Master_Moridin

I'm having a hard time parsing this, but from what I'm getting all the ideas on the Cognitive realm seem really cool.

When you bring up Shards though, you seem to ignore the existence of the Spiritual Realm and that Shards exist in it primarily.  Hopefully someone that can put words to screen on this better will come along.

spoiler/If White Sand is a thousand years before Elantris, then the people of Taldain are likely in space by the time we meet Sarene and Raoden./spoiler

If I'm not allowed to post that then let me know and I'll take it down.

How do I get the spoilers to work?!

use [] around spoiler at the beginning and around /spoiler at the end

Example:

Here be quote in quote form
 

Dalenthas (15 October 2008)
Does the Well of Ascension still exist in the new world? Or is it no longer necessary? I assumed that Preservation collected there like Ruin collects in the Pits of Hathsin, so if Atium keeps forming then the well should keep filling...

Brandon Sanderson (16 October 2008)
The Well (and the small wells in the Pits) is no more. For now at least.
(source)

I actually had a different idea - since we now know that Wax's superpowered steel & iron while he is holding the Bands allow him to essentially see Investiture (kind of), I had the idea that the reason Allomancers believe steel and iron affect metals specifically is because metals are the easiest to affect (them being sort of gateways to the Spiritual Realm), but with enough power, they could Push and Pull on anything. After all, if Wax can see the blue lines pointing to everything, and we know that traditionally those lines point to valid targets for Steelpushes and Ironpulls, then why not be able to affect those things too?

It is also possible that Wax seeing lines pointing to everything was the result of seeing lines pointing to the atoms of the metallic elements that make up a lot of things.

You could probably make some sort of allomantic nuke doing something like that...

A chain of powerful nicrobursts culminating in bursting a large-ish chunk of steel...

Depends how exactly you were changed to cope with it, if it just gave you magic pewter-style strength then it depends how exactly it scales to how much you tap, does it just give you enough to not be crushed and that's it? Or does it just greatly increase your bodies compressive strength? In which case pulling your leg up to walk would be impossible without snapping every muscle fiber. 

I wonder if it's directly affecting his body's ability to generate force.  

When he taps mass his body starts generating enough force to keep from collapsing in on itself, but not enough to make moving as easier as before, and when he stores the force his body outputs drops to a point it makes doing something like a pull-up more difficult, but not enough to make moving around difficult.

So like, if he taps 2x mass, he generates 1.3x force and if he stores 0.5x mass, he generates 0.7x force?

(just to put some vague unfounded numbers there)

Entirely possible Cosmere healing involves converting Investiture into matter.

I'd argue that actually compounding is just allomancy with something altering what power you get, I'd be very surprised if compounding didn't have a bronze pulse.

And no we haven't seen feruchemy from the cube specifically but it is mechanically used to make the planes lighter.

The cube wasn't used for reducing the plane's mass though.  The dude from SoScad (I am so blanking on his name) had Wax charge it with Allomantic Steel to power the propellers.

We're overthinking this. The way I see it is that the total amount of power you can get from a bead of metal directly depends on the mass of the bead. Thus, since mass is the main factor, density can be also viewed as the factor, since density = mass/ volume.

So if you have 1 kg of tin, it will burn for a year (for example, random numbers here), no matter the volume.

If you have two beads of metal of equal volume and different mass, the denser one will burn longer (as it has more mass).

If you have two beads of metal of equal mass and different volume, both will burn equally long.

 

I think this is where we're misunderstanding each other.  Burn length being a function of mass is not the same as burn length being a function of density.

Burn length being a function of density would mean that if you have two beads of equal mass but one has a smaller volume, then the smaller bead would burn longer.

And the quote we have mentions density.  We honestly just need more clarification in the form of a full quotation.

That's the quote I was thinking of. That's very interesting. I had thought of that quote as referring to the Cognitive Realm in general, but in the context of the one I referenced above, it's not quite so clear. Isn't Shadesmar just Roshar's portion of the Cognitive Realm? Why, then, would the distance be compressed from Roshar to Scadrial, but not from Scadrial to Roshar?

Brandon has a tendency to use Shadesmar to refer to the Cognitive Realm as a whole, even though he's also said it refers specifically to Roshar's part of the Cognitive Realm.

And there's nothing in that quote about distance from Scadrial to Roshar not being compressed??

In fact, they are not storing their mass. Because their density doesn't change. They're storing something like... boson field interaction?

They're still "storing mass", they're just doing so through manipulation of Higgs field interactions.  It can't be storing that interaction cause then that would have the exact same effect straight up storing mass should have.

Either way, they don't store weight and Brandon has said they "store mass", but the whole mechanic of it is weird and breaks things.

Agreed. A denser bead will burn longer than a less dense bead, i.e. 2 beads of the same metal and volume will burn proportionally with their mass. Clearly, this doesn't apply to affecting different metals' rates. I get from this quote that each metal burns at a certain rate (e.g. 2 grams per hour) and that thus two non-equally dense beads with equal volumes of the same metal burn for the same length per particle, and the denser one thereby burns longer. Really, this is being overthought - Brandon is probably describing it fairly simply, it's not spoilery at all.

This is the crux of the confusion though.  In the quote we have, Brandon only mentions density.  So the question becomes, did he specifically mean density, or did he mean two things of equal volume, but the one with greater mass would burn longer.

It's a question of whether density or mass determines burn rate.

Relevant WoB
 

Brandon Sanderson (Paraphrased)
Shadesmar- you can WALK to the other planets. It's a pretty far ways away (at least days, if not more), but you can go to Shadesmar, walk in the directions where it says "The Expanse of the Vapors" and it runs into Scadrial . In Shadesmar all of that empty space doesn't really have any human interaction, so it doesn't really have an aspect in the cognitive realm, so all of that place gets shortened immensely. Whenever a planet has enough thinking life on it that's it’s considering it a planet, it drops into Shadesmar.
(source)

It doesn't remove the mass of the food, just the nutritive value and the calories.  Much like Crashers can't store their mass in a metalmind, just the weight that mass exerts.  Spiking someone in the chull with a F.Bendalloy spike would cause them to have, uh, buildups.

Crashers actually are storing their mass.  In-world they just happen to not understand this so they say they're storing their weight.

Question

Does Iron store mass or weight?

Brandon Sanderson

Excellent question. The thing is it really does involve mass, but I’m breaking some physics rules, basically. I have to break a number of physics rules in order to make Magic work in the first place. Those whole laws of Thermodynamics, I’m like “You are my bane!” (laughter) But I try to work within the framework, and I have reasonings built up for myself, and some of them have to be kind of arbitrary. But the thing is, it does store mass if you look at how it interacts, but when a Feruchemist punches someone, you’re not having a mass transference of a 1000 pounds transferring the mass into someone else.

So there are a few little tweaks. You can go talk to Peter, because Peter has the actual math. Oh Peter’s back there. Peter is dressed up as Allomancer Jak from the broadsheet. In fact we’re giving some out broadsheets, aren’t we Peter. So when you come through the line, we’re giving out Broadsheets. Please don’t take fifty—I think we might have enough for everybody. The broadsheets are the newspaper from the Alloy of Law time. It’s an inworld newspaper. It’s actually reproduced in the book in four different pages, and we put it together in one big broadsheet.

So anyway, you can talk with him, he’s got more of the math of it. I explained the concept to Peter and he’s better with the actual math, so he said “We’ll figure it out.”

(source)

Complete lack of anything backing this I can think of, but if the Investiture stored in nicrosil is done so in the form of a spiritweb, maybe it acts almost like a less invasive and less diverse version of hemalurgy, and touching the charged nicrosil connects the spiritweb in it to your spiritweb?

This might be relevant:

 

http://brandonsanderson.com/annotation-the-alloy-of-law-chapter-twelve/

I actually brought this up in another thread.  If we extrapolate bubbles absorbing (and for Cadmium presumably injecting) kinetic energy to doing so for the energy of light, it would fix the redshift problem quite efficiently.

You would be able to burn a denser bead longer than a less dense bead of the same volume.

And?  That doesn't mean that a chunk of metal with the same mass but larger volume would burn the same length as a denser bead with the same mass but smaller volume.

That very well could be what was meant, but it is not what was said, at least in the quote as it has been delivered to us.  In the quote he addresses density, and says nothing about volume or mass specifically.

If we had a more complete quote that actually stated the exact question asked and the entirety of Brandon's response this would be much simpler to come to a conclusion on.

He's referring to an earlier post, I think, talking about taking a block of metal and force-condensing it down to a bead.  The bead would have the same burn length as the block of metal it came from.  Not from another bead of different density.

Except that's not what Brandon said?  Brandon said the piece with greater density would burn longer, presumably referring to compressing a chunk of metal into bead shape.

"you would be able to burn [the denser bead] longer."  doesn't have much wiggle room.

If you look at it as "it would burn longer than another bead of lesser density would," no, I don't think so.

The statement you said

"the dense bead would have the same burn length as the original-density block."

means the same thing as

"The dense bead would burn as long as the piece of metal would have before it was made denser."

(dense bead = dense bead), (have the same burn length = burn as long as), (original-density block = metal before it was made denser)

Which contradicts Brandon's statement that the denser piece would burn longer.  Like, it does confirm that if you have two pieces of metal with equal mass then the denser one would burn longer.  I was just confused because what you said it meant contradicted that, so I thought you had made a simple mistake so I asked.

"Yes, you would be able to burn [the denser bead] longer."

 

the dense bead would have the same burn length as the original-density block.

Aren't these two statements contradictory??

But if he has strong enough Connection to be a Mistborn, he SHOULD have strong enough connection to hold the Shard. To my way of thinking, anyway.

 

But this means that using a magic system does not involve much of a Connection to the Shard. So storing/tapping Connection should have no or little effect on your ability to use other magic systems.

What makes a person an Allomancer isn't their Connection to Preservation, it's the actual piece of Preservation in their soul.  There's random scattered quotes that all talk about this, but I readily admit I have no idea where all of them are.

Unless there was something explicitly mentioned in Secret History I'm unaware of that completely overwrote all the old stuff we'd been told.

Cadmium bubbles - Chromium leeches metals.  And possibly, although Khriss probably hasn't made that particular connection yet.  

Oops

I always mix up those metals in my head

This is an odd question not sure quite relevant to this thread but:  Where did the recent trend of people referring to Shardholders as Vessels come from?  I've seen a couple of people use it and I'm just wondering if there was something said in something or other that I missed.

Hasn't, in a way, the question of redshift been answered in the Alloy of Law annotations?

In them Brandon says that bubbles absorb the excess kinetic energy of objects leaving them.  This could probably be extrapolated to apply to light as well, as a change in wavelength is roughly equivalent to a change in energy.

For Cadmium bubbles I presume the effect would be reversed, with the bubble injecting extra energy to get things to where they should be