Chaos

Yeah That sucks...

That is accurate to my American knowledge of Australia

I know you mean South Australia, but I choose to believe you mean Stormlight Archive. I live in Montana, so I feel your pain. Very few Sharders here. The ones that are the ones I introduced to Brandon.

Fits signature guidelines, 10/10, would read again (That's all I really I care about...) Okay, really, the sig is pretty good. I'm also posting here because--gasp--I changed the text in my signature. Hell hath frozen over. It's been quite a few years since I have done that. Harmony help us all if and when I change my avatar.

That's crazy. That said, as a person who teaches Calculus 1 and 2 at the collegiate level, all you really need is a good precalc background and familiarity with algebra.

Well then. That's pretty cool! ...this would be a bad time to mention that I am more fond of tau (2pi) than pi, yes?

Instant upvote! Thank you Your name is really Pi?

Short answer: computer algorithms.

Cheating to make it rhyme Also, that's more precalculus than calculus

She linked me. I don't get it Mi'ch didn't get it because of the math. I don't get it because I see the math and don't see how it is a limmerick

That would require me to do poetry though Though I really like writing, my brain just doesn't quite "get" poetry...

Someday when we get our crap together, we'll have more Shardcast, as opposed to the Splintercast Reads series. Maybe I should listen to those podcasts to see how they are laid out. But, we aren't the community, of course. I am sure these will exist. I can say that with certainty with Shardcast, and as Stormlight, Mistborn, and the rest of the cosmere continues to expand and get more popular, I'm sure these will happen.

This won't be the answer you want, but, you can't! Such equations are impossible to solve algebraically. These are called in math parlance as "transcendental equations," as opposed to your more common algebraic equations. Algebraic equations are the equations that involve only the operations addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square roots. Functions that involve those operations are called--shockingly!--algebraic functions. They are a very small list of functions. Exponentials, logarithms, and trigonometric functions are not algebraic functions. A function that is not algebraic is called a transcendental function. Equations involving transcendental functions are called transcendental equations. Transcendental equations are really hard to solve, and you can't use normal algebraic functions to deal with them. How does one solve these? Well, in practice, you have a computer find the answer numerically. For example, a helpful Wolfram Alpha search determines that the solution to x^x = 6 is approximately 2.23183. (At least, in the real numbers.) It's literally impossible for a math teacher or anyone to ask you to solve it, because you can't. Now, this might not bother you, but here's the thing: that decimal expansion is not the true value of x^x = 6, it is merely a decimal approximation of its true value. In principle, these transcendental numbers can't be expressed "nicely". When I mean "expressed nicely" I mean "you can't use a formula with the algebraic operations to find this." It's not hard to write a transcendental equation. e^x = x or sin(x) = x are unsolvable with algebra. There's two instances of x in both of those and though you know the inverse of e^x and sin(x), you will never get any closer to isolating x. There are rare instances where we can solve these transcendental equations, but only where they are really easy. If I ask sin(x) = 1/2, there are x values that satisfy that. If you have e^x = 1, you know x = 0. Typically with transcendental functions you know values at a few places, like e^x = 1, and sine and cosine at the various exact angles. But it shouldn't be surprising that these functions are less "nice" than your usual functions, because if I say solve e^x = 2, well, you know that x = ln(2). Great. What's ln(2)? It's transcendental. You can't express it with the common algebraic operations.* So you need more advanced numerical operations to write down a decimal approximation of this. With that in mind, though you can easily represent some transcendental functions--if you are extremely lucky--hopefully this should persuade you it isn't surprising that these transcendental solutions are really hard. Mathematicians often invent what are called "special functions" to express answers to certain transcendental functions more nicely, because mathematicians hate decimals (this is because decimals are fairly arbitrary to what base you're using. We just developed our number system to be base 10, but who cares.) Wolfram helpfully told me that x^x = 6 can be written as x = e^(W(ln(2)+ln(3))), where W is the product log function, which you definitely hadn't heard of and neither did I. There's lots of weird, special named functions. They generally have a specific application in very specific problems (see Bessel functions). *The reader with a background in calculus might say that you could express ln(2) with an infinite sum of algebraic operations, namely with Taylor and Maclaurin series. That also is lucky, as it just so happens that the Taylor series of this function converges at this point, but if we had ln(2.1), we're screwed. I'm sure there's some numerical method for this, though. You'd probably use Newton's Method instead of Taylor Series anyway since that converges much faster, but I don't really have a background in numerical analysis. Long story short: almost all math problems can't be solved by hand. RIP.

I am going to put this in the Bands of Mourning forum.

I want a picture of this so bad

Surprise! I am super busy and much of my time to 17S has been down to "hey is it running okay cool it works and I paid bills". But more work is coming! Shards are inherently "orderly." Ruin, for example, is an orderly force that rationally destroys and breaks up the world. Any intent really would have this in mind. For this reason, I don't imagine that a Shard could even be Chaos. It's antithetical to what Shard intents are. Plus, deities like Order vs. Chaos are kind of boring. Mistborn is cool because it does a twist on the good vs. evil god.

This has been fixed. Sorry it has taken me a while; it is totally my own fault.

This is not a tech support question with regards to 17th Shard, so I am moving this to General Brandon Discussion, as I assume this is in relation to Brandon Sanderson books.

There will be forums for White Sand and Aether of Night, but they will be passworded and only accessible to people with the manuscript. Info from such books will not be allowed in other forums. These are coming very soon, especially White Sand. There is no plan to make a Dragonsteel forum as that book is NOT distributed by Team Sanderson.

I am hoping we can call them and see if they can ship one. So maybe we can get them still.

This article is so good. Even had info that I didn't know because I haven't been keeping too close of tabs on the stuff in the Bands tour. (Which is scary, because I wrote the cosmere article.) Guess I better update that ASAP... Great job Windy and Zach!

I hid a long conversation regarding White Sand Prime/prose version. Spoiler tags are not sufficient as the book is not publicly available there. You will need to wait in the next week (or so) until we sort out splitting White Sand forums from the graphic novel from the prose version. The prose version will remain in a password protected forum, and prose info will not be allowed to be in the usual, canonical graphic novel discussion. Sorry! It's unpublished, so it still goes by that rule. Absolutely not. Soon™ Sorry for hiding the discussion. It was very interesting. I just hid the whole thing because it came from a point coming from the prose version.

This might be a thing you want: http://coppermind.net/wiki/Cosmere

Until I hear something from the publisher proper, with a specific date (not "hey in this range"), I don't consider it real. What happened was Brandon wanted a date but other members of his team wanted it pushed back for more revision/editing time.

I saw this and actually contacted this artist directly if he had any other comments he would like to make about Birthright.