king of nowhere

by quick calculation, i make a rough estimate that it would take one or two hours for the trip from one side to the other (little more than half an hour if the gravity was constant at 1g toward the center of the planet all the time, but it will decrease when you sink inside the planet and the outer strata will pull you away from the center. Inside a concave sphere, gravity is 0 everywhere, so you could get a good approximation by assuming that you are being pulled only by the part of the planet that is inside your radius. however, the accurate calculation would require getting the estimatiions for the density of the planet at various depths, so i'm just using raw approximations there. Also, I'm in no mood to calculate an integral). That's because, without anything to slow you down, you accelerate pretty quickly; in one and a half minute, you'll already be faster than an airplane. If you fly at constant speed, than you won't be much faster than just going around the planet. And if you have no control over it, you'lll spend that hour or two inside the planet, then pop up on the other side for a few seconds, then sink down again. seems a boring way to spend eternity.

oh, and i found another as well in the epilogue: it has sazed reading the original metal plate at the conventical of seran, and it opens with "two weeks later, a solitary figure arrived at the conventical of seran". But before, when he came back from the conventical to luthadel, he mentioned that it was six weeks of travel - he only could make them faster because he had his metalminds, which he didn't have later. it could be believable if he took four weeks by pressing hard, but not two. yeah, that's exactly the reason i opened this thread. i don't know why i forgot to state it explicitly. i don't have a twitter account, so i can't tweet it to peter. it would be nice if those could get fixed.

he counted as one of the nobles. the books states clearly that there are 24 in the assembly, 8 nobles (including elend), 8 merchants, 8 skaa.

and your point is? he got 18 votes, the total number of non-merchants is 16, so at least two merchants voted for him. in fact, if the whole assembly wasn't there, then it would mean even more merchants must have voted for penrod.

you know, that's a pretty good point for how any coinshot can aim accurately; I always found strange how good their aim could be with what was basically throwing some metal bits in the air and pushing on them. especiallly since, even if i know that steel and iron lines are straight, i can't help visualizing them a bit curving. but having the line would help a lot.

yes, i agree that the scene where he ricocheted the bullet is ridiculous. the only way to somewhat save it is to say that harmony made it possible. in general i was a bit disappointed that mistborn 1.5 sacrificed a bit of consistency in the name of cool. as for the thing with the ceramic tip, it's not the first feat of improbable aiming that wax pulls. nothing too strange. as for why his opponents don't push more often on his gun, yes, that also is a good point. even a moderate push or pull would throw his aim off.

Pretty much what the title says. Now, maybe they were fixed in later versions, probably someone else noticed and reported them, but just in case I think I should drop them. Chapter 19; Sazed has been traveling ans is now nearing luthadel. "Luthadel was now a little over a week away. [...] He'd passed Faleast and Tyrian, two of the northern ashmounts. Tyrian was still just barely visible to the south" This doesn't fit with the map. First, tyrian is a northern ashmount, but Faleast is not - it is to the southeast of luthadel. Second, Sazed was coming from southeast, and tyrian is to the northwest of luthadel. So to have tyrian to the south, sazed should have walked north past luthadel for at least a couple of weeks. The sentence would fit with the map if the mount sazed sees to the south was faleast, which was along the way he would have made to return to luthadel. Chapter 31; the assembly has to vote to appoint a chancelllor. "He got a good eighteen hands - all of the skaa, most of the nobility, only one of the merchants." That cannot be. the assembly has 24 members, 8 skaa, 8 merchants, 8 nobles. to get 18 votes, he'd have needed at least all skaa, all nobles and two merchants.

while investiture and shard surely have an effect on infant mortality rates, they can't be nowhere near as great as those of modern healtcare. i couldn't find a hard number on the internet, but before the industrial revolution, roughly one child in five died within the first year. now, in western europe, is more than 40 times lower. but the most important parts of it are two: 1) an adequate nutrition, 2) basic hygiene practices. so, for example, in roshar they know of basic hygiene thanks to rotspren, which would probably bump a bit their survival ratio. on the other hand, their whole "children food vs men food" dumbness may well be causing their kids to eat the wrong stuff. Anyway, in the elendel basin they have both decent healtcare, and enough food. also, harmony removed all genetic diseases 300 years prior, and while some will have reappeared, they're probably less widespread than they would be otherwise. Oh, and I think harmony would try to avoid the insurgence of any really big epidemics.

yeah, they say it "will happen". When announcements like that say that something "will happen", I'll believe it after it happened. maybe.

but that nly applies to normal allomantic metals, not to metalminds. or, rather, the allomantic power of a burned metalmind is not dependant on the size of the metal but on how much investiture was in the metalmind. and brandon confirmed that it was possible to live for centuries with a small bead of atium, because of multiple compounding; basically, you use your own compounding on investiture to become a more powerful feruchemist, so that you are capable oof storing more charge into a smaller piece of metal, so that you need less metal. that should prove that the size of the metalmind is mostly irrelevant when burning it.

well, now i'm glad that i didn't go there when i visited the usa. though i did visit the library of congress, which could be even worse...

as far as i know, even a partially filled metalmind would only return the full feruchemical effect, because being invested as metalmind changes the identity of the metal. but it makes sense that you can get more power if it is invested more heavily. it is fully possible that your basic assumptiion, i.e. that you gain equal amounts of investiture by burning equal masses of metal, is wrong when applied to burning metalminds. also, burning metals does not create investiture, nor is the investiture contained in the metal; instead, the metal is a key to access the investiture, so no principle is violated if there are ways to squeeze more investiture from the same metal. That investiture always comes from the shard, not the metal itself. all things considered, i see no inconsistency.

Maybe I'm not remembering the scene well, but I was under the impression that jasnah was very surprised. it's just that she's not the kind of person who react to surprise by becoming dumbfounded. in her surprise, she make the immediate assesment: this guy has powers i don't understand, this guy can be dangerous, hold him at swordpoint. In fact, I'd suggest summoning her blade like that is a big surprise reaction for jasnah, who usually reacts to stuff by being calm and collected.

the post they are referring to is this one: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/48947-steelrunning-secondary-powers-what-kind-of-imbalanced-broken-power-is-that/page-5#entry390738 While there is good agrreement that Feruchemical steel is by far the most powerful single power to have - provided you can get enough charge, cause many in-world sources agree that it is difficult to store - and it has less limitations than it should (at the speed she was moving, bleeder should have slipped on the marble floor as if she was walking on ice), the gun scene is perfecty explained by nnormal physics. Sometimes regular humans without superpowers can do things that would seem ridiculous. On the same level, I discovered that the record speed with a bow was shoooting ten arrows in less than 6 seconds. With enough precision to hit a person from ten meters. About the charge issue, bleeder was probably half-compounding: real compounding requires burning a metalmind for power, and storing that power in another metalmind, then repeat the process to multiply your storage at will. This requires both abilities at the same time, so bleeder could not do it, but she could fill a metalmind and then get a coinshot spike and burn it. It would not give limitless supplies, but it would give you much more power than you started with.

back on topic, jasnah knew him as the king's wit and as a guy who made cryptic (in the sense of misterious, not the spren) comments. Then, when she reappears from shadesmar, hoid was there, waiting for her in the middle of nowhere, not surprised to see her. the connection is immediate: this guy knows a lot. he must have supernatural sources of information. I doubt jasnah knows anything more about him, though.

are copyright laws that bad? I doubt there's any kind of problem with simply referencing to the name of a character, especially one that is deeply ingrained in pop culture.

Fair enough, let me restate: - most men in roshar are illiterate - of the literate ones, most do a specific job and are trained for it, but lack general knowledge; kaladin knows his job as a surgeon, but does he have other cultural interests beside it? I get the impression that even men who do intellectual jobs are learned in their trade, but totally ignorant in everything else - of those that are truly literate, most are in the ardentia, and are therefore forbidden to marry except for other ardents (I think) - Jasnah is a genius, therefore she requires a men who is, if not her peer, at least close enough. People that would match up to her standards are rare indeed,even among ardents or scholars. - most men Jasnah knows are noble, meaning they are trained as warriors, not thinkers. - men doing intellectual works are not noble, and therefore they would never think to try to approach the sister of a king. - in the west there are no restrictions on what men can do, but jasnah lives in the east. So, taking all those into account, is it really hard to believe that jasnah simply never met the right person? sure, there must be some of those in the world, but they are rare enough that she never got to know one of them. I myself haven't met a girl who would attract my romantic interest in the last ten years, not because I'm gay or asexual but simply because I have several quirks and I need a very peculiar girl to fit with me. And jasnah is much, much stranger than I am - for the standards of her time.

i always seen it clearly as the symbol of superman. I am curious as to why it is never described as such. clearly superhero comics existed in the reckonerverse before calamity, so the superman symbol should be recognizable by anyone. yet david never describes it as "the symbol of superman", just "a stylized S". In fact, i wanted to open a thread asking for it, but now I'll use this instead

or maybe she's just extremely picky and she feels fine as a single, so she's not actively looking.

on the other hand, bones are white (or a very pale grey) anyway, so not much way to discover it. Something we must ask brandon, definitely.

nope, it's something sanderson said at an interview or other q&a with fans. i'm sure there is the quote somewhere on the internet, as there are quotes for pretty much everything sanderson said, including stuff he aready forgot. anyway, even with future technology and metal abilities for everyone, consumption is still low compared to the total reserves. you see, at the moment on earrth we are using over one liter of oil per day, per person. and we got proven reserves for several decades, plus a lot more in other reserves that are more expensive to extract. most metals are more abundant than oil, and judging by the size of allomantic vials, an allomancer only needs a few grams. With further technology, metals are very abundant in asteroids, and therefore it is expected that the scadrians will learn to get them from there. (Assuming there is an asteroid belt in the roshar system; an asteroid belt is caused by a giant planet causing gravitational disruption on the neighbooring orbits. Giant planets act as a sort of vacuum cleaners for rogue asteroids, greatly reducing the chances of impact on the rocky planets. Without jupiter capturing most asteroids, life on earth would have probably been wiped out by them - it came close to it several times already. So we can infer there is a good chance of a giant planet and an asteroid belt in the scadrial system too. but it's not a given, especially when shards are involved.)

basically, on scadrial they have better medical care compared to other planets. comes with being more technologicaly advanced. it means nothing more.

at the relatively small burn rate of metals, times the small amount of allomancers in the population, those metals will last over a geological timescale. anyway, it has been confirmed that they return to the planet after a while

I think we can draw a good comparison to other media, because with informatic piracy almost everything can be downloaded for free somewhere. So, the impact of warbreaker online on sales can be assumed to be comparable to that of piracy on the sales of movies or videogames. That still leaves the question unanswered, because while the impact of piracy has been studied in depth, the results are controversial. On one hand, the entertainment industry claim losses for tens of billions because of pirated stuff, but that's clearly an overstatement, since the vast majority of those who download something pirated woud have never bought it anyway. On the other hand, those that are in favor of piracy say that a movie/book/game/whatever gets a lot of free advertising from being handed out for free, and enough of those new customers will buy the original version to overshadow the losses. Of course, that's also an idealistic view. So, basically you have to measure two factors: 1) people who would have bought the stuff and won't because they can get it for free 2) people who would not have bought the stuff, but will because of the advertising effect or because they wouldn't have decided to spend their money without a free trial. Whether having your stuff going around for free is a good or bad thing depends on which of the two factors is greater. I have read several researches on the topic, and few could agree with each other. That's unsurprising; there is no accurate way to measure those two factors. However, one of the few things where there appear to be some consensus is that piracy (and free stff in general) is a damage for the mainstream, and a boon for small producers. The mainstream is well known, so it doesn't have much benefit from the advertising effect of piracy, while the amount of people who would buy it - and may not if the stuff is for free - is high. Small producers, on the opposite, would not sell much on their own, and therefore factor 1 is small, but they can get great benefits from factor 2. So, that's an even more in-depth "I don't know". Actually a "nobody knows". But if I had to venture a guess, I would say that the overall effect is small. After all, despite everything being available pirated, the media industry still makes lots of billions every year, and despite everything being equally available most people still get the mainstream. So I'd say that those who are mostly involved in the piracy business, one side or the other, are mostly exaggerating the impact of it. But personally I appreciate Sanderson putting one book for free. I am one of those who doesn't like to spend money for something he does not know, but is ready to throw money at someone who makes good stuff.

and that's why the idea is fun!