ecohansen

From Syl's first convesation with Kaladin, iirc: "The heart of a beetle, so tiny yet so powerful".

Pigs are special everywhere in the Cosmere, and probably invested. They are one of the few vertebrates outside of Shinovar on Roshar, where they provide milk ( http://www.tor.com/2014/06/10/brandon-sanderson-answers-your-questions-about-the-way-of-kings/question 8). They are one of the few surviving vertebrates in the Final Empire--TenSoon ate a pig, and Elend called his father a pig. They are obviously invested in Threnody, and we have it on the word of a certified Preternaturally Wise Child that they have strong personalities and preferences: In Elantris, Kiin chooses to cook pig on the night he introduces Sarene to his conspiracy. This at least hints that pigs represent a very high-status food. Similarly, in Shadows of Self, Unfortunately, I didn't notice any pigs on First of the Sun.

On Scadrial, coins are USED by allomancers, rather than POWERING allomancers. I can imagine something like classical Chinese spade money, where coins are shaped like parts of the human body to provide a focus for Awakening. Of course, metal is a poor material for Awakening, but what would happen if you fastened finger-shaped coins to a mass of rope and told it to "grab things" ?

Hoidhunter, you asked if there had been much speculation on the nature of crem. There was a pretty lengthy discussion of the possibilities downthread in my first-ever thread: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/30579-theory-co2-and-roshars-atmosphere-and-ecology/

Have you checked out this thread? http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/6334-the-moons-of-roshar/

So, one of the most famous threads in the history of this site was the discovery that the Roshar supercontinent is made from Storm-deposited crem ( http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/6912-hidden-things-in-map-of-roshar/page-31#entry127467). There have since been several Words of Brandon confirming this. Of course, I guess that there is a chance that the crem was deposited pn the ak of a great beast...

Going back to whether teeth are sufficiently alive or not, don't forget saliva. Saliva has as many as 8 million living human cells per mL, so it would definitely count as "alive", and since it is touching both the metalmind and living flesh, it should do fine. This does, however, raise questions. Since Rashek lost his powers after the bracers were bloodily ripped off, even though his blood cells would still be alive at that point, it seems that a body fluid would have to BOTH contain living human cells AND still be in contact with the ferruchemist's body in order to transfer Investiture from a metalmind. But what if you made a snail a Ferruchemist? The snail could leave his metalminds in a secure location, and leave an unbroken trail of living mucus connecting him to his powers. Snail-paths can in many ways still be considered a part of the snail: snails generally eat the mucus while backtracking on a trail, and have been found to leave chemical notes for themselves in the mucus: if in the morning they turned left instead of right, but thought that the right turn was also promising, they can leave a note for themselves to investigate it later. Snails can store their memories externally. Given how connected a snail is to its trail, I think there's a good chance that snail ferruchemists would have a big leg up on us measly humans.

Both are currently causing crises in the Pacific (the Diaoyu Islands dispute, and the Great Pacific Trash Gyre) Mayflies are like body odor.

Alright, new thought on the mechanism. The WoR Ars Arcanum states that five types of fabrials have been discovered so far. Conjoiners, Reversers, and Warning fabrials all require specific gems, and none of those are smokestone. So the fabrial clock must be either an augmenter or a diminisher. The AA states that augmenters can create "heat, pain, or even a calm wind". Since smokestone's essence creates opaque gasses, it seems likely that a smokestone augmenter would create a "calm wind". So, the moving air is forced down a channel, where it drives a paddle or a piston. The fabrial clock is essentially a steam clock. Of course, the force of the moving air will probably diminish as the stone loses stormlight, so you'd need something like the balance wheel of a spring-driven watch to maintain constant motion in the dial. *** Sheep, you asked how the clock would be reset after the gem was re-infused. Probably the same way that clock-towers were reset before timezones came into existence: you set the clock to noon at solar noon (which you can easily and accurately determine with the shadow of a leaning stick oriented north/south). And since it's the only clock in town, it doesn't matter if it says it's 12:15 when it's really 12:20--what matters is that it divides time up evenly, and when it says that a patient has been under anaesthesia for an hour, he's been under for exactly an hour. Patrickstar: But how would the bridgemen know how to walk at a constant rate if they didn't have a stopwatch to allow them to keep that pace? Tabitreader: Yep, you have it pretty much right. Note that the upcoming Desolation is the True Desolation, and so will be different from prior Desolations in several ways (none of the previous Desolations had an Everstorm, for instance). You might want to check out the desolation page on Coppermind, enter "desolation" in the searchbar, or browse older threads in this forum.

Anyone have any ideas about why smokestone is the gem of choice? The best I can think is that Smokestance is a stance that requires "constant motion", so maybe smokestone somehow 'moves' something at a constant rate.

I've mentioned this speculation once before, but thought I might give it its own thread where it can be shot down by a wider audience on its own small merits. Everyone's favorite quote about the Dawnsingers is the following conversation between Kabsal and Shallan: (Irrelevant side note: does it seem ominous to anyone else that Kabsal is vouching for these 'caring healers' while he is using his 'caring priest' persona to plot murder, within shouting distance of a hospital where other healers were committing mass murder?) So, what would be the 'opposite' of a Voidbringer? I guess the closest opposite would be a spren being possessed by a Parshendi. But that doesn't seem likely at the moment. We know, however, that there are two nonhuman sapiences on Roshar: Parshendi and Aimians. We know that Aimia and the Shattered Plains are on opposite sides of Roshar. We know that blue and red are commonly used as opposites, and Aimians are blue and Parshendi are red. We know that Slaveform Parshmen are inhumanly dull and passive, while (presumably unbonded) Aimians are commonly seen as superhumanly clever and devious. So, if the Parshendi are the Voidbringers, and the Dawnsingers are the opposite of the Voidbringers, it would seem to make sense that the Dawnsingers were Aimians.

There was a reason Hoid was named Topaz, just like there was a reason Rock was named numuhukumakiaki'aialunamor. The question might be referring to that reason.

I think this has been mentioned elsewhere, but since this thread has been resurrected I might as well add it here for completeness: I've always thought there's a good chance that the black gemstone is lined to the following passage in the WoR letter to Hoid:

Terrifying at first glance, but delightful once you're familiar with it. Germans are like Jurchens.

Wow! Three Kingdoms Period is NOT the period I would have thought of. Just, wow. I'll have to do a lot of re-thinking.

It seems here like you're committing the same crime you're accusing us of: Europe-norming . It seems like the rate of technological advancement is a particularly poor metric for measuring the state of a society as a whole. Aristotle and Plato agreed on very little, but they agreed that the chief virtue of society is giving philosophers the leisure to think, by means of the menial drudgery of the majority of the population. Several preindustrial societies had intellectual golden ages while the vast majority of their populace was mired in serfdom: The Greeks had inventors like Heron of Alexandria and Archimedes; the Song Dynasty invented the printing press, the compass, and the mathematical matrix; and of course there were Ummayyad Arabia and Gupta India. Before companies could afford R&D departments, the best way to get a high rate of technological innovation was to have a lot of upper-class people with both education and leisure: Alethkar obviously has that in lighteyed women and in ardents. Nevertheless, the life of a serf in any of these intellectual periods would be fairly indistinguishable from the life of a serf in medieval Europe, and none of these periods of intellectual innovation wound up leading to any sort of major revolution: not democratic, not industrial, not capitalist, not agricultural, not educational, not informational. They only led to new and better toys for the upper classes. Conversely, China under Mao was a horrible place for intellectuals and inventors, but had a massive shift from agrarian to industrial society, and with one of the biggest increases in median lifespan in human history. Since fabrial research is being done by the leisured upper classes and ardents instead of by proto-industrialists, it seems like they will tend to invent fabrials that meet the whims of the upper classes, rather than the needs of society as a whole.

Here, we see that Jasnah planned to leave Shadesmar using "Honor's perpendicularity", which I think we can now confidently assume is Honor's shardpool. In the WoR epilogue, Jasnah materializes at a seemingly random place in the wilderness. It definitely doesn't seem like a shardpool, but there might be something like the Pits of Hathsin below. Of course, she could also have changed her plans, and found a different way ot of Shadesmar, but I'd say that the spot where Jasnah met Hoid is as strong of a contender for being Honor's shardpool as the Purelake is.

Books seem to have different values at different times. The Davar family library was very small, despite their nobility. Shallan was initially charged 10 emerald broams for 7 books, with each broam being worth 1000 diamond chips. So, one book would have cost 4 years' worth of Kaladin's bridgeman pay. Nevertheless, Kaladin's poor surgeon father had several books of medical illustrations, and we've seen books being treated cheaply in other situations. One guess: Roshar might have developed something like whole-page woodblocks instead of movable-type printing presses. Since all the masculine trades would require only illustrated texts, it seems like there would be an incentive to treat the page as the unit to be reproduced, instead of the letter. So, very popular books would have each of their pages engraved into a woodcut, which could then be mass-produced cheaply. For rarer books, it wouldn't be worthwhile to undertake the initial engraving-investment, and so things would still have to be hand-scribed and expensive. edit: I just remembered that we've actually seen a version of this: The common soldiers' maps at the warcamp were made from rubbings from an engraved shell. **** I would also note that China developed movable-type printing in the Song Dynasty, but remained feudal and "medieval" for another half-millenium: the printing press is only fatal to medievalism in certain circumstances.

On a similar note, what is Syl's relation to bindspren? Obviously a very different kind of spren than Syl. And yet, Syl defines her basic function as binding: "I bind things. I am honorspren." And, maybe related, there always seemed to be something odd about how Pattern seemed to have a special disdain for creationspren, despite creation being a big part of what he and Shallan do. Wild speculation time: what if the 'higher' spren capable of making a nahel bond arise from one type of primitive spren taking on the intent of another? What if an Honorspren is a windspren that decides it wants to act like a bindspren, and a Cryptic is a liespren that decides it wants to act like a creationspren? That could be tied to each Order having access to two surges: one alligned with what the spren originally was, and one alligned with what it rose up to become? [/wild speculation]

Sure, but the only agriculture we've seen is field agriculture rather than paddy agriculture. Just before the Yuan Dynasty which you cite, China was divided between the wheat-eating northern Jin and the rice-eating Southern Song. The two states had similar area, but the Southern Song had over twice the population of Jin, and therefore twice the population density. Before the Industrial and Green revolutions, you could consistently get much higher population densities in rice-growing regions than in wheat-growing regions. In other threads, I've talked about the wastefulness of using moving plants like rockbuds as a foodsource--I definitely can't imagine that, given similar landuse, you could maintain a higher population density with rockbuds than you could with wheat. Therefore, I would say that wheat-dependent regions provide a better model for Alethkar than rice-dependent regions do. For that, our best options are northern China, parts of India, and Europe. Europe had the least trade and interdependence with rice-regions, so it provides the cleanest model. --All of which is to say, even if Alethkar is in no way medieval europe, medieval europe still might be the best model we have for certain questions. For other questions, other places might provide better models--we definitely shouldn't ignore Brandon's experience in Korea or the American Southwest, for example. However, the people on this board will generally be more familiar with western history--if I can make the same point using either Germans or Jurchens as my example, I'll probably pick the Germans, because more people will be familiar with them.

Granted. Glinda the Good Witch, sparkling and glittering, rides in on a rainbow and says "Silly Drake, the power has been within you all along!" She then disappears, and you never learn what she meant. For your bane, you become convinced that you are a cocker spaniel that only thinks it is human. I wish to bask eternally in sunny meadows by the shore of a wave-strewn sea.

Alchemical Taoism would be another example of a spiritual tradition that wound up driving a very great deal of real-world research. For instance, the Taoist quest for immortality-medicines led to vast compendia of herbs, which had the side effect of recording a and systematizing a great deal of real natural history and botany.

Snopy, which specific extrapolations particularly irk you? In the thread you cited, I tried to make a very rough estimate of Alethkar's annual death toll by assuming a population density similar to medieval Europe. I did that because the pictures of village life showed an agrarian society dependent on human and animal muscle-power, and because the Shattered Plains warcamps, with approximately a half-million people, were now considered a major population center. Given that both villages and larger population-centers had populations similar to those in medieval Europe, and given that Alethi geography seems less fertile than European, it seemed reasonable to guess that Alethi population density would, if anything, be a bit lower than medieval Europe's population density. That particular extrapolation still seems reasonable to me--although it could definitely be disputed

Nope, Pathfinder, rats (and pigs) are the OTHER common mammal(s) outside Shinovar, and have the same negative conotations they have here. WOK p.66: A few skyeels undulated through the air, searching for fish and rats. WOK p. 71: Why did a rat population thrive in one area, but fail in another? WOK p. 168: That rat! he sends a boy into my shop trying to steal my customer? Outrageous! WOK p. 47: ...the way a rat can empty an entire wineskin by chewing out the corner When Kaladin is down in the chasms, he find's a bit of sow-milk cheese on one of the dead bodies, but word search isn't pulling up the page.

Sure thing. You can take Ted Cruz along--he'll spend the whole trip telling you about "New York values", and contrasting them to the virtues of the heartland. I wish to be befriended by all the slugs in the world, and become known as "Ecohansen Slug-friend".