king of nowhere

I was ccounting that in central america. As far as i know 10 millions is a good estimate for american indians, and i was counting only those since I was mentioning lands there didn't have a central governemnt but were still widely populated (at least by that time standard).

I wasn't talking about governments, but about population. that large swats of land are not claimed by any government is not that strange. in europe the rival nations would contend for land and absorb every place that was not reclaimed by another, but in other parts of the world many places lacked central government and were no part of any nation. north america, at the time of discovery, had no nations, only tribes. but still it had over ten millions inhabitants. Also large parts of asia didn't have any government, but they still had sparse villages. All those explanations about wars and famine could hold for many of the unpopulated places, but not for all. the ones I picked as examples were the ones that did look fertile and not in conflict. lack of rivers in the caralain grass may be a reason, however. lack of commercial routes should not stop the rising of villages (we know some of them exist because verin mentions stopping at some of them when crossing the place between book 2 and 3), but maybe there isn't enough water to sustain more than a few villages and nomaddic tribes. As for the left bank of the arinelle, that one has good access to water, a main commercial route, good land, and no conflict - so I see no reason why it should not be populated. It is probably the only place left for which I can't find a reasonable expalantion. the presence of a known and widely used contraceptive is another good point that I missed. THat, along with a certain kind of culture, would prevent population growth and could therefore explain all the discrepancies.

One constant thing in the story of mankind is that, ever since the discovery of agriculture and cattle herding, the human population has increased to fill all the space available. all the good arable soil has been cultivated for the need of the ever growing population, and that growth stopped only when the new land run out. But as long as there was new land, the population would occupy it. As long as there was uninhabited terrain, someone would go settle there. Every farmable place was settled. And even many that were not farmable. Ancient men, with very little in the way of technology, already managed to live in the most desolate reaches of siberia or alaska or upper canada, even in the permanent ice of greenlandand. Everywhere the population grew as long as it could find enough food. And wars and disasters were not enough to invert the thrend. one third of the european population died in the plague in 13h century, but in a few generations the population already fully recovered. there have been plague outspreads all the time, and constant wars, but that never stopped the population from growing. In the wheel of time instead the opposite happened. We have no word of major conflicts since the war of hundred years, and it is clear that they have enough igienic notions that they should be safe from most epidemics, yet the population has been dwindling all the time. when perrin and egwene are stranded on the left bank of the arinelle, elias tell them they could walk in a line up until the spine of the world without meeting a single human being. the land seems fartile enough, and in fact they find ruins here and there. why the population left and no one ever resettled? it's not how demographics work. how about the caralain grass, or the area around far madding? all places that seems good to suppor a big civilization, but are only scarcely populated by a village here and there. villagers there should make more than two kids per family, and farm new land to feed them, and so the population should grow, and instead they apparently do the reverse, they make so few children that the land depopulates despite not seeing much war or disease. The only places not depopulated are the borderlands, which are the only places that would have a good reason to depopulate. What's the problem with this people? did they discover contraception? Was there an artifact of the age of legends that causes radom abortion in a 1000-km radius? maybe they got enough radioactive waste after the war of power that they still have infertility problems?

I'll give my ideas on some of those 1-2) i suppose scadrial has an axis that is much less tilted than our. that means that the artic circle is much smaller than it is in real heart, and the differences in the duration of the day are less marked. 3) I guess so, but most of the empire at that time was already depopulated due to famine, anarchy, wars, and rampaging koloss armies. there were only some survivors on the coast and in the caves. 4) the way i see it, the terris dominance is the north pole. luthadel was too south to be inhabitable, except for the ashmounts. so the final empire would have had the shape of a circle around the terris dominancce + one circle around the ashmounts. also keep in mind that climate is much more unpredictable than just latitude and altitude. local winds and currents can make a huge difference. the island of sorland is well over the polar circle but has a winter average temperature below zero thanks to the gulf stream, while the city of yakutsk is more south than that but the winter temperature drops easily to -50 because of some siberian wind jet. so the shape of the final empire would be determined by many climatic factors. maybe near the terris dominance there is some equivalent of the gulf stream that makes the land around too hot to live, even if the terris dominance itself is cool. notice also that the terris dominance is likely to be a plateau, like tibet, so it would be colder because of altitude. 5) no idea. maybe the mists already give the maximum power, so duraluminium makes no difference. i doubt it would be possible to run out of mist, since it's preservation's power and is way to vast to be tapped out that way. 6) when you push and are knocked back, not only your wheight is important, but also your posture. when you prepare to push (manually) against something you adopt a posture with yoru knees and body that lower your baricenter, making it more stable. also keeping the feet separated increases the area you are standing on (quite difficult for me to convey those concepts in a foreign tongue, but i'm doing my best), providing extra stabilization. planting the feet firmly on the ground reduces the chance they could slip. before the impact, you also move your body towards the thing you want to push, to build some momentum to back your push. Last time i played soccer i was thrown to the ground by a kid half my wheight, because i was never expecting them to try to push me and so i was keeping a posture good for speed but not for stability. the next time he tried it i was ready, and he practically bounced on me without moving me at all. That is how much posture makes a difference. So I think elend just kept a more stable posture before pushing. 7-8-9-10) no idea.

lyrebon, i think you failed your detect sarcasm check. Anyway, I prefer the idea that demandred is bela After all, isn't it suspicious that she is just a stupid farm horse and we still see her around and in the middle of important events after 13 books?

i found neither to be very convincing, but lyrebon's expalnation is at least good enough for my suspension of disbelief

the dark one must not be named. ever. in fact, most people don't name it, ever. at the beginnign of book 1, mat recalls one of the village guys doing that, and a series of calamities falling on him. that would imply that naming the dark one is extremely rare. probably that guy was the only one in the village to have done so in years. so how do people know that name? even those who knows it in the first place surely don't pass that knowledge to their childrens, as doing that would require naming the dark one. It stand to reason that within a few generations no one would know what the dark one's name was. except the darkfriends, but they won't declaim it in public. So how is knowledge of the name spread? who told rand, mat and perrin the name shai'tan in the first place, back when they were in the two rivers?

after reading the arguments, i came to the idea that nalthians are "uber". the reason is, magic users can be physically improved in other worlds, and any breath-possessing nalthian is a magic user. with one breath you could give a very simple command to a piece of straw, or you could animate a lifeless. every nalthian is a caster, and so every nalthian has a bit of blessing from it. So, from our point of view, drabs would be the normal ones. Also keep in mind there is no suich thing as life sense on other planets. you realize someone else is in the room because you unconsciouwsly hear their breathing, feel the ari shifting, stuff like that. nalthian's life sense is different. And there is little difference between having one breath and being drab. you can live well without, which is what we do all the time. nalthians feel it like a privation because they are accustomed to the breath, just like we would feel about having to live without electricity

Just for a slight assonance in how two names sound? We are well into epileptic trees land here

nalthians are born with one breath and consider it the normal status. a drab, someone who lost their breath, to them is more grumpy, less lively, more likely to fall to disease. However, the difference is not that big, and people can live normally without breath. Humans outside of nalthis are born without breath. are they like drabs for nalthian standards? Of course they would never consider themselves less lively or healty; in their worlds no one has breath, so being like that is the normal way of being. Thgey would never notice one way or the other. only the nalthians can make the comparison. So, are humans on nalthis blessed for their breath? do they have something more than humans elsewhere because of their single breath? or they are like humans elsewhere with their breath, and if they lose it they would be seen as different even in other planets? do inhabitants of other planets receive something that equals the benefit of having one breath?

I'm not even sure there can be malatium mistings. that would imply there are mistings for every alloy of atium and for every alloy of lerasium (i know everyone can burn those, but for the technicality of it there must be mistings of those - I'm also sure brandon said lerasium and its alloys would also make additional effects, so mistings that can tap those effects make sense) and that means that 2/3 of all mistings are never discovered because they are mistings of an alloy of atium or lerasium that was never discovered. Yes, it could be possible, but I don't see it happening. I'm curious if brandon has decided and written somewhere the effects of all atium and lerasium alloys, or if he just established that they exist but figured they would never be used and never decided what they did (except for malatium)

seers would be useless without atium. they wouldn't even be known in the time of AoL. About the 1/16, I see a problem there. We know there are 16 metals + 2 god metals + 16 aalloys for every god metal. and we know there can be atium mistings at least. Anyway, there should have been 17 kinds of mistings. one for every metal + 1 for atium. Possibly even 1 for every atium alloy, making it 33. lerasium mistings are not taken into account, since everyone can burn lerasium or its alloys. But shouldn't the seers have been 1/17 of the total instead of 1/16? Did I just uncover a minor flaw of the book?

I like the beehive thing, even if it is way too impractical to work except as one time situation. First of all, I doubt bees exist outside of shinovar: bees feed on flowers, and I saw no evidence of flowers anywere, and I don't remember honey ever being mentioned. Let's assume you can keep a shin garden in a room indoor, it would still be very expensive. Second, you'd need to carry the beehive without the bees getting angry at you. Not sure if it is possible. Third, the beehive is not well suited for launching, so tghe chances of getting it right are low. Then, a windrunner could easily dodge it. if you can hit him with a beehive you can hit him with an arrow, and if you can do so, you need no beehive in the first place. But even if you managed it, the windrunner could run away. Humans run faster than bees fly, and bees would not keep following forever. With the windrunner gone, the bees would turn against your troops. A bearer of the shard would have to run with his legs, it would probably be succesful. A bearer of the plate could cover the eye slit with one hand. So, all in all, it would not work. I think the only hing that could kill szeth would be a surprise arrow, simply because there's no way to hit him if he's prepared. he can pull arrows with a reverse leashing, but, as far as I understood, he needs to be aware of that to pull them. he can't use the pulling all the time because it would be too expensive in stormlight. And would be ineffective against arrows striking from the wrong direction. getting him in melee is otherwise hopeless: with his super speed he can dodge any attack easily, and only a few men can attack him in melee at a given time. plus, he could escape at any time if he risks running out of stormlight or getting swarmed too much. So the only way I see to kill a powerful windrunner is a stray arrow from the shadows and hope he don't notice it. With all the confusion of the battle, I figure putting a few hidden archers that would strike when the windrunner turns his back wouldn't be impossible. EDIT: if he lashes two shileds on both sides, an arrow coming from the front or back would be pulled equally by the two lashings, that would effectively cnacel each other. Plus, it would drain light very quickly. Plus, he'd have trouble in melee.

addictedfanspren: they materialize when someone is so addicted to a story that he/she writes silly stuff on forums to compensate for having to wait years before reading the end. We should be able to see them any time now...

I'm wondering if all that crap about gender roles separations comes from the sunmaker or earlier, but I won't be surprised if it was the making of odium. It is just so needlessly complicated that it surprises me vorin societies survived that long.

it is certainly possible that they think they are doing good, just like the king of karbranth think about himself. That do not make them the good party.

the greatest problem in space are radiations. without the earth magnetic field and upper atmosphere to shield from them, a men exposed to deep space radiations would receive a lethal dose within minutes. the only protection against radiations is lead (other heavy elements work too, but lead is by far the most cost effective), but lead hinder movements on a suit and is very expensive to launch into space. So I'd argue that a gold feruchemist is the most effective to send into space, since you can save a bit on the lead shield. you still have to use some, otherwise they would drain their reserves within hours, but it should be more convenient than not having to store air. Plus, I don't think it would be possible to store enough breath to survive months without breathing. it would require far too much time to store to be practical.

I'm not sure if some shards are more powerful than others. I just assumed that they were all matched in raw powers, but they can do different things, and odium is the most dangerous because its powers are focused on personal destruction. I remember reading somewhere that rashek tried to kill his uncle when holding the power of preservation, but failed because preservation was not meant to destroy (he probably could have killed his uncle in a more indirect way if he applied to it). So we see a shard that is not capable of killing a single person, yet it was evenly matched with ruin for raw strenght. I assume with odium is the same concept, reversed. odium i as powerful as the other shards, but his powers are focused on killing. That makes him "more powerful" than other shards in the way that he is able to destroy them. One last point: his "brief" visit to Sel could have been brief by shardic time. Could have easily been several decades or even a few centuries and still count as brief for the timescale shards act.

We scientists are well aware than we don't know everything and that a new fact may force us to modify our theories. That do not make said theories wrong. They were approximations of reality, and they worked just fine within the boundaries we used them in before we discovered the flaw. Within those boundaries, they are still good, while a new theory developed to fix the flaw may be a better approximation of reality. The canon example is newtonian's physics, that got proven false by relativity; however, it is still perfectly good for anything bigger than a chunk of atoms and moving much slower than light, so we still use it widely. Now back about relativity: that theory has been around for a century, has been tested in all possible conditions we could conceive, and has always resisted every attempt to falsify it (Note: this do not take into account compressing time or warping space or similar stuff; those may or may not be possible, still to early to say). It is certainly possible that in some particular conditions, which we have never reproduced experimentally, relativity don't hold anymore, and maybe we will find out in some near or far future. But even if relativity is proven flawed, it would still be good in all conditions we tested it to date. So, if it is possible to surpass the speed of light - and every evidence we have to date says it is not - it would still require some pretty exotic conditions. Just accelerating an object would not work anyway. I'm not sure what I wanted to argue for here. I wanted to clarify things a bit, but I realize many would find what I just wrote even more complicated. Anyway, saying "this is a physical law that allows to FTL travel, but hasn't yet been discovered in our world" would still count as changing physical laws. But the cosmere has already some extra sets of physical laws that our universe lack, so it would not be a problem if some quirk of those laws allowed FTL travel. I just want it a bit justified. I am confident brandon will put an explanation consistent with the rest of the physical laws. He has enough scientific culture for that. In fact, as a nitpicking nerd, I appreciate him for that. P.S. another set of laws that don't work in the cosmere is thermodynamics. You can make perpetual motion just by putting 3 (or more, or even less if you are careful) iron feruchemists on a wheel. they are to tap their metalminds when going down, and filling when going up, and bam, perpetually accelerated motion. I'm also pretty sure a brass feruchemist would be able to transfer heat from a colder source to a hotter one without doing work. Those would be ways to get free, clean, infinite energy, but it would be too little to matter on a practical scale.

About the speed of light: the problem with reaching it is that, by the laws of relativity, the mass of an item increases as its speed approaches the speed of light, eventually coming to infinite. so it don't matter how much energy you store in there. when you are at the brink of light speed, it will not accelerate the object, but merely make it heavier. The conservation of momentum is respected, since increasing the mass causes the item to increase its momentum. That is the reason light speed cannot be achieved in our universe, no matter how much energy you use to accelerate. Of course brandon is free to use different physical laws for the cosmere.

I always assumed that the chances of being mistings of any metal were the same. that in the world there were, within statistical variance, an equal number of every kind of misting. When rereading alloy o law, however, I noticed a line: Wax mentions that coinshots were one of the most common types of allomancers. That implies that they are not equally likely How does it work? are some allomantic powers more likely to show up than others? Is the kind of allomancer you are also genetic, meaning if your father was coinshot you are more likely to be coinshot too? Do we have any brandon word on this?

I'll go with the "sazed is the only shard there, so there should be no one to influence miles hemalurgicaly". I also am a fan of Occam's razor, in this case stating that miles pierced himself with his metalminds just to protect them from allomancy. I am aware that Occam's razor is not a good way to predict books or other fictional stuff, however. Also, if I were miles I would have swallowed a big chunk of gold, big enough that it would stay stuck in the stomach. It would be protected from allomancy, and gold is the only allomantic/feruchemical metal that would resist digestion practically forever. Maybe he did and that was the last metalmind he had at the execution

Many threads focused on finding some god use for some apparently uselss power. Here, I'm doing the opposite: take some perfectly good power and squander it in some ridiculous way. here my ideas Surgebinding - infuse yourself with stormlight, then read by night without needing to turn on the light. - use a lashing to bind your trousers tight so you don't need a belt - when opening or closing a door, change gravity on the handle instead of pushing or pulling it. Soulcasting - if you are stuck out under the rain, constantly soulcast the water in your clothes to air so you stay dry (that looks useful enough, but you could just soulcast an umbrella) - turn ink to blood. Sign everything in blood, because it's cool Awakening - awaken the ties of your shoes and have them tie themselves, because you are THAT lazy - same for your cravat - awaken the food you're cooking and tell it to stir itself now I'm wondering if you could use awakening to do household chores; that would actually be useful Allomancy - have a keyboard specifically made of metal for you. type by steelpushing (i figure it would be much more difficult than just using the fingers. maybe vin or kelsier could have typed at a reasonable speed and used their hands to do other things) - have a layer of metal under the pavements, roofs and walls in your house. float in your house instead of walking. - put a metal collar on your dog. use a subtle ironpull on it instead of a common leash. Feruchemy - use alcohol or drugs freely. tap gold to prevent damage to yoru body. tap more gold if you need to be sober to drive. - only for kids: fill gold to stay home from school - tap a lot from bronze to make a sauna without the sauna. Bonus points if you're in your garden in the middle of the winter dressed only with a towel and swaeting like hell. Extra bonus points if you accumulate all that heat by walking around with an heavy coat in summer. Find others!

With cadmium you can also protect other people from explosions, if with dire risks for yourself: when wax was in the exploding room, if marasi had been in a position to throw up a bubble encompassing the explosion, the explosion would have slowed down enough for wax and wayne to leave the room safely. too bad for marasi, who would not have stood a chance. That makes me think, if some terrorist put a bomb with a timer somewhere, and you need to evacuate people in little time, put apulser near the bomb and you have all the time you need. Also, the chance to just lose time is more useful than it appears at first glance. I could use it when traveling by plane (the thight seats are a pain) or if I'm waiting in the line out of the bathroom. In this time of chrisys, a poor family without income could buy some cadmium, fit into a bubble and lose a few weeks or months, hoping to come out in better times with some more job opportunities. i figure it would be cheaper than needing to eat the whole time. Also, since cadmium slows down time, you can live longer if you burn it often (you still experience the same amount of time). I think doc brown (from Back to the future) would have used it to see the future world... you know, if he hadn't invented a time machine before.

I did specify that my idea for armored bridgemen involved having the bridgemen run unarmored until the last plateau and wear the armor (brought by other people) at the last moment. If someone is still not satisfied by that, you could even add two crews per bridge, so that they can take turns at carrying the bridge. In fact, it seems like a good idea that would gain some time, eve if I'm not sure it would be worth the cost of maintaining additional bridgemen. I maintain that carrying a bridge over long distances is no worse than what many people do for a living. As for assaulting the chasm against archers, when wearing some good armor (one designed specifically for the purpose) it is no more dangerous than fighting as a common soldier. Possibly less so. Personally, I'd rather do that than fighting for real. If dalinar can ask his soldiers to risk their lives in battle, a single charge against archers wearing adequate protection should not be a problem.