king of nowhere

On 5/29/2024 at 2:41 PM, alder24 said:

Here:

Kaladin arrived at the Shattered Plains at the year 1173, 7th month, 9th week, 3rd day (1173.7.9.3), the Battle of the Tower happened at 1173.9.6.4 - 86 days in total. A month is 50 days, a week is 5 days, there are 10 weeks in 1 month.

Reading the notes, though, you see that a lot of that is speculative. in particular, in reference A427, the author notes that the time is very constrained, and he's making some generous assumptions to fit the timeline. that is, it does seem like kaladin is doing an awful lot of things in a very short time, but there are constrains in how long he can be spending as a bridgeman, so those assumptions are needed to fit the timeline - which actually does vindicate my point that kaladin spending less than 100 days as bridgeman seems short.

i didn't go look those details - I am not aware of any book reference for when, exactly, kaladin arrives to the plains relative to other plot events. the closest i can think of is amaram winning his shards, but iirc, amaram himself faked the date, so we don't have any reliable in-book reference "amaram took the shards from kaladin exactly 11 months before arriving at the warcamps, and kaladin spent 8 months as a slave before arriving there, so he must have spent 3 months as bridgemen". I haven't seen anything like that. so I'm not sold on why kaladin can't have arrived at the shattered plains a couple months earlier, and have started training bridge 4 a bit earlier.

18 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Sand is generally a bio-substance, and usually a product of the marine environment (on which Roshar is based). From the other wiki:

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Calcium carbonate is the second most common type of sand, for example, aragonite, which has mostly been created, over the past 500 million years, by various forms of life, like coral and shellfish. For example, it is the primary form of sand apparent in areas where reefs have dominated the ecosystem for millions of years, 

WoBs:

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Sandy beaches, in a storm surge, will often wash off shore into sandbars (which Shallan also mentions, because the Santhid leaves her on one) but they do not tend to "blow away" due to surface wetting forces. The mass of individual grains is much smaller than the mass of the water droplets holding them down and together - which is wny you get sand storms in desert environments, but not beach environments. 

As for the tides - sure each moon is smaller than our moon, but you have tidal gravitation from (at least) four distinct sources (their sun and three moons, which each pass much closer to the planet than ours). I imagine the tides on Roshar to be very complex, but with a lower average tidal differentiation than we would see in our world (NOAA links - Nova Scotia can be as great as 38+ feet). I would also expect that, like @hwiles said, part of the effect they are seeing is storm surge from the Highstorms while off-shore, which they simply call "tide" because of the similar effect of offshore storms interacting in the beach environment. 

Hope that helps

Makes enough sense for sand - though if soil, which is held together by similar mechanisms, is eroded away, then a beach should too.

Does not make sense e for tides. Doesn't matter how close the moons are, they are too small to cause a tide. They would not cause a tide if they were on the surface. The highstorm explanation doesn't hold, because there was no highstorm for the whole next day. 

The sun explanation is the only one with some merit regarding tides

Reteading words on radiance, i caught on a small detail, and i can't let it go.

In chapter 9, kaladin enters a chasm, using a sapphire broam for light, musing how it's worth more than all his wages as bridgeman.

Sapphire is second most valued stone, a broam is 500 clearchips. As a bridgeman slave, kaladin earned a clearmark per day, so the line implies kaladin spent less than 100 days as bridgeman. 

It seems not enough time for all that happens. I spent the better part of an hour looking, but i could not find a chronology of the book, only of the wider cosmere.

So, when kaladin is first assigned to bridges, he goes on for a while until all those in his original crew died - most of those who replaced them died too. For all that bridge crews have terrible casualty rates, the same book states an average of one run per week - and not all are bad. To lose 96% of their original members, it must have been at least a month. In wok chapter 30, kaladin states he's been on a couple dozen runs - implying 120 days as bridgeman already, and it's a third of the book.

Then he decides to fight. He spends at least a couple weeks taking control of bridge 4. He trains them; they exercice until they can run with the bridge for hours and be only mildly tired; that kind of training doesn't come in a few weeks. 

Then he thinks of the side carry, he takes time to train the men at it; it ends poorly, and he is left to the highstorm. He spends ten days recovering. Then he starts training the men in combat, and from there more weeks of training pass. 

All in all, 200 days seem a more likely estimate.

I am rereading words of radiance, and i'm noticing little details that seem inconsistent.

In wor chapter 11, shallan just survives the shipwreck, she's on a rock near the shore, and she says that she can reach the coast because of the low tide.

How is there a tide on roshar? The tide is caused by the moon's gravity, and we have noticeable tides on our planet because our moon is pretty big. Roshar has three small moons, but they are said to be roughly the size of phobos. Phobos has such low gravity that a person standing on it could escape the moonlet just by jumping, it could not cause any noticeable tide.

So, how can roshar have tides? is that a mistake?

By the way, the same chapter says shallan reached the "sandy shore"; later in the chapter, shallan draws a glyph in the sand. There should absolutely not be sand on roshar, not in an exposed eastern location. This looks like an oversight, except that the sand is referred several times in the chapter. If roshar has no soil because highstorms strip it away, how can it have sandy beaches?

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/FlaBsERulK

when you see that image, and you think "yumi was there"

i was hoping for more on the mistborn movie. one year ago he said he'd be surprised if he didn't have anything to share next year. now he mentions a mistborn movie being on hold, which by itself implies there is something a lot more solid than just selling rights to somebody. but that's all the info i can find

4 hours ago, Amira said:

SA3, interlude 3, Venli:The listeners worked so hard and sacrificed so much to stop their gods from returning, and then one day they just decided to call them back? Did Eshonai not know that discovering stormform would bring them back? Did Venli know?

they didn't "one day just decided to call them back". they were under extreme pressure when they decided it. they also weren't sure at all of what would happen. it's been millennia, and all they have are vague legends. they may not even have been sure of which forms were safe and which weren't. anyway, faced with unsustainable attrition from the alethi, the listeners tried to do something dangerous. seems reasonable enough.

by the way, you will gradually learn they were also thoroughly manipulated by forces way beyond their control. when you'll get listeners flashbacks, you'll get some more pieces of the puzzle.

incidentally, if they had just denied any involvment with szeth and his assassination ("how can we possibly be related to a shin shardbearer? on the night when we are about to sign an important and favorable treaty, no less"), then everything would have been different.

I do not remember any indication that the mass of the object or the allomancer affects push strenght, only allomancy strenght and distance.

Hence I would say F=O*f(d)

I further believe f(d) must be some kind of exponential decay, not a quadratic one like gravitation or electromagnetism, because allomantic strenght remains approximately constant at close range (up to 10-20 meters) and it becomes basically zero relatively fast after that.

Still, I'm not writing d<R because there does not seem to be a specific upper range, you can see larger metal objects at greater ranges.

I think the history of canticle mostly disproves that notion, though - or at least proves it to be minor.

we know that those threnodites came to canticle after the evil appeared. we don't seem to have strict chronology for when it appeared, but it was much after the shattering. centuries, not millennia, before the current timeline.

the beaconites know of threnody because of the chorus, but they say it's been long enough that they have no oral memory of it. so, many generations. centuries.

so, you see the problem. the threnodites left their planet no more than a millennia ago, and they spent no less than two centuries on canticle. if your theory was right and nomad/sigzil spent his day on canticle while months passed on the outside, then the threnodites should have felt they were on the planet by a generation at most, probably less. instead, we could rule out any time dilation effect greater than 5 to 1. this, in turn, mostly removes time dilation as an explanation for why the night brigade came so quickly.

my pet theory is that they track him by reading some kind of residue where he skips to the next planet. last planet they were very close, and he had to skip in an emergency. but the brigade was right after him, and they could quickly calculate his new destination, and get there as fast as their spaceship could travel. normally, nomad could lose himself in a planet, and the brigade would spend months to find him.

also, while he has visited tens of planets (how many are there in the cosmere anyway?) nothing forbids him from having visited the same planet multiple times.

15 minutes ago, Duxredux said:

Am I the only one that thought The Machine was built from spirits? At least in part?

very possible, yes. it would explain how they would awaken a machine without deeper knowledge

I am surprised by how, at the time of warbreaker, a returned with 2000 breaths was an amazing, incredible amount, and now sigzil is holding as much and complains how low that is.

then again, it makes sense as a result of progress. a few centuries ago a horse was a powerful, expensive transport vehicle, and now we have the power of several dozen horses on our cars and we think those are low power engines.

a stark comparison, though: nightblood only required 1000 breaths. those spears are twice as invested - i'm still in the early chapter so i don't know what they can do, however it seems to me like those uses of investiture are highly inefficient. people in the past could do a lot more with much less investiture

4 minutes ago, Amira said:

SA3 chapter 30:  Next they find the the column is covered in large gemstones. I wonder what its purpose is...

it'll be explained before the end of the book

1 hour ago, Amira said:

 is she losing her mind, or did someone or something else draw those, kind of like the spren imitating the killings?

well, there's no doubt whatsoever that shallan is losing her mind. let me rephrase the question: is she losing her mind more than usual?

12 hours ago, DocNappers said:

So, I've just got up to the point where they mention that their fusion reactors produce gold as a by-product. I'm wondering if Brandon is aware that fusion reactions stop producing net energy once you reach iron (this is what triggers core collapse supernovas).

In order to produce gold you'd need to be dumping a huge amount of energy into the reactor to progressively form the elements heavier than iron, so for each gold producing fusion reactor, you'd need a significant number of hydrogen fusion reactors dedicated to powering it (I haven't run the numbers, but I suspect that it's at least an order of magnitude more). So while it would be possible to generate the rarer elements this way, it wouldn't automatically lead to an over abundance of these elements without some other societal incentive for doing so.

remember three quarters of our planet are literally covered in hydrogen oxyde, for a depth of kilometers. there's no shortage of hydrogen for fusion.

let's make the generous assumption that it takes 100 hydrogen fusions to power up the formation of a gold nucleus. one liter of water is 55 mols, which make 110 mols of hydrogen, with which you make 1 mol of gold. which is 200 grams, because gold is heavy.

so, under that assumption of 100 hydrogens for 1 gold, you can make 200 grams of gold for a liter of water. if you can also recycle the oxygens, you make more.

really, how much gold can you really need? that's unlimited for all practical purposes.

There's also some deeper stuff that's only said by brandon in questions from fans.

This book should give you all the pieces, but it's quite hard to make out unless you are keeping notes or unless you go look in the coppermind

On 3/8/2023 at 7:37 PM, Siri said:

Was any one else bothered by the machine's invention? 

Like,  as far as we can tell,  there has never been any other kind of machine invented.  All the innovations are done by the spirits and yoki-hijo. Ofcourse,  we only see that world from yumi's perspective,  but if you think about the complexity of that machine,  there must have been more machines previously invented leading up to it. 

Just think about it.  It has to first sense where a rock is,  pick the rock up,  assess the weight and balance of the rock.  Place the rock on a stack in such a way that it doesn't fall (in other words it can't just make a pile,  and has to remember the aspects of the other rocks and their balance,  etc.).  All of that requires very precise sensors and precision motors,  levers,  etc. 

Then it has to sense when a spirit comes,  have the mechanisms to capture it, then convert it into energy and output that energy.  

All of that is very complex and isn't likely to have been achieved in the first machine ever invented, even with a prototype. 

So,  how did they come to develop such a complex machine with no evidence of other technological advancements leading up to it? 

the fact is, it's not a technological machine. I'm not sure we ourselves could build one like that. It was a machine made by magic.

specifically, hoid mentions that the machine was awakened, which refers to a specific type of creation, mostly used in warbreaker. can't spoiler it in this thread. suffice to say that made it possible without any sensor and motor, because the magic was providing that. the machine only needed to be able to bend in the proper ways, the investiture would take care of the rest.

anyway, we see no other instance of awakening in yumi's world, so it is pretty clear those scholars were advanced in manipulating investiture and had access to magic yumi had never seen. so,  yumi had a limited perspective on her world. she never saw the capital, where probably was the most advanced stuff.

it's also possible those scholars got their extra knowlege from a passing worldhopper, or from a spirit

1 hour ago, Treamayne said:

Actually, if I were the less-than-frugal-waizrd in this case, I would develope (adapt) a phonetic alphabet (maybe a simplified version of the IPA) for the English of the time, so that as literacy spread, the phonetic alphabet spread with it - making it easier to achieve literacy and learn the language.

yes, please! all foreign english speakers would definitely love being able to forget pronunciation

51 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

Interesting thought experiemnt. While hygiene is critical, I would say the better method to instigate vast improment early would be to recreate (or bring back) a rudimentary printing press.

20 minutes ago, alder24 said:

That's a good idea. Pushing it even further, what about a basic steam engine?

I don't know how viable those are. the problem with many technologies is that they require certain other prerequisites in society that are not obvious.
for printing press, I think some early idea of printing - engraving a page in wood, inking the wood, then making multiple copies of the page - already exhisted. mobile letters easily interchangable are probably the most key idea, however the whole machinery is going to require some level of mechanical proficiency. and a major problem is that for the whole thing to be worthwhile you need some scale economy. you need to make many hundreds of copies of a book. with paper being made of animal skin, rare and expensive, and with low literacy, it's hard to reach that scale economy. printing made possible an increase in literacy, but it was first an increase in literacy - and mechanical technology, and cheap paper - that made printing possible in the first place.

as for the steam engine, you yourself said it, they had some prototipes already in anciet rome. the problem is that those machines were very inefficient, and ultimately much more expensive than horses or slaves. the steam engine was made possible by further advances in mechanical technology, and by the availability of cheap coal. without massive coal mines digging up cheap coal, the steam engine is just not convenient.

not saying it cannot be done, but it's hard to accelerate progress. heck, even my idea of hygiene can backfire spectacularly; with lower mortality from disease, population would grow unchecked, until there is either some massive famine, or some massive war over food resources, or the higher population density overcomes hygiene and gives rise to a new pandemics.

On 17/4/2023 at 6:09 PM, AquaRegia said:

I really enjoyed The Long Earth series, and TFW brought it to my mind as well.  I thought Baxter and Pratchett did a reasonably good job of showing how people's first (and second, and etc) schemes for commercial exploitation of the infinity of parallel Earths all ended up being, as you say, ridiculous.  They "worked" for a short time, until the people on the buying end realized that (with infinity just a step away) there is always an easier or cheaper way, then they went bankrupt.

I think one of the main themes of The Long Earth is that so much about our economic system is predicated on scarcity.  If infinite resources suddenly become available, most "traditional" economic ideas can go right in the trash.  I do wish this idea had been fleshed out more in the books.

no, not really.

sure, gold prices would go way down, because gold would no longer be so rare.

on the other hand, oil prices would stay the same. because there is plenty of oil in our world too, the problem is digging it up from deep underground and transporting it. those costs don't go down with parallel earths. same with iron, aluminium, timber, agricultural products...

by the way, we already have a society that's post scarcity in some areas: most notably, digital entertainment. we already have more books than anyone can possibly read, more movies than anyone can possibly watch, more videogames than anyone can possibly play, all available completely for free because they are a couple decades old. and guess what? people keep paying good money for those things.

11 hours ago, Frustration said:

Well even if they had Silver, why would they decided to try that against nightmares that can move through walls? Especially when painting works.

why would someone decide to use painting against a nightmare in the first place? I wonder how they discovered painting was effective; who was the first person who, confronted with a nightmare, decided to try and paint it. on the other hand, someone trashing and hitting a nightmare with the first object available, and that object being silver, is a lot more likely to happen. if there is silver around.

but that's a tangent.

we know silver works against the cognitive shadows on threnody. silver generally has good properties against a lot of invested entities.

would silver have worked against nightmares? there are strong similarities between the shades on threnody and the nightmares of komashi

we don't know what aluminium does to the shades of threnody, but it does affect investiture, blocking or negating it. would a wall of aluminium be able to keep the nightmares out?

mind you, it is fully possible that the nation of kilahito had no access to either. many rare metals are only available in a handful of places on the whole earth, and with kilahito only consisting of a few cities surrounded by the shroud, i'd bet they totally lacked a good half of the periodic table. silver is not too rare, but it is fully possible they just had no silver ores anywhere in their land and didn't even knew the element. there is no reference to silver anywhere in the novel, except in the end with silverware, and I doubt it means the eating implements were made of actual silver - it wasn't that posh of a restaurant anyway.

as for aluminium, while aluminium ores are ubiquitous in planetary crusts, kilahito derives all its advanced technology from hion. even though it mostly resembles 1950s, they could absolutely not have discovered aluminium smelting.

By the way, i'm wondering how the nightmare painters started. As the survivors of the shroud started rebuilding civilization, nightmares started to manifest.

And somebody first had the idea to paint them. 

Imagine the scene. There is this eldritch horror. Weapons pass through it. And somebody painted it.

It must have taken a very unusual person. 

7 hours ago, Elegy said:

@king of nowhere (This is not the Cosmere spoilers forum, so better hide that second part of the reply.)

 From the top of my head, in the matter of seconds, I can name seven significant fake deaths of major characters in his work. This is not a problem that a list of actual deaths will nullify. Like, the man has written like 40 books, of course characters can die.

Edit: Also, regarding your very last point, no, that's a fake-out death by every definition of the word.

weird. off the top of my head, I can't name a single one in a cosmere book - ok, my last point if you consider it as such.

after checking book by book, I can list a handful, but still rather rare considering the sheer amount of books he's written. like, I can list it once every 3-4 books.

also, there's a strong dependence on the amount of foreshadowing involved; I mean, in most fake deaths you have enough details that will let you know it was fake. As I said, I never expected yumi could possibly die for real in this book. If you catch the hints, does it count as a fake death? and if you don't, but after the fact it makes sense? I'll bring a couple of examples from the reckoners trilogy because I'm rereading it right now and it's fresher in my memory:

reckoners big spoilers

so the question is, do those count as fake deaths, or not?

for me, they don't. if for you they do, I can see why you'd be annoyed.

6 hours ago, Argent said:

@king of nowhere, I've edited your message to hide the - pretty significant - Cosmere spoilers. Please be more careful in the future. 

sorry about that

5 hours ago, Elegy said:

Epilogue 1, although my problem is not necessarily the plot armor, but the fact that the book tries to make the reader feel the sad ending without commiting to it. Which feels like a major fake-out.

 

I never bought into the fake death, because at some point near the beginning hoid says that yumi and nikaro narrated the story together (can't find the exact point). meaning they are together when hoid is "defrosted". so i never felt that kind of emotional whiplash from that. i always knew yumi was not gone for good.

! Cosmere spoilers !

27 minutes ago, Amira said:

 what will he do finding out that this enemy is in the right?

well, it is a bit more complicated than that. having been wronged in the past does not make one right.

you will see.