I'm ultimately the system admin of the site (and I'm not good at that, honestly). I deal with the Shard's software. I do some coding stuff on the main site, but mostly to make the Shard look pretty. I write news articles (which I did exclusively for a while. Now Weiry does a lot, which is good). I manage all podcasts, and somehow weaseled my way to be on every podcast now or involving future plans. I also do audio editing now for Shardcast, somehow. In many respects I'm a manager, directing a lot of our people to make cohesive things. I connect the 17S design team. I'm on the Coppermind staff. I'm on the new WoB Archive staff. I'm constantly working on something. Currently the WoB Archive is sapping a lot my effort. I used to be much more involved in the theoretical discussion here, but I'm way too busy these days to do so. However, I'm directly responsible for some terms fans use all the time, like intent and Survival Shard (the Survival Shard, by the way, was a thing that was written into a book of mine). I rather aggressively pushed the idea of Adonalsium's "opposing force" and kept asking questions about it, but that eventually got me in trouble, because Brandon likes intentionally misleading me at this point. He very much knows I care deeply about the Shards. Troll. I remember at a signing when I asked him, "How many Shards have Invested themselves onto Roshar?" (This was because at the time there was some debate as to whether there could be a fourth Shard in the system.) You know what he said? "Technically, all of them have." What a troll. I still find the pinnacle of my theorizing in the cosmere to be the Principle of Intent, which was eventually revealed to be totally canonical. 5. What made you join the forum? Maybe you guys don't know the story! I'll recount it. Long ago, when the Earth was young (meaning 2010 here), Mi'chelle wanted to make a fan site because she felt the fanbase had been outgrowing Timewaster's Guide. She along with Josh Brandon gave this place its name, and once we had that, I got fed up with our coding person I bought the domain myself. Thus, I've been struggling my way through being system admin of this site ever since 6. How many hours do you spend on the Shard on a given day? The Shard itself, less than you'd think. I always have a tab of it open but I don't browse all new posts. I probably spend less than hour actually posting on the forum itself. I'm always doing stuff in the periphery of the Shard, though, like being on Discord (where you can always find me), the Coppermind, or the new WoB Archive that I really want to tell you the name of. When I spend a day working on this Shard related stuff, I'll spend the whole day on it. 7. Describe your fondest forum experience. This requires me to actually remember things? Man, that's hard. My memory is quite legendarily bad. Sometimes people will say "You told me to do it this way like a year ago!" when I tell them to do the opposite in the present day. Oops. Anyway, this is hard to narrow down. For a forum specific moment, I'm going to say that one fateful day in February 2011 where Joe kindly bought us this forum software. When we did that upgrade, Kerry and I immediately had the most stressful design night, as we had to get the crappy default IPB site to do what we wanted it to do. There was about an hour where we yelled at CSS because something wasn't centering that should have. (Mind you, the site was live this whole time.) My fondest moments are really in all the people I've met on the Shard. I've met amazing friends who I talk to all the time. I've also met people on the Shard that I dated, but as that goes, that kind of happened by accident. An extremely humbling time happened when, at either Alloy of Law's or Words of Radiance's release, I was talking with someone and she eventually screamed, "Oh my god, you're Chaos!?" Apparently I am famous to a few It was a cool and very humbling. 8. What is one thing that Brandon does really well? Endings. Brandon's such a freaking boss at endings, especially recently. I'm a guy who absolutely loves good plot and good endings, and I don't think I'd ultimately care about the connected universe stuff and his worldbuilding if his endings weren't so sweet. (Uh, Oathbringer hype.) 9. What is one thing that he could work on? Sometimes he becomes so fond of a character that he has no perspective on when to cut down on a character. I'm looking at you, Wayne in the beginning of Bands of Mourning. Brandon liked the scene and he kept it in its entirety. I think it's still the strongest thing to criticize Bands about. Brandon likes Wayne way too much... It's hard to say other things. Others are having a problem with the amount of fake character deaths, but if those people didn't infect my brain, it wouldn't bother me too much. 10. Which fictional character is the best representation of yourself? I suppose I'll go with Mistborn 1 Elend Venture. 11. Any additional comments, whether it be about your life outside of the forum, favorite food, your website, or...anything! I teach math. Math is applicable to everything, because math is logic. The universe is inherently logical. You might not see that is inherently logical, but that's just because you might lack perspective on the issue. Everything has a cause and effect. Sometimes this is phrased as, "everything happens for a reason." That's needlessly dramatic. Practically speaking things happen for utterly mundane reasons. I'm thirsty, so I'll drink some water. My feet are cold, so I'll put on socks. It applies to everything. If you crush on someone and they reject you, or a friend betrays you, their logic may seem unknowable, but there is always reason for why something occurs. (Sometimes, though, it can be a very unsatisfying answer for you, especially if a person actively tried to hurt you.) So, in a way, if you learn math, you learn about logic, and you learn about everything. Learning math has made me a better writer, because writing is not some unknowable enigma. You can design a great story. There are bits and pieces you need to make a great novel, or even pieces you would need to write a good paragraph! Anything you think is challenging has a logic to it. I think drawing is really hard, but surely there is logic to it, or else it could never be taught. The universe has rules to it! How cool is that? One could easily imagine a fantasy universe where the universe actually doesn't have rules to it and it truly is unknowable, but fortunately, it is not the world we live in. Just because you don't know a fact doesn't mean it is unknowable--it means you have more work to do. 12. How did you incorporate the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise into a calculus lecture? Actually, a student of mine wrote this on a calculus quiz when he didn't know how to answer the question. It was great. I don't think I directly mentioned in it a lecture, though.

That sucks no audio of the main Q&A. Thanks for your notes, @Darkness. Could you post the audio you have? With the seminar video, maybe strip off the audio and see how big it is, perhaps? With your notes from the signing, was that from the main Q&A or during the book signing itself?

That's actually exactly what we are doing now.

I've done some research and it appears there are other SoundCloud podcasts that are also in the wrong order. I can't fix it manually. I'll see if I can ask SoundCloud to alter this somehow. I'm not really sure. Regarding some things not appearing in SoundCloud rss feed, it can't hold more than 250 tracks. But we have way less than that so I don't really know why that would be.

Oh neat! I did not see that. Great job

I think my quotes found for the Cosmere article on the Coppermind are still up to date. But yeah, the search on the new thing is much much better.

Sorry, unfortunately this is not a feature that exists

It's generated by SoundCloud. Not sure how much I can change it. I don't know why they would be out of order, though. That's very annoying...

I'm writing it

Guys do similar things. When you know a person and have been texting them for a long time, you will see the connotation eventually. Hard to determine when you don't truly know them, though.

Yes! Use the drop-down menu on the Search bar and near the bottom there is "Members". This lets you search members themselves.

REJOICE all. I got fed up with this terribleness and finally asked for help, and @Kurkistan delivered. The icons no longer do this. If you were fed up with it, trust me, my neurotic tendencies of wanting everything on 17S to be perfect died every time it did it to me. My apologies on the delay. EDIT: Just to be clear, I did make several attempts and it was horrible, but thankfully Kurkistan had an elegant solution. I'm very happy.

In this situation topic necro is fine, I should think? It was clearly relevant to the topic at hand. I think the thing KittyofAtlantis linked absolutely indicates this is okay here. Totally okay in my book.

Hey guys, This is a problem we had a long time ago which I thought was fixed with our new server, but nope. It actually came back a while ago and I have kept forgetting to post this important topic. Microsoft servers just don't accept our emails, period. They don't go into the spam filter. Microsoft refuses to accept the emails. Why? I have no idea, honestly. If you know a lot about email servers, hit me up because I am at a loss as to why this would be, or why Microsoft of all email providers would complain. I don't think this happens on any other common email provider. Practically speaking, this means that if you use Outlook, Live, or Hotmail as your forum email, you just won't receive emails. This is a problem when it comes to email verification of your account. (For a while I had email verification turned off, which was nice, but then we had some nefarious users so I had to re-enable it.) It will also affect you receiving emails for password resets. You can always email at [email protected] and I will get your account approved or your password reset as soon as possible. The forum's Contact form also goes to me. I really will try to get this done in a day or two. If you don't want to wait for me (which is entirely reasonable), another way to fix the problem would be to use a non-Microsoft email, like Gmail. I'm not trying to shill for Google here. I know this is an unacceptable error and you should absolutely be able to use the email provider of your choice. I really don't know why this keeps happening. Maybe I have set up something incorrectly somehow. I'm really sorry for the major inconvenience.

I concur that we should remove it; I strongly prefer using sa1, sa2, sa3 for the citation format. I remove "twok" and "wor" on articles to the sa1 and sa2 format whenever I see it.

Math is why I like Brandon's books. Anything that has concrete rules are good stuff, and is essentially math. That said, when some people go super in-depth about Feruchemical iron and calculations on it, I really don't care. That's a subject I've never really been interested in, because the answer is just, "yeah eventually magic breaks rules of physics." I mean, in the defense of the people, it's a constant struggle to make sure you think logically and well-founded in fact. I think the key is that when you are confronted with new information, you should be gracious and not defensive about it, and adequately change your perspective. Easier said than done, but still. The people who totally disregard blatant facts, though, and are not gracious? Screw those people. At risk of being political, it's like when someone says "climate change isn't real" and you respond with "yeah but what about ocean acidification." I bet they have no clue about it, and instead of researching this concrete numerical data, they just go "herp da derp I don't understand those words and so I will disregard them!" That just makes me want to say, "Well, I'm going to disregard you then." (Note: don't turn this thread into a political discussion, and if you are reading this and don't know about ocean acidification, do that right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification. Knowledge is pretty cool, guys. Don't support people who are okay with ignorance.) Oh, I see xD This does make more sense in retrospect. It's really fun to make a speech like that to my students. Sometimes I will digress for five minutes to do that, because it's important dangit.

Hey @ButChrisNo Eric here. I just wanted to let you know that I love the charts in the article, and it's actually amazing how much you want to make things accurate. The cosmere is difficult because there are so many Words of Brandon (WoBs) to keep track of. I really appreciate you coming here. As you can see, Sharders are extremely passionate. A lot of the people who posted in here spend hours transcribing audio from Brandon's signings. They are really dedicated. As far as content goes, Pagerunner hit all the points I noticed and beat me to it. @Pagerunner, you rock. Let's talk about the Coppermind. I have my fingers in many pies and one of them is that I'm a Coppermind admin. You might not realize, but actually, over half of all edits on the wiki are made by four people--Coppermind staff. (Those people, by the way, are Joe, David aka Windrunner, Ian aka WeiryWriter, and I.) Most of the stuff that are the big articles, like Cosmere, Shard, and Hoid, are written from this group. Thankfully other editors refine the articles, but at some point there's so much new knowledge on the subject that the article just needs to be totally rewritten, and that means a very small and busy group has to do this. The Coppermind is a wonderful thing, but it's also terrifying. When people cite it, I'm overjoyed it's useful, yet I also think, "oh no those articles need so much work!" It's a never ending of pile of work to do, to say nothing of many other time commitments we have. My rewrite of the Cosmere article last year was an exhausting, draining experience that took a month of research to do, at least a while to write, and even more time to cite. I didn't work on it constantly but it took about three months. (And I need to do some more major revisions to it.) I'm not trying to make excuses; I'm more trying to apologize. It's never perfect. The Shard article (another piece I wrote, but in 2012) needs a total rewrite. None of the individual Shard articles are up to par, especially Odium. We should probably use our "This article needs updating" template more. This is on top of the 900 or so articles that need to be reviewed to see if they get the "completion" mark. Heck, even today I noticed several cities on the new Elantris map that didn't have articles! A travesty. In any case, I hope this is illuminating on the process of the Coppermind. I can at least say that when the articles are written, they certainly are complete and well-cited! (I would say our ludicrously extensive citations are one of the best things about the Coppermind. It's a perpetual issue to educate people on all of this knowledge that comes from outside the text. To this end we have our Cosmere Q&A board, and we also have our 17th Shard Discord server. You can always ask cosmere questions in the #cosmere channel. In Discord, you can also write @Worldhoppers to ping a group of people who identify that they have knowledge on the cosmere. So feel free to ping a question there If you want to keep things more secret before something is published, you can hit me up at [email protected] and I will take a look. I know the group of people to ask if I don't know the answer. Also amusingly, David, Ian, and I write most of the 17th Shard news articles. Thanks again for coming here. Maybe you'll stick around a bit, or come to the Discord upon occasion Keep up the good work. Oh, PS when writing out the in-universe group, can we write it as "Seventeenth Shard"? That's not super important, but as that's how it is written in our one reference to it in-universe, it's a good way to distinguish the in-universe people from the 17th Sharders, the members of this site. (This is probably a thing I think about more than others, as you can see other people in this thread denote them as 17th Sharders.)

Physics is the study of the universe and the forces that govern it. It is basically the study of the rules of the universe. Mathematics is not the study of the universe. It is the study of all universes and no universes all at once. It would not matter how our universe, or any other universe, acted. None of that matters to the truth of mathematics. I do not care what anyone's religious beliefs are, or whether they believe in capital-T Truth. If you do, cool. But mathematics is the highest form of knowledge humans have created. (Math is created, too, not discovered, so it's actually quite astonishing that humanity can create such amazing, powerful things.) Once something is proven in the context of mathematical proof, it is true forever. We will all die someday. The Earth will be absorbed by the Sun as it expands, and then the Sun will die. The universe may yet die. But none of that matters if I prove something mathematically. It's true for all eternity. Nothing can take that away from us. If you are not familiar with mathematical proofs, the idea is very simple. You take hypotheses, and then from those hypotheses, you take small steps that you know to be true. Once every step you take is true, you get to your conclusion. And well, if every step you took on this path is true, then your conclusion is true! You're done. No person, god, or alien can ever take that away from you that you know a fact. (Some humans might argue with you and say "that's not important", but those people are uninterested in facts and thus are unimportant people.) For example, I could say, "If you have a differentiable function, then it is a continuous function." That statement is true. That statement might also not mean anything to you. One thing about math is that it is not designed to be easy to understand, but it is designed to be totally unambiguous. Every statement is precise and people have problems with that. But the thing with math is that you just have a really big toolbox. You have Axioms, simple facts that you assume to be true (they are generally absurdly basic things, and mathematicians spend great effort in reducing the number of axioms), and then you have Definitions, things that people create. What's a function? That has a definition. Someone made it up but it's a word that has a precise mathematical meaning. What's a differentiable function? Well that has a definition, too! What's a continuous function? Defined as well. Those definitions are all practical and concrete. Obtuse the layperson but you can learn the tools to understand the definitions. They aren't easy definitions to understand, but they are precise. So when you read a mathematical statement all you do is say "okay well that's a lot of words. I need to translate that into more basic concepts." You keep translating those terms until you get to things you understand. Then you go and take small, true steps and when you get to the end, if every step is true, then your conclusion is true. Neat! You can have some really crazy results that don't seem intuitive that are true. A lot of math is you discarding your intuition, because it is wrong. (Humans also have a very hard time with that idea.) Nothing is more powerful on the scale of knowledge than a mathematical proof. You have true assumptions, you have definitions that you made, and in that context you took steps which are true, so therefore the conclusion is true. Your feelings are irrelevant. If you want to break that, you have to show that one of those steps is not true. Math is tier one on the scale of knowledge and truth. It requires none of your belief (except, again, for very simple axioms) and it is true. Science is tier two. It's very powerful, because it is also a system that tries to remove biases to determine truth through repeated experiments and the careful analysis of data. But you require data. Math doesn't require data Lower than that, there is tier three, which are opinions based on data. You generally do this process a lot of the time. Science is essentially this but very rigorous. Then there's tier four, which are opinions that have no justification. Ignore them, and cut people out of your life who do stuff like that, because they are unreasonable people. I mean that in all meanings of the word "unreasonable". How do you reason with someone who do not properly justify their statements? You don't. Anyway, that's a very long explanation for the difference between math and physics, along with my usual rant about how freaking amazing math is. Isn't it cool? If you're into afterlives, no matter what thing you meet after you're dead, you can say, "I know this to be true," say a mathematically proven statement, and you are correct forever. Physics, I find, is much more difficult than math. I actually switched from a physics major to a math major out of laziness, because I found math easier. As for your other question, @The Flash, there was a need for some dedicated Brandon discussion, so we made our site long ago. It's quite amazing how many authors don't have a fansite similar to this. But then, fansites are quite a dying thing these days. There are many ways to discuss things on the internet and generally they are not centralized platforms, such as Reddit or Tumblr. I do not think you will see many more sites like this ten years from now (they are expensive timesinks). We'll be here for the long haul though, don't worry A very smart scientist (I forget who) sarcastically said the meaning of life was to increase the entropy in the universe. I always liked that quote. Though my handle was just a cool word I picked a long time ago.

Circa dates are totally fine. I don't think she was that young, but it's been a while since I've reread it in entirety.

That's the plan! It's too early for that right now, as the beta will have changes. But there will be a list of terms mentioned and which need to be updated, and then also a list of which need new articles. As you might expect (considering with what happened in the jump from Way of Kings to Words of Radiance) there will be articles that will need to be totally rewritten.

Yes, but perhaps we should do things differently now as before we did not have a whole forum for such things. Having a dedicated topic like this, I suspect, will stifle people from making new topics.

True. I dunno, part of me feels weird about having a whole forum if the headline topic is half of what the forum is about xD

With an entire STEM forum I'm not sure how good it is to have a lot of this discussion siloed into just one topic?

I like the answers, Mestiv! Now I'm working on pronouncing your first name Could I make a suggestion that the featured member also post his responses in this thread? The OP is good for archiving but as a browser you might like to catch up on the latest posts. I have an unconventional nomination: myself. Let me explain! I am not trying to be a douche. I suggest this because I believe Silverblade tried to feature me eons ago and I guess I was very busy at that time, so didn't have much opportunity to respond. Oops. Sorry Silverblade. Sometimes I am super busy. I'm also busy now, but differently busy as I spend a lot more effort on the Shard and its related things Still that's an unconventional selection and not in the spirit of this thread, so if that does not suffice, I nominate Pagerunner, who is super awesome and has very impressive spreadsheets on his WoB work. It's awesome and he deserves to be highlighted for that and his theory work.