Aethling

Isn't there an annotation or comment where Sanderson states that the reason Clod is such a good swordsman is that he remembers some of the original skill? That implies that there is at least some brain activity, unless you want to believe that something that intricate can be simple muscle memory. Also, the way he acts in parts of the book hints there is something more than just basic brain function.

ah. Misread. Much simpler idea would be that someone told them. All it takes is one person that knew them before they returned. They wouldn't even have to have died together. One could have died, returned, been taken care of by the family, and then the same happened to the other. Losing the memory could also be a more recent occurence. I don't remember any hint that Vo did not remember his wife.

The odds of siblings returning probably aren't much worse than anyone else, they would both just have to have a reason. I always interpreted it that Arsteel and the rest know each other because their research was done after they returned. I do not know that that was specifically addressed, however, and I may just be misinterpreting.

Article from a UK paper stated she used her friend's address specifically to bypass Amazon's policy. I think it was the guardian, but it was really the only one I read of several that even came close to actually looking in to what she had done. I am a big believer that if you know you are doing something wrong, you can't blame others when you get bit. Amazon must have just caved on this one.

Ok, after reading several articles about this exact issue, I believe the woman got what she deserved. She knew that kindles were not licensed for use in her home country, and she used a fraudulent address to get around the limitation. If you know a product is not offered in an area and you commit fraud to get around the limitation, you cannot complain when it comes back to bite you. It boils down to she did something she knew she was not supposed to do. When you make a decision to do something like this, you have to live with the results.

I wonder how much of this came from her buying the items across national borders. She is using the UK site, but she lived in Norway.

Graduate school book on a medieval English king refered to someone as an Aetheling. I like the look of the word and its meaning so I use it occasionally as a username.

If you figure ten million across the entire continent, that isn't all that much. Historically, cities and towns have been at or near a source of water. Lakes and rivers give sources of food and drinking water. Seas give abundant food supplies. Any of them can be used for trade, though that may not be a major factor in primitive societies. A town just wouldn't stay viable for very long if it was a hundred leagues from a water supply. A single family farm would just be too open for raiding by banditsif people knew it was a week or more away from the nearest help. Until relatively modern times, the number one cause of death for women was childbirth. Imagine having a pregnant wife and being a week or more away from help. If anything goes wrong, the mother and child would probably die. That would leave the man out in the middle of nowhere by himself. Almost any farm accident would probably result in a serious condition, if not death. Jordan says pretty early on that it is rare for someone to leave their town or village, with Tam leaving and coming back with a wife being a rarity. Doesn't Rand think or say at one point that he would probably never have left the two rivers region if Moraine had not come there? Andor hadn't sent a tax collector to the region in several generations, and even Elayne knows that she holds the region on paper only. Humans are primarily a social being. They tend to flock together, if the resources are not there to support a population, the area will probably not be settled, except for the occasional pioneer family. Sure, people are encouraged by free land to call their own, but if you tell them they will probably have to fight for their lives on a daily basis against bandits, scarcity of water, scarcity of supplies, lack of other people, unknown/unreliable weather conditions, human frailty, lack of game, and zero trade, there probably wouldn't be too many people that would rush to take the land. Imagine having to travel for a week or more each way just to get a wagon full of ale barrels.

Even today, there are large areas of land that have little to no human habitation. The lack of population in some of the western lands may be attributed to the near-constant border wars that go on in some of them. Most people that I know would not want to live in the middle of an area that is constantly overrun by warring factions. Some of the various clues in the WoT setting give me the feeling that it is around the late 1500s early 1600s settings. There were still periodic famines and epidemics during these periods, but they were much advanced compared to only a few hundred years before. There are Aes Sedai around to heal people, true, but most areas have never even seen one even during Rand's time. The daily lives are still run as without magic, indeed some despise it. The major population boom in Europe happened at the end of the miniature ice age, and that loosely corresponded with the beginning of the Renaissance. Some say that the decreased temperatures had lowered human resistance to where the plagues were more devastating when they came through due to the decreased nutrition available from crops. The story begins in winter, and we miss much of the first summer due to the portal stone travel. That is followed by an extra long and hot summer and then by a pretty bad winter. We do not really know what the normal weather conditions are like, at least for our story time. They could simply be on the edge of a climatic change that would allow a larger population. Unfortunately, the outside influences changed even that. Also, as for wars affecting population. Check out the population charts for Germany and Russia in the late 40s through the 50s. There was virtually an entire generation of men missing, and this was especially marked in Russia. The US had a "baby boom" when the soldiers came home, but we did not lose nearly as many men as Germany or Russia. I have never looked into what happened in Japan, but the last I heard they were still suffering from a slow population growth, but that was attributed at the time due to fewer of the women deciding to give birth. China could throw half a billion soldiers into a war, lose every one, and still have a higher population than the US. Their problem resides in the several million men that will not be able to find a mate, but that was intentional on the part of the goverment.

But you have to think that paper is actually a renewable resource. The paper company where I live keeps forests full of trees. They eventually cut them down, but they also replant after a few years. Compare that with the gold, silver, plastics, etc that are part of ereaders, and real books are far more ecological. I don't believe that anyone would want to go back to vellum or papyrus. Real books will always exist. We can't say that same of kindles or nooks.

I use a library that loans out ebooks. Even with them, they have a limited number. You check it out from their site, and they have a button to download it for kindle. A nice trick that I discovered is that if you download using usb and never connect your kindle to an internet connection, you can keep the books forever. All you have to do is check the book out, download it, and return it. That takes probably 10 minutes max. I still prefer real books though. Nothing beats the feel and smell of a real book.

I haven't gotten to his second time with Avi yet. Only up to Winter's Heart so far. Taking a YA break between each book to downshift. Still, most women I have known can tell they are pregnant long before they start showing. I don't know that she could keep that from Elayne or the Wise Ones.

Chalk up some of the issues with the axis and geography to him being a writer, not a scientist. Do you want him writing his books or spending years doing research for something many of his readers will probably not notice or even care about? Throw in an orbital shift and a climatic event, and it doesn't require all that much of a suspension of belief to see the poles as habitable. Even on Earth, true north and magnetic north do not align, and this can cause problems with flights and ships that do not have a gps.

Shedding blood and dying are two different things. In a battle as large as what is going to happen, it would be hard for me to believe he does not get at least one wound that draws blood. That said, the only thing I see stopping him from dying is the information about Avi bearing his kids, but we do not have evidence of her being pregnant. Still, that wouldn't take all that long to remedy in the days before the battle. If you take the family definition of blood, there are probably plenty of cousins from the Aiel as well as nobles from his mother's line. Prophecy in fantasy is often confused by double or archaic meanings.

People still say it, mostly people trying to prove how brave they are. Travelers and Gleemen have probably kept it alive even in the remotest regions like Two Rivers.

The reason I left out the remark about the train is that I feel it is nothing more than a rewording of the first question. The first question asks what would happen and the second gives an example of the same thing happening, but using a different object. To me, that is fundamentally the same thing, just using different objects. I am saying that when the train crosses the edge of the bubble it immediately assumes the new time scale. Also, it seems to me that he has deliberately been pretty vague about answering questions that he feels will probably be explained in a future book, but I do not believe that is what he is doing here. He said the entity would not notice crossing the border, not that it was completely unaffected, which is what I see you guys are saying. As a very, very basic example of crossing and not noticing, imagine driving from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida to New Orleans, Louisiana. You drive across three separate state lines, one time zone, and numerous county/parish lines. They are borders that you would not notice without the signs. Sure, some of the magic systems may not obey fundamental laws of nature, but then they are magic. Sanderson is not a physicist, and neither are vast numbers of his readers. It is much easier to see this happening than to say that some objects are affected upon entering a bubble where others are not. We already have ample evidence that objects are affected by entering a bubble

It is pretty bloody long. I think it is pretty much the complete chapter. I have been debating whether to cut or paste it into a document so I can read it on my kindle.

I guess the difference of interpretation is coming from a fundamental difference of envisioning what is happening when the object crosses into the time bubble. I will try to explain what I see is happening, but first let's look at the original question and Sanderson's response. Question: "If you are standing inside of a time bubble, and throw a spear out of the bubble, what happens to that spear as it traverses the border of the bubble? Are different parts of the spear ever in different "time zones," going fundamentally different speeds?" Response: "In general, a large object going through a time bubble is not going to notice. An object is either in or out, and it depends in part on how the object views itself. People inside the train would be inside of its influence, and wouldn't notice the bubble. The spear would go from one to the other, but would never be in both." The question and answer are both about what happens the moment that an object crosses or touches the edge of the bubble. The "in or out" part is saying that an object is either in or out of the bubble, there is no transitional phase. The instant the object crosses the bubble, it is in the new "time zone." Because there is no transitional phase, the object does not "notice" it is now moving in accordance with the new time, it just is. It is hard for a non-sentient item to notice anything, but the same principle would apply to a self-aware entity crossing the bubble. My interpretation is that he is saying the people on the train do not notice that they have crossed into the bubble, not that they are completely unaffected by the bubble. Once the train crosses the bubble, it and all the passengers are under the influence of the bubble for the time it takes for the train to cross to the other side and exit. Again, neither the train, nor its passengers, notice leaving the bubble but they did enter, transit, and exit.

Sanderson states in annotation part two for chapter 21 that the number sixteen has to do with how the Mistsickness works. The Mistsickness was something completely outside the normal genetic inheritance. In another annotation he states that some of the people snapped by the Mistsickness would not have been mistings at all without it (see chapter 49.2 annotation. We have something that is stepping outside the normal realm and making people mistings that would not normally have been coupled with the idea that the 16 was meant to be a clue that came about at the time when the Well returned to full power. The 1:16 is actually an articifially inflated number used to give clue for one thing.

The 1/16 was done intentionally so they would notice. Since it was artificially influenced, the same ratios probably would not show up in nature.

More than likely, they will just discover the command that allows them to be made with far fewer breaths. Remember, awakened corpses used to be expensive on breath until they discovered the command that is currently used.

I think you might be misreading what he stated. He said they would be under the influence of the bubble, they just wouldn't notice it. That isn't too hard to invision.

Highly improbable simply because Vasher remembers being around when Nightblood was created.

It looks like Tor has expanded the chapter one preview beyond what they originally posted. It now has more between Rand and Perrin as well as the wondergirls.

Terrorist organizations often use the naive to carryout the attacks or murders instead of the organizers. That doesn't necessarily mean the organization itself shares the beliefs or the lesser members that are often the sacrifices.