Pagerunner

It's not the third Bondsmith, it's the third Bondsmith spren. In Words of Radiance, the number of Bondsmith spren was said to be "specific." In the Stormlight Archive Pocket Companion, it was confirmed that this meant there were only three spren that a Bondsmith could bond with, so there could only be three Bondsmiths at a time. Right now, there is only one Bondsmith we know of, Dalinar, who has the Stormfather. Nightwatcher is a similar spren to the Stormfather, but for Cultivation (and also appears to rule the Cultivationspren the same way the Stormfather rule the Honorspren), so many of us believe she could also pair with a Bondsmith. For the third spren, we've got very few concrete ideas. It could be a powerful Odiumspren (but he doesn't have a single powerful spren like Honor and Cultivation; the Unmade, as a collective, fill that role). It could be something like Cusicesh, the large spren we saw in Axies' interlude in WoK; although we know it is not as powerful a spren as Stormfather and Nightwatcher. It could be a thus-far-unseen spren of Adonalsium, or maybe a 50/50 Honor/Cultivation mixture. That doesn't mean anyone has currently bonded it. Just that there is one more spren out there that could be bonded to create a Bondsmith.

There is an excerpt of White Sand, both from the manuscript version(which was never published) and the matching pages from the graphic novel. The images may or may not show up, but you would be able to get all the content from the text version. That being said, it's not a self-contained story, just an excerpt out of another full book, so even if you can read it all you will be 'missing out' on the parts not included. So, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

There are a few available (with the Elantris leatherbound) that Brandon just donated to Geeks Doing Good. EDIT: Whoops, false alarm. All five copies have already been claimed.

The Sea of Spheres occupies a significant portion of Alethkar, and has at least two major Alethi cities built on or near its banks. That would need to be a lot of Shardblades that go unnoticed right in the middle of a country where they love their Shards.

Hey, I didn't mention that one over here yet, since I haven't had a chance to check up on it! But now that the cat's out of the bag, I am exploring a different model to restrict force based on relative velocity. Instead of it being a piecewise function where force drops to zero at the moment you exceed the maximum velocity, the force is gradually decreased as you increase in velocity. The faster something moves away from you, the less force you can exert on it. At the speeds a coin moves at, an Allomancer can only exert enough force to match the drag from the air. But when the coin suddenly becomes stationary, the force can be very large again and move the Allomancer. It's another situation where the math works, but I need to convince myself that it truly fits every situation in the books. It would severely limit the Coinshot's maximum speed, which I think can be comparable to the speed of a coin. (That's what I need to research, if in any of the Vin/Zane or Kelsier/OtherGuysInAoL an Allomancer manages to outrun a coin or anything like that. I know they throw themselves to the side to dodge sometimes, but I'd like to find some scenes where the velocities are aligned, so we can actually get an idea as to how much faster coins are than Allomancers, if at all.) But big picture, it's the same conclusion I make in Model 6; that if something is moving too fast, that will arbitrarily restrict the force you can apply to it. Model 6 does have some odd behavior as written when it comes to a steady-state Push, where the velocity of the coin will reach the max velocity, the force will stop, the coin will slow down, the full force will start again, the coin will reach max velocity... cycling on and off so quickly it seems to be a continuous force, which will average out to whatever force is required to overcome drag. But the new model will truly give a reduced force, which I would like slightly better.

The forum doesn't have any rules to the contrary, as far as I'm aware. Adam is the one to worry about, if he wants to be on-record or not. In the past, when Team Sanderson has communicated things they wish to remain confidential (either through online messaging, or an in-person aside at a signing), they've told the person not to pass it around. I very rarely take anyone other than Brandon as 100% correct. Even Peter, the Stormlight continuity editor and one of Brandon's old writing group, has said some things that I think are wrong. (Not counting the time he and Brandon took to arguing on Twitter over how Shardblades interact with aluminum.) I don't know as much about Adam's background as I do Peter's; depending on the answer, and how he phrased it, it might not be definitive.

Can you provide this WoB? Peter, at least, believes they are just Honorblades, so I would be very surprised if we had confirmation to the contrary (even if I do agree with you that Dawnshards are not the Honorblades).

Okay, that's a little bit better, but it still will have problems matching the model of Allomancy we've seen. Lets look at when Kelsier was raiding Keep Venture; an enemy Coinshot fired a coin at him, Kelsier Pushed back, and the enemy Coinshot was launched out the window. That time, it wasn't any screwing with the mass of the coin; it was just the application of another force on the coin that made the first Coinshot's Push increase in force.

The whole exercise is to explain, using physics, exactly what happens during Steelpushing. Saying that physics works fundamentally differently is in direct contradiction with that stated goal. It is saying that Brandon can write discrepancies, and does not need to explain them. It means we cannot have a model that reliably predicts how Allomancy will behave. Don't what I'm saying that the wrong way; it is an entirely reasonable approach, and it's what I thought for years. That there was no cohesive explanation, that Brandon wrote what he felt fit the situation best, without focusing on the details of whether the math actually make sense. Only as I was recently telling everyone else why all their models were wrong, did I realize there was an opening for some level of consistency by tying together maximum speed and maximum force. I still think that Brandon didn't start from a mathematical definition of any kind; he wrote Vin's steelpushing one way, and Wax's another way, and I'm just trying to make math that will fit both of them. I think we're bouncing back and forth between definitions. Your equation has rolled a lot of these things together to determine the final force (which is fine, I rolled a lot into my parametric push graph, too), but none of those aside from the bracing has any relevance on the particular example we've been looking at. There are a lot of things that go into the force of a Push; but for the particular instance when there's a change in force when the coin is braced, everything else is constant. The application of the normal force changes the force of the Push. Now, you might say that other parameters, like mass and distance, appear both in the force balance and in the equation for force, so why can't the normal force also be a parameter? But the normal force, by definition, is a response to the Allomantic push. The force exerted by the ground will be exactly enough to cancel the other forces on the object (Allomantic, and gravity). Trying to use that to calculate your force is putting the cart before the horse.

Brandon recently posted about it on Reddit after his latest State of the Sanderson:

Mathematically speaking, 'anchor quality' isn't a meaningful parameter. This sort of gets back to my issue with Model 4, which talks about 'effective mass,' which isn't meaningful either. What does it mean to be a good anchor? You'll look at the force balance to determine if the anchor is immobilized. Qualitatively speaking, whether or not something lets you push off of it (like kicking off the side of the pool versus an inner tube floating in it) depends on whether or not the thing will move on the other side. That's obvious and intuitive. But what's the math behind how that works? You apply a force to both objects. You calculate the acceleration each object experiences (F=ma). You calculate the velocity and position of each object, as a function of time (a=dv/dt, v=dx/dt). You find what time the objects get so far apart you cannot exert force anymore (or just when you stop exerting force). You look at the velocity of each object when you stop pushing. Bad anchors move away from you, so you can't push on them for as long. Good anchors don't move, so you can push on them for longer. Work equals Force times Distance; you will apply a force (equal and opposite) for a set distance (until you've gotten so far away you can't push anymore). You'll do a constant amount of work in total; whichever object moves farther will have more work done on it, and will thus have more kinetic energy at the end. So, if whatever you're pushing on doesn't move, all the work you do goes to making you move faster. If whatever you're pushing on moves a lot easier than you, then all of the work will go to making the object move faster. So, the best way you could define as 'anchor quality' is acceleration of the Allomancer over the acceleration of the anchor. But, since you need the force balance to determine those accelerations, you can't use anchor quality as an input to that same force balance. You need a solved force balance to even discuss the concept of anchor quality. The last equation you've described is true, regardless of force applied. You cancelled it out. Even if the force doesn't increase when the coin encounters the wall, and Vin is still only accelerating imperceptibly, the acceleration of the coin will be even more imperceptible. The ratio will change because the circumstances change, but why do the force and Vin's acceleration increase, instead of the force remaining constant and the coin's acceleration decreasing? What you've done appears to be a modification of Model 2. But instead of relative velocity, you've defined relative acceleration. When the coin hits the wall, there is no reason for the relative acceleration (a_coin - a_vin) to be preserved; unless, of course, that is the variable that the Allomancer defines. But I laid out the issues inherent to that that approach in my original document; the relative acceleration is not always preserved when a coin encounters an obstacle.

Don't look at me. Light scattering is physics, not chemistry.

Electromagnetism vs gravity is a good analogy, in a way. They're different forces that act at different scales. For small particles close together, electromagnetism overwhelms gravity; electrons are held in their orbits by the electromagnetic attraction to the nucleus. Gravity is the weakest, but when things get very far away and very large, it will dominate over electromagnetism. But within the nucleus of an atom, there are behaviors that overcome both the force of gravity and the force of electromagnetism between the protons. These two forces, Strong and Weak, are responsible for the behavior of the nucleus. They do not have any observable impact outside the nucleus, but they explain why the nucleus holds together (when electromagnetism should hurl it apart), and why it sometimes breaks apart in very specific ways.

Welcome to the Shard! In Arcanum Unbounded (a collection of all cosmere short stories and novellas Brandon has written), you will find a novella called Edgedancer, which is about Lift, set between WoR and OB. Most of the other stuff in there is fair game for what you've read: there are three standalone novellas (Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell, Sixth of the Dusk, and The Emperor's Soul), and one Mistborn short story about Kelsier training with his old master, Gemmel (The Eleventh Metal). You could get away with reading the major Mistborn novella in the collection (Mistborn: Secret History), although Brandon recommends waiting until after you've read the next three Mistborn books. There's a Mistborn short story (Allomancer Jak and the Pits of Eltania) and an Elantris short story (The Hope of Elantris) that won't really make any sense unless you've read the second era of Mistborn and Elantris, respectively. And there's a preview from White Sand; more on that below. If you're looking for the other cosmere books to read, you can follow up on Mistborn with three novels (Alloy of Law, Shadows of Self, and Bands of Mourning) which jump forward about three hundred years into the future and are set in an early industrial world. There are two other cosmere novels out right now, Warbreaker and Elantris, which are both standalones. (Brandon has slipped characters from each of them, and from White Sand and from the original Mistborn trilogy, into the background in Stormlight. Keep an eye out for weird interlude characters. Warbreaker has had the most noticeable crossovers, by far.) White Sand is a graphic novel adaptation of an unpublished manuscript Brandon wrote; rather than revise it, he sent it straight out to be adapted. Part 1 of 3 is out right now, and Part 2 will come out about the same time as Oathbringer, I believe. That should be enough to keep you busy. If Oathbringer is anything like the previous two Stormlight books, there will be lots of little tidbits that you can catch if you've read everything from the cosmere. But they won't be so obvious that it won't ruin the experience of Stormlight if you miss them. Stuff like the travelers in the Way of Kings interlude at the Purelake, or all the odd items Mraize has in his collection, or the identity of that strange Ardent who was following Bridge 4 around. For example, there's a House Venture spy in Mistborn named Felt. One of Dalinar's scouts is also named Felt. It's actually the same character! We don't know what he's up to or why he hopped between worlds, but there are a lot of little things like that, that you won't pick up on unless you're fully versed in the cosmere. (Or wait for those of us who are to point it out on the forums.)

From the wedding scene in Alloy. Definitely looks plausible, the sort of trick Kelsier did to get a coin underneath a Hazekiller's shield and Pull it into his back. I don't think you'd be able to move it in any other direction than straight towards you, however, so a boomerang-like motion would be very hard, if not impossible, to achieve. You'd probably have the most success if you tried to fire over their head, stop the bullet, let it fall behind them, and then pull it back to get them.

You can put me down for chemistry.

Why do we assume that the Bondsmiths were leaders? Because Dalinar is a Bondsmith, and he's pretty much leading Alethkar right now? The Windrunners were associated with the Jezrien, king of the Heralds. One of the Attributes they're associated with is Leading. If anyone was going to lead the Radiants, I feel it would be a Windrunner. There was no new answer posted. It was just the results of the poll, of people voting for which question they wanted to see answered next.

I'd look at what actually exists in real life, and try to tweak that to what you want. You could make your planets actually be moons. Have a black hole with the mass of Jupiter, and then you can have four 'moons' that are each the size of Jupiter's moons, which could easily be small planets. Jupiter's density doesn't matter, just its mass - so let's compress it down to an infinitesimally small point. I don't think Jupiter's moons would be close enough to see one another, but you could do a similar principle if you could figure out how to get a terrestrial planet with four relatively large moons. Or maybe you could base something on the Pluto planetary system, which has two large bodies and then more smaller bodies (if you're fine with having really small planets). As far as tidally locked, our moon is basically 'tidally locked' towards the sun; although it goes around the Earth, it doesn't ever rotate, so the 'dark side' never sees the sun. So that concept is definitely possible. EDIT: So, that's fake news, apparently. You learn something new every day. But just because it isn't true doesn't mean it couldn't be true; the spin of a planet won't affect its orbit around a larger object. That's all I was getting at; I thought we had a real-life situation of what you're looking for, but this far, I guess not.

The question asker drew that. You could ask @Sam Script what the arrow means, and if he drew it or if Brandon added it. There are several inaccuracies; the long island north of Aimia is drawn as attached, the Purelake isn't shaped quite right, there are missing islands northwest of Iri. It's still a pretty good drawing, even if it's not 100% accurate.

That's what I said. *wink* Thanks for the correction. Here's what he said in his latest SotS: " Some people do wonder why I’d do like The Apocalypse Guard before The Atzlanian (Rithmatist 2). It comes down to having two publishers. Stormlight, Rithmatist, and Wax and Wayne are all books for Tor. I need to give Delacorte some love too, and they’ve waited patiently all year for me to finish Stormlight. So they get the next major writing time slot."

I don't think so. He's already said his next writing block will go to Apocalypse Guard, for his other publisher. I think it's just been Oathbringer revisions weighing heavily on him, and he's doing prep work for Apocalypse Guard 1 while he can. EDIT: Guess who doesn't read Reckoners?

Looking for one that goes something like this: Q: Will the events happening elsewhere in the cosmere influence Roshar? A: The events on Roshar will influence the rest of the cosmere.

I saw this - it's very well-done! Lots of functionality, although I'll admit I don't fully see why the coins are on the end of the clear pieces for the swinging. It almost looks like they move with the coins, instead of moving away from them. It's also a really cool touch having anything Pushable or Pullable be gold. But didn't Lego recently revise their policy for intellectual properties when it came to Ideas? Or was that just for lines they already had the licenses for?

You make a good point about how smaller anchors cannot support as much of a Push; I had forgotten about that aspect. The parametric push graph must also change with the mass of either anchor, not just the Allomancer. Spoiler'd for length. Just to clarify, the first five models are ones I have seen proposed, and I am just explaining why I think they all are wrong. Having shown the necessity for a new model, I present the one I developed, Model 6. Inertial mass is just regular mass, not a separate concept - it is accounted for in the free body diagram that applies to all situations, and is why the slopes of the orange and blue lines are different. I think the concept you're getting at is how I have ignored how all these values are functions of time. I recently uploaded an addendum to my original post, which approaches the math from a different angle, which basically says the same things repackaged using math that fewer people will be able to follow. I don't know if you noticed it before posting your reply, but it may address your concern. Because that's really where the issue with your examples comes in: with time-dependence. In each of the four situations, exerting force forward will also exert an equal force backwards; that's what Newton's third law says. That's not talking about the normal force equaling the force you're applying; that's saying that the force of drag on your hand is the same as the force of your hand on the air, and the force pushing your hand forward is the same force pushing your arm backward. You've suggested that the force on the coin is not the same as the force on the Allomancer, which actually is a violation of Newton's third law. In the first example you present, look at the sum of the forces on your hand: strong forward, nothing backward. With the very small mass of your hand, that's going to give it a very high acceleration forward. Look at the sum of forces on your body: strong backward, nothing forward. But, because the mass of your body is so much larger, you have a much smaller acceleration than your hand does. You can calculate the time it will take to reach full extension, and the velocities that each piece will be travelling at that time. It will be a very small time, a negligible velocity of the body, and a high velocity of the hands. (We'll conveniently stop looking at our model right before you need to stop your arms from moving, since we don't particularly care what happens then.) You've interpreted the lack of movement as meaning there is negligible force, but it actually means that a moderate acceleration has operated for a negligible time. This is where time becomes important: if you exert the same force in every situation, then higher mass objects will take longer and longer to reach the 'end state' of your push, with your arms fully extended. That gives that same force on your body more time to act; it takes longer to push the basketball forward (we'll just model that as a piece of your hand, and then any 'normal forces' are all internal strain), so your body is moving faster at the end. A longer time, not a larger force, is why you are moved backwards. But that's explicitly different than what we see in the text. There is a discontinuity in force on an Allomancer's body. If Vin launching the coin is like your example of pushing your arms out, the coin would need to move almost instantaneously to the wall, not giving the Push enough time to noticeably accelerate her. She can clearly identify two regimes: when the coin is in the air, there is no force on her. When the coin hits the wall, there is force.

I know some of the audiobook accents aren't accurate. Herdazians are supposed to sound hispanic, but the narrator uses an Australian accent, I believe. (Brandon loves it, so it doesn't matter too much.) Alethi has influences from real-life Hebrew and Arabic, so Vorin languages will probably sound very Middle-Eastern. There are three other major language groups on Roshar: Iri, Makabaki, and Dawnate. We've seen that Makabaki is more guttural than English; it might be similar to Arabic, as well. I don't think we've seen enough of the other two language families to make any educated guesses.