king of nowhere

I reopen this thread after one month because I reread SoS in the meantime, and the chracters there really state that bleeder had shot four people faster than the gun could have. Along with the comment that they were killed so fast that the four shootings would have sounded as one, they also say that they were killed by the same weapon. So, steel apparently turns your pistol into a machine gun.

I see many people assuming shantids are sentient, but do we know that? So faar the only indication we have is that one of them saved shallan from drowing, but even dolphins have been known to do so. It could easily be just a smart animal.

I'm sure there is some sanderword about investiture being attuned to crystal structure. Metal indeed has crystal properties different from other substances, because of electron delocalization. Uhm. Makes me wonder how would investiture react with nanotubes or graphene...

I'm also puzzled about them floating. I don't remember the details, but I seem to remember that they allways stay afloat; but it would be very weird, a water animal who cannot go underwater. Maybe they can submerge, but normally won't. The huge eye implies the shantid is a predator (predators tend to have good frontal vision to focus on a prey; preys tend to have fuuzzy but large periphereal vision, to spot attacks from every side). But it doesn't seem fast enough to chase a prey. Maybe it uses the tentacles to dig the sea bottom for the creatures that are hiding there? that would also justify the good vision. Or maybe there's a reason connected to stormlight. Maybe they prefer to float because they need to also recharge during a highstorm, but they can't sense them underwater.

And it's also what I was saying.

one of the planned cosmere series still to write is about hoid. brandon wrote, like, 100 pages of the first book, then set it aside because he felt it wasn't working. Also, he now has to finish all the other cosmere before he can reveal hoid's backstory. But! those 100 pages are available to read (i don't remember where i found them, or I'd post the link; but surely someone else will). I read them, and hoid is certainly not a villain. Though, while he is not a villain in the common sense, he may still end up opposing the protagonist of some book to get his goals. Well, he already did actually. In the emperor's soul, he framed I-forgot-her-name while he stole the thing that she was after. While hoid is a good person, he views the various people in the various worlds as simple pawns to his (unknown) plans. I suppose it would be a common side effect of being tens of thousands of years old and dealing with powers that shape the cosmos on a regular base.

also, this particular debate has popped up several times already. the last instance is here http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/45742-brass-compounding-what-does-it-do/ last post is from 30 september, i remembered it more recent

i doubt odium would be alllied with a shard, because odiium want to shatter all shards, so i doubt any would want to help him. but a powerful worldhopper may be involved.

Animals do need to conform to the same physical laws, and they have to deal with evolutionary pressure. that's where the argument can go. Nothing, on the other hand, forces those animals to have the same internal structure that our animals do just based on similarities on the external shape. So, a giant crustacean cannot exist without magic, or without an atmosphere with at least ten times more oxygen than our, because of the way they breath. But a giant crustacean-shaped animal? Sure, why not? Just because it is multi-legged and with a carapace, it says nothing on how it breaths. As for the wheight of the carapace, hoidhunter already answered that. I may add that foor the square-cube law, a large animal would have a much lgihter carapace compared to its body mass than a small animal. On the other hand, a large animal is also less strong compared to its body wheight, so the carapace still hinders it more. but large armored dinosaurs had existed.

look at the bright side: you already know that it's going to happen, so you won't suffer for it. anyway, it is the right ending for the book. Also, in the ending someone whose trustworthyness is beyond doubt mentions that there is an afterlife, so I like to imagine the crew reunited.

crustacean on our planet have no specific respiratory organ and are therefore limited in their size by how much oxygen they can exchange through their skin, as per the square-cube law. On roshar, nothing forbids the greatshells to have lungs or something similar. In fact, I'd say chasmfiends would be fully possible without magic. After all, some dinosaurs were bigger than them. Although they would not be able to move fast or be agile without magic help. We know they are feeding off stormlight because of their gemhearts and the spren, otherwise they could still be normal animals. As for skyheels, reduced gravity + denser atmosphere + sacks of gas make it reasonable that they could fly, although probably not very well without stormlight. It would be very peculiar to see a creature that has evolved to make elemental hydrogen ((the only other candidate gas, helium, is too rare in the atmosphere of a terrestrial planet; the gravity is low enough that it would escape in millions of years, so roshar can't have much of it) and use it as a sort of flying balloon, but life is surprising. Again, we know they use investiture to help themselves because of spren, but they could be justified with mundane means.

I don't see why she would lie about giving her breath to the emperor.

and if you think that's useless, then you're not lazy enough

this. plus, the spear is the symbol of the survivorism, which makes more sense in-universe

yes, the sense of balance is the capacity to tell which direction is down and where your baricenter falls, while the ability to balance is about staying on your feet. they are linked, but not the same thing. as for the rest, it is possible that spook could have his sense of passage of time increased, if only he paid attention to it. most people don't even think about it.

if i click on your link, it shows google maps with road directions to go from cape town to singapore

if this was the wheel of time, then the parallel would be intentional, as just another myth of our time that stems from the deep past. but since the cosmere has nothing to do with the real world, i don't think there is any real parallel. As for the fish/whale thing, I assumed the answer is simply "at the time, no one knew that whales are mammalians".

Mind you, if we could awaken the internet to only Destroy Really Bad Illegal Activity, it could be the single most useful application of awakening. I wonder how many breaths it would take to awaken the whole internet. And what kind of collateral effect could span from infusing massive amounts of investiture in something that is already almost a neural net by itself. Also, I wonder what would happen if the command was to Destroy Immoral Activity, and the internet decided to judge what is moral by making polls in forums. I may have nightmares for it.

This made me think of the old question "where is the best place to hide an elephant", to which the proper answer is "in a herd of other elephants", the whole exchange being about the concept of hiding in plain sight. I have to admit, "in a large stomach" is an even better hiding place.

Yes, I believe that if native populations elsewhere simply came in contact with western technologies, they probably would have ended up adopting western lifestyle over time. most of it, anyway. they'd still have kept some of their tradition, but they would have started to live in houses, or work in factories, because it is more efficient. maybe they would even have adopted western culture faster, because, as i pointed out, if you try to force a lifestyle on someone, that someone is likely to resist. Probably, the world today would be strikingly similar to what it actually is. At least, the large picture would be. There would probably be less resentment around. There would be more people with a native surname. more local influences on traditions, local laws, food, fashion, sports, that kind of stuff. Maybe that astronaut who brought a golf ball on the moon to make the record for the longest throw would have brought instead a boomerang, or a bow. But science and technology would likely be at a similar level if the contact had been peaceful. By the way, both in america and australia, the vast majority of the native casualties came from illness, not weapons. And those epidemics that killed the majority of the native population weren't engineered, they came entirely by accident. Europeans didn't knew about virus and bacteria at the time. they had no idea contact with other populations would exchange diseases. The common story about infected blankets gifted to natives to spread the disease is actually unsupported, or vastly overstimated (can't guarantee the accuracy of this, but it makes sense). the first wave of epidemics happened when the first europeans met the first natives, and it spread form there. The american continent was depopulated before the europeans even set foot on most of it. Quoting from wikipedia, Epidemics of smallpox (1518, 1521, 1525, 1558, 1589), typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614) and measles (1618) swept the Americas subsequent to European contact,[24][25] killing between 10 million and 100 million people, up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas. The cultural and political instability attending these losses appears to have been of substantial aid in the efforts of various colonists in New England and Massachusetts to acquire control over the great wealth in land and resources of which indigenous societies had customarily made use. Such diseases yielded human mortality of an unquestionably enormous gravity and scale – and this has profoundly confused efforts to determine its full extent with any true precision. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas vary tremendously. So, while attempts to cause further epidemics did probably happen and were more or less succesful, most of the damage was already done by that time. And the europeans then sent vast migratory fluxes because they saw an empty continent, which was empty exactly because no one at the time understood how diseases work. It would have happened even if europeans had come with the best intentions.

well, yes, we are saying more or less the same thing. Then I believe the golden rule stated as "treat others like you want to be treated" can be misleading in its formulation, because it can be misinterpreted as "force other people to live the way you would". It's simply a matter of different wording. I'm sure there are at least a dozen different ways to state that concept. Not that it really matters, because there will always be people who just don't care what others feel, or who believe they know better and should force their point of view on others. It's not like trying different phrasings for the golden rules willl change that. EDIT: re: the suicide argument. Yes, suicidal people would rather live, but they consider suicide the best of the allternatives they have available. On the other side of the spectrum, even people who make heroic sacrifices don't want to die, but they see that giving their lives will achieve something they think worthy. I'm sure they'd much rather prefer that somoething worthy was achieved without requiring theirs, or anybody else's, sacrifice. But this is an imperfect world, and we have to deal with the choices we've been given. Sometimes death is the best among those. So, do not confuse "not wanting to die" from a metaphorical, ideaized point of view, with "wanting to die" as an alternative to some other poor choices. Also, there are the glory seekers, those who actually want to die in a highly visible manner to make a name for himself. They are most common in fiction as glory seekers, but I'm sure there must be some of those in real life too. They probably can be grouped under the "die to achieve something worthy" category; I suppose they'd rather live if they could get the same level of recognition without dieing.

Alas, that's not always true, because people are different. The main examples I can think of are in the sexual sphere, because that's one field where people have such different needs. For example, I would like for girls to make me explicit sexual proposals, because I have an extremely relaxed attitude about it and at worst I'd just say "no, thanks". It is good that I remember that people are different, because if I "did unto others what I would have done to me" I'd be in jail as a sex offender. Well, probably not jail because I'd always stop at the first "no", but certainly girls wouldn't be happy if i tried to treat them like I wanted to be treated. Or, there is one very interesting discussion I had with my cousin about possessivity towards one's partner: Him: "You have to be a bit jealous of your partner, otherwise how does she knows that you care about her?" Me: "How can you be jealous of your girlfriend? If you are jealous it means you don't trust her. I would not love a girl I don't trust" "I do trust her. But I am possessive if other men try to hit on her." "That makes no sense to me. What other men do is up to them. Your girlfriend is perfectly capable of turning them down. Being jealous means you don't think your girlfriend capable of taking care for herself; that you think she is stupid, incompetent, gullible" "But if you are not jealous it means you don't care for her, for what she does, or that she may betray you" "Jealousy leads to toxic relations, to try to control a partner, curtail her social life, to stalking" "Lack of jealousy leads to open couples" "What's wrong with open couples?" "There! I knew you'd have said that!" At which point we both had a good laugh. I won't be so naive or arrogant to think I am right and he is wrong. Simply, we have different needs. But it shows how trying to treat others like you would be treated can be misleading. Well, most examples I can think of that related to me personally are of sexual nature, but it applies to politics too. People think their way of life is better, and that if only other people could try it, if they were forced to it, they would also like it better. They don't realize that other people want to live in a different way; or maybe they would actually like your way of life eventually, but there is no surer way to make someone dislike something than to force it upon him. I remember reading an editorial written by a straw feminist where she said "when i see a woman wearing the burqua, I am soo angry, I would like to rip it off of her". Well, I don't like burquas either, but what do you think would actually happen if you were to actually do it? Do you think that woman would thank you for freeing her? Or do you think she would be afraid of that stranger suddenly rippping her clothes off of her? Would she be happy to suddenly show more of her in public? Or would she rather react like your conservative religious grandmother would if you forced her to wear a miniskirt? Those people who tried to put aboriginals in schools, or to convert them to various religions, certainly assumed that if they were aboriginal they would want to be put in schools or be converted to religions; because they reasoned according to their life experience. I have no doubt the straw feminist whom I mentioned before would certainly advocate taking children away from their families if they belong to cultures she deems inferior. I also suggest, at the next election, to resist the temptation to dismiss those who vote the other party as misguided dumbasses. Try to twist a bit your vision of the world, and you'll see that most of them are perfectly aware of the "terrible" things that would happen if the other party won, and they would actually like to live in that world. I believe the right principle is not "treat others like you would want to be treated yourself", but "ask others how they want to be treated, and then try to do it, within reason".

wait, i didn't remember the part about calamity being visible at the same time from every part of the world. then clearly we can't study/attack it because we have no idea where to actually shoot.

always the same problem, lack of manuevering capability. you fire a railgun projectile, it moves in a straight line. even at a speed of several kilometers per second, it takes it a few minutes to reach low earth orbit. if, when you fire the projectile, your target changes its speed by 10 meters per second, you're gonna miss by several kilometers. of course a homing missile is an attempt to fix the situation, but the problem is, with all the wheight contraints to putting something into orbit, there just isn't that much room for fuel to change trajectory. or for a big rocket to change trajectory fast. So you fire your missile, the target dodges when the missile is still several minutes away. the missile changes trajectory, the target dodges the opposite way. the missile against makes a correction, and the target again changes direction. up to the point where the missile runs out of fuel. Or, the target just dodges faster than the missile can follow. Long story short, if something can sense incoming threats when they are launched from the ground, has good manueverability, and no fuel limitation, then we are utterly unable to hit it. I'm not saying it went that way. It is also fully possible that calamity can survive being nuked in the face. I-don't-remember-his-name made explosions big enough to level cities, and prof made shields capable of stopping such an explosion. steelheart was immune to armor penetration shells, and there's no reason to assume he would have survived even a nuclear explosion if the person setting the explosion was afraid of him. Mitosis could survive a nuclear explosion just on account of some of his clones being somewhere else, and regalia could have probably pulled enough water around herself to shield the explosion. there's no guarantee nuking calamity would work any better.

good point, after epics started to manifest and it became clear they were all evil, nuking calamity seems a logical step. hoowever, keep in mind that out space capability is limited. in partiicular, we have little manuevering capability in orbit. if calamity can dodge in advance, we cannot go close to it with a nuke.