Chaos

The Gollancz covers definitely work for Mistborn, and this one is no exception. It's fine. It's the non-Mistborn Gollancz covers that are egregious...

I asked Brandon to write this in my copy of Words of Radiance at the release party. He almost always can do such requests for signings, but not this time. He seemed legitimately pained that he couldn't do that. So I have no idea, but clearly: this question is extremely, extremely important.

This has developed further: http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=1109#14 In addition, each character in the flashbacks are the "focus" character for the books. Kaladin has the most word count by far in Way of Kings, and Shallan has the most word count in Words of Radiance. Brandon described Way of Kings once as a big arc for Kaladin, with two smaller arcs with Dalinar and Shallan, so Kaladin was the "focus". How do I know about the word count? Well fortunately, someone has done an analysis on that: Way of Kings analysis Words of Radiance analysis

I am extremely thrilled to show you a project that I've worked on since late March: a total rewrite of the Cosmere page on the Coppermind! It now has the dubious honor of being the longest article that isn't a verbatim source or summary. It also has the most references of any article. I developed some sexy side quote boxes for this, and I think they make huge blocks of text much more readable. It also took me basically an eternity to research and get every quote together. I have a spreadsheet. But I hope you like it. I hope it is both a good introduction and also a complete history of the cosmere

Eshonai was planned as book four for a long time

I imagine Szeth will be more than an interlude character in this book, though.

Sorry, was in a meeting and couldn't update it fast enough. I totally didn't see that tweet reply initially.

I'm moving this to General Brandon. EDIT: It's so incredibly hilarious to me to see how discussion on Brandon books goes on non-17S places. I just want to pat them on shoulder and say, "Oh, you."

Glad you liked Transcendence; I fully intend to make a book with that being a big part of it. I'm going to say probably not. I might change my avatar someday, but it would have to be something I really liked. Yep! You know how to make the best mac and cheese? Get some bowtie pasta, boil those. Then when it is done, add milk, butter, and like a pound of cheese. Stir like mad and you have the cheesiest, best mac and cheese. It's really easy and you can make six meals from one prep. It's great. You know you're talking to a collegiate math professor, right? I dunno, calculus is easier than precalculus. Calculus has well-defined rules that you apply, and is narrow in focus. You're really just doing three things: limits, differentiation, and integration. That successfully sums up all lower level calculus. Really people just have a difficult time due to lack of algebra proficiency. Calculus requires you to be skilled at that level of abstraction and pushing symbols around. But, again, algebra is intensely logical and has a small, finite number of possible things you can even do. Calculus I and II are my favorite courses to teach. Anyway, onto that arrow paradox. Wikipedia answers that one itself. It's a pretty dumb paradox, honestly. Your matter regards what it means for points to be "infinitely close" to one another. This is one of those things that regular language has difficulty in dealing with. It really requires the precision of mathematics, or else people get it wrong. (If any of you were reading the Religions topic, this is why I told Twilight that some truths do require math to explain, and this is one of those. The razor-sharp precision of mathematics is essential for these purposes, and other languages pale in comparison.) All of these paradoxes are solved with modern calculus, which perhaps to your dismay is very rigorously proven, and is true forever. Hell, I can derive for you all the results. Mathematical proof makes the matter done. However, in the 1600s, when calculus first was developed, they did not have our level of rigor, and didn't prove things. They merely used it for the results. And the results are amazingly powerful: what's the rate of change of the volume of a sphere with respect to its radius? It is exactly the formula for a sphere's surface area. That is not coincidental, and describes the deep relationships of rates of change in the universe. Anyway, I'm being philosophical, when what you really need is to know what it means by "infinitely close." The answer really comes down to the definition of a limit, which makes this meaning precise. The definition of a limit doesn't involve points, though. Let's consider just the real number line, so all points will just be x-values. If you have two points that are not equal, they are not "infinitely close"--there is distance between them. It's easy to describe the distance between two points: you subtract them and take the absolute value. So the distance between 2 and 3 would be 2 - 3 = -1, so take the absolute value, you get 1. |2 - 3| = 1. Even if you pick two ridiculously close numbers, like .0001 and .0002, there is a nonzero distance between them. So just points by themselves can't be infinitely close. They are either equal or not equal. Instead, consider points given by a function, which let's assume to be defined on the real line. This function draws a path, and what we really want is to know how points along that path approaches other points. The definition of the limit, though it looks complicated, has very simple origins. If you want a point "really close" to another, you want the distance between them small. How small? Really small. This is accomplished with defining an arbitrary variable epsilon (used because the e stands for "error" here), and I want the distance between the height of the function, f(x), to be really close to a limiting value L. In other words, we want |f(x) - L| < epsilon. But I don't want it for just one epsilon, I want it for every epsilon, so we'll just say that epsilon > 0. Any will do. Since we are now in 2D, epsilon dealt with the y-values, but we also need to restrict the x-values that correspond to where we are going to (let's say we are approaching in x to a point a). So let's say we have a delta > 0, and we want | x - a | < delta. What's happening here is really this image: We're drawing a little box around this function. Epsilon can be really small, like a billionth, trillionth, or quadrillionth, so we can effectively zoom in this box as close as we want. That's the essence of the definition. "Infinitely close" means "we can get this function arbitrarily close to this single value." Interestingly, the function doesn't even need to be defined at x = a. The function can still be approaching a value, even if it isn't defined anywhere. (This is actually the whole point of the definition, because we want to eventually deal with derivatives, where the thing we are taking the limit of is not defined at this a value.) There's some important logic in defining this, though. The formal definition is: Ta-da, you now have the power to do all derivatives, and do a ton of calculus. But all the definition really requires is the distance between the x values and the y values to be small. How small? As small as you want it to be. In practice, when you use this definition, you let epsilon be arbitrary, then delta depends on epsilon. That way your proof works for every possible epsilon value, so you are done. Limits have all the properties of real numbers that you would like. Arithmetic works as you'd expect, and basically, they are extremely nice to deal with. Limits also let you deal with the dumb Zeno paradox about infinite sums. Precision, it helps!

I've decided upon my Epic's name! It would be Transcendence. The godlike telepathic power would allow me to read minds of everyone on the planet, and grant me with expanded mental capacity to process it. I have access to thoughts, memories, and also muscle memory. This means Transcendence has access to literally all of humanity's knowledge or skills at any moment. The act of summoning knowledge or information is not instantaneous--general queries take time, though if I focus upon specific people, it is laughable easy, and nearby people I do have instant knowledge of. But it is more of "hey get me some kata stances" and if I hadn't grabbed it and archived it specifically, there is delay. I don't have invincibility, but you can't assassinate me because I'd know you are coming. Earthquakes, natural disasters would get me. Long range missiles might be challenging, but I figure I would constantly be querying myself and making sure I know everyone's thoughts regarding me. But given that I don't have direct offensive abilities, I would hide. The name Transcendence does not just come from my own knowledge. I can send thoughts, but I cannot control people. Unless they give themselves to me. In exchange for their service, they can transcend themselves, and have access to this immense knowledge. They don't get the increased mental capacity, so I generally need to query information for them. But they have access to this vastness. But, what I gain is mental slaves who I have absolute control over. With no offensive abilities, it is much more advantageous to keep my identity hidden. I stay in the shadows and try and bribe people into becoming Transcendent, and then I exert my will through them. It's a character from Guild Wars, my MMO series of choice. This is Shiro Tagachi, the villain of actually my least favorite of GW1's campaigns. It requires a bit of explanation as to why he's my avatar, as he's been it since before 17S existed. You see, back in... 2006, when Guild Wars Factions came out, I lived with my dad in the middle of nowhere. We had dialup. Surprisingly, Guild Wars 1 worked okay on dialup, actually, as much of that game was instanced. That was nice. Anyway, Shiro's plotline was pretty terrible. He came back from the dead, brought affliction, blah blah. In the final battle with Shiro I kept DCing because dialup was also awful, but I managed to get credit for the mission. The end cutscene had someone explain that they need an especially bad place for him in the afterlife, since he already left it once. So that person said Shiro was going to "a place of eternal torment." Naturally, I assumed this to be a dialup modem. It makes sense. It basically is eternal torment. From there I began to say that random disconnecting was Shiro's fault. Later when I got better internet, when routers randomly need to be rebooted, I also blame Shiro. He is a convenient scapegoat for all networking problems. His powers have grown over the years. If a snowstorm takes out the internet, I blame Shiro. His mythology that I have invented is extensive now. There's the Anti-Shiro, god of networking, but Shiro erased his name. Shiro can turn into a cat, and for some reason, I have memory of Matt Damon/Jason Bourne being part of Shiro's mythology. I don't really know why. Shiro's my avatar in penance, so he takes pity upon me and does not destroy my internet. That, or I liked the wallpaper at the time, and I might just think it's so weird if I change it now. Dr Pepper. I basically already have that done. You can download the software at your leisure, though it's paid. But no, you don't get access

Agreed, this is still against the rules, and I am not compelled to make this the reason to make exceptions for forum games. Anonymity could be maintained by making a burner email and sending the message over email, I don't know. The only exception to multiple accounts are families with the same IP addresses, obviously, but those people do not technically have two accounts

Who's booty?

Oh god he's turned into a spambot! *clicks Flag as Spammer*

I'm the head webmaster and the sysadmin. Anyone else with that technical access answers to me Other questions will be answered soon. In addition there are way too many of these AMAs, so I'll make a subforum for them today.

There are reasons for that, primarily art related.

Mastermind isn't quite right... I'll find the right word. And then probably steal it for a book. Use [spoiler][/spoiler]! In the new site version this will be on the toolbar and I'll have much more control over what is on the editor's toolbar. I've ran forums since I was 13 and picked it up from there, though I was rather thrown into 17S as being the system admin. It still sort of terrifies me and I think I'm not that great at the tech side, if I'm honest. EDIT: This weekend! Promise.

ETA would be June-July. MBI is separate so it won't be affected right now. MBI is difficult because the character mod is so essential that we have to make sure it absolutely works before we can do that. That's why the crazy errors are still there... Unfortunately, can't take the complex exam for you. I'm a bit rusty on that. I didn't take the graduate level of it. I said it'd be done by the weekend and I stand by that (Possibly by the end of the weekend) 1. I think the most clever answer I heard to this question involved a biologist, and he said that the meaning of life was to increase entropy into the universe. He had a chart that implied that without life, you could only get so much entropy. Life required a temporary drop in entropy, but once it going, it caused much more entropy. I found the explanation cute, so I'll go with that. 2. If I knew that, then I would have asked it. 3. Supreme willpower. 4. Now that's a fantastic question! The power would be an extremely high level of telepathy, as powerful as I could get it. I want to be able to have a godlike level of telepathy. Imagine being able to read everyone's mind at once? You could have the sum of humanity's current knowledge at your fingertips! That's the power, hands down. I have books I plan to write on someone with this insane level of telepathy. I'll have to think about the proper Epic name for that. 5. I barely have time for MBI, so I can't really take the time for a long, time-intensive game like that. Sorry! If I'm RPing, it will be MBI, and I am so incredibly behind it is insane...

Not really. I am very good at backslapping pesky rebels and I make sure to use all the tools at my disposal, unlike the actual Lord Ruler, who was extremely negligent in this regard. Just kill Vin, man! Stop toying! Rest assured, uprisings will be dealt with swiftly, and with a pewter-Compounded slap to break the rebels necks.

I really enjoyed the Religions topic, but I'm derailing it with my zany brand of nonspirituality. Also math. There was a lot of that. So, here you can ask me anything you want! You can continue that discussion in the religion thread, and maybe probe deeper into my atheistic tendencies. (Topic starter: I'd prefer if there wasn't an afterlife! Am I crazy? You decide! ) Ask about philosophy! Ask about math! Ask about quantum physics! Ask about Brandon's works! You could ask me about theory stuff, but that might be as bad as me blabbing about math! Ask about site stuff. Ask me sarcastic questions because you thought they were funny! Ask me anything!

Whoa whoa whoa. Hold up. I have never claimed that math did any of those things. (Read again! I really didn't say that!) Math's claims are far less exotic. They are things like "a series of functions that are continuous which uniformly converges to a function F(x) is also continuous". I did say that math is eternally true, and will always be true, but I never claimed that it spoke of those things. (But, then, I don't really require a book to tell how me to love or be kind, nor do I wish to be saved.) I might be really bad at explaining--probably because I don't voice these opinions often, so I am ill-practiced at describing them--but it's not a math or science textbook that I want as a holy book. I'd just like some divinely inspired book to mention once, somewhere, that humanity can do a ton of good and discover a lot of these things. Vague hints. You could sell it like: "I am God. By doing these few steps [vaguely explain scientific method], learn the nature of the world, behold its beauty that I created, and become closer to me!" That doesn't really seem out of place in a holy book. There's plenty of stories that have a very clear message to it. Why can't one have a message like this? That's all I want. A hint. A small light where humanity can figure out the rest. To find this crazy glory in the natural world. This has no practical difference to any religion that promises anything in the afterlife. It is not compelling because you can give me no guarantee that such a place exists. I will focus on making this world better because it's the only one we got, and not act in some arbitrary decision of what "good" is because of eternal salvation. This one is here, so I'll focus on that. I do enjoy this, but I don't want to derail this topic further with my math ramblings. I am probably going to make a "Ask Chaos anything" thread where we can continue this. (Sorry. I turned a religious discussion and ended up mentioning formal definitions of limits. Ooops...) EDIT: Here's the aforementioned Ask Chaos Anything topic. If you want fun, you could ask why I'd prefer if the afterlife didn't exist Or really whatever you want. You're the boss.

Different strokes for different folks, Twi. I would hope that a divine being would not simply dumb down eternal truths because some found them difficult to understand. No religious text can be for me in its current state. Stories and platitudes are meaningless to me. Maybe a book everyone can read, but not a book everyone will care about. There are certainly a great many who will not find it compelling, and I've explained that the messages in the texts do not enhance my worldview. So, eh, shrugs. If there is an afterlife, I can be satisfied knowing that the things I believe were true, and no good or evil supernatural being can change that. Words are just words, and I would prefer to not be corrupted. I'll stick with things that are definitely true that require no leap of faith to decipher. Also, as a math teacher, I firmly believe anyone can learn math. Some with great difficulty, but anyone can. Ultimately, academia always provides a solution for corruption, as there is the natural check of "hey, I get a doctorate and tons of notoriety by proving famous people wrong? Great!" (Though when it comes to a church, centralizing money and power in such a way... yeah, probably not a good idea. xD)

It was a team effort