Oudeis

In the entirety of all four currently released books, I can think of exactly two benefits a Tineye (or Feruchemist, for that matter) ever gets out of an enhanced sense of touch. One is a burst of pain to clear your mind. The other, in his fight scene Spook comments how he can feel the footsteps hitting the ground around him. Are there any others, in the books? I feel like I will regret opening this door, but can anyone else think of any advantage one might get from an enhanced sense of touch?

No? I don't believe so. The actual Chasm was a line curved down like a frown, entirely south of the curve of the mountain range to the east. So the Chasm Line would be entirely "below" the lower horizontal line of the Aon Rao or, since the city is oriented west, entirely east of the city itself, on the north side of the road connecting Elantris proper with Kae.

A few thoughts. First, no one in-universe has ever used the word 'lerasium', I believe. More importantly, as has been pointed out, it's just a name, not an intrinsic property. Second, I disagree that aluminum "exhibits allomantic properties without being burned". WoB is that aluminum was designed to interact oddly with all arcana. This could simply be that. I grant that it's a huge coincidence that the effect happens to have some similarities to its allomantic power, but I'm loathe to assume that this is all it's doing. After all, allomatic aluminum doesn't directly stop the effect of metal, it metabolizes it all instantly. And touching aluminum to a bead of pewter doesn't make the pewter vanish. Third, just throwing this out there to see what people think. My personal theory is that mechanical allomancy is the secret to how the Southern Scadrians not only survived 1024 years without genetic modifications and while the merciless sun beat down on them for hours there at the very end, but also how Rashek could possibly have been confident that they would not only survive, but would not in that millenium advance technologically or do anything to disrupt his plans. Do you believe harmonium existed before Harmony did? Do you have an answer to my two concerns, if mechanical allomancy wasn't the solution?

I had him draw Aon Rao with the Chasm Line in it in my copy of Emperor's Soul, and he explained that the giant Aon Rao was oriented to the west, not to the north, and that more-or-less cleared up any confusion I'd previously had about the chasm line. I had been assuming that when we looked at the map, with north going up, that was supposed to represent the top of the Aon, but once I realized Kae was at the bottom it made more sense. I wonder if his edits are going to simply clarify this, or is he going to change it all so that the explanation as I currently understand it is no longer correct...

Well, Spook became a Savant after something close to a year of flaring his metals constantly. Wax says the time dilation is 8x but the text shows it to seem significantly faster. Is there WoB on whether flaring the metal changes the size of the bubble, or the rate of time dilation? If it makes it go a quarter against as fast, that means to be a Cadmium Savant, you'll have to burn for a solid year, and 10 years will have passed outside. Even if there's no significant change to the Misting's spiritweb from use of this external metal, there would still be an impact. People are mentioning "feruchemical savanthood." I have my own theories on the subject. Short version, I don't see a reason to assume feruchmical savanthood has to work exactly like allomantic savanthood, though I conceded that maybe it does. I just think we've seen hemalurgic creations, and we've seen allomantic creations, and they are incredibly different from each other; there's no reason a feruchemical creation would just be a clone of an allomantic creation.

If you don't like being challenged to come up with hand-eye coordination when you're at basic human levels, why would you enjoy being challenged at super-human levels? Wouldn't it all be a relative wash? Wouldn't you only like being superhuman if it meant you could do all the normal human stuff super easy? If, instead of making free-throws from the free-throw line, they made you throw from the opposite free-throw line, so you had to work just as hard as the non-Thug kids to get the coordination and strength correct, wouldn't that be as much effort and failure as just being a normal person making normal free throws?

((NOTE: I realize there's discrepancy in the book about the rate of time dilation. For purposes of this post, I'm assuming Wax was right when he spoke of an 8x time dilation. If other ratios are more accurate, I don't believe it substantively affects the outcome of my suggestion, just changes the rate at which things are good/bad. Please just mentally substitute the numbers I use with numbers that more closely match your idea of time dilation.)) Not sure cadmium prisons are the way to go. In real life, we have a prison overpopulation problem. Sometimes, non-violent offenders are let out early simply because we need the room. In cadmium prisons, either they're in jail for their own subjective sentence, which means people would leave prison almost never, and if someone actually did manage to finish a 5 year sentence, 40 years would have passed for them. Their children would have grown, their significant others would have moved on and forgotten them, they'd likely have few skills that would let them work anything but the most menial of jobs in a possibly completely different global marketplace. Or, they're in prison for an objective sentence. So if someone has an eight-year sentence, they're out after one year. Prison terms would be a fraction as harsh as they actually are; some of the problems from the last example would still crop up, just not as bad. And prison would be far less of a deterrent, since you know you're just gonna be in there for a short stay. I'd say a bendalloy prison would make a much better option. Get someone in jail, let them serve their fifteen year term, but we only have to use up the room for them for two years. They'll come out a lot older, but at least their family will still remember them. More punishment to the actual criminal, less punishment to their kin. Less of a problem for prison overcrowding. There's the fact that we'd have to feed them 8x as much per objective day. But, that's as much food as we'd have to feed them, ever, so the cost isn't increased, just concentrated. There are prison work programs, yes? So prisoners would also be stamping license plates, building tables, what have you as fast as they eat, possibly defraying the cost of feeding them. (Though there might be an impact on the economy when prison goods are manufactured 8x as fast). And think what we'd save on total construction costs, let alone staffing of the fewer, smaller prisons we'd have. And it's not like they can dig their way to freedom; once they leave the room, they aren't going superfast anymore.

It is announced! Lerasium, Electrum, Duralumin. Cadmium got 5.82% of the vote. I wonder how that's split between Marasi fans, people wanting to round out the temporal quadrant, and people confusing it with Chromium...

I had a theory that if there's such a thing as a "feruchemical savant" it's not simply an allomantic savant for a feruchemical power.

I'm not sure we can conclude either that people of Nalthis don't think white is a color, or that this cultural bias would for any reason spread to Roshar. Remember, in Idris, people wear black because they don't want Awakeners being able to Awaken. They think "black" is a lack of color, and as far as BioChroma is concerned, they're absolutely wrong. Black is a strong fuel for Awakening. So it's not even a consistent cultural belief within just Nalthis itself. I can't think of why it's reasonable to assume that Roshar would think that white light isn't a color.

Voidus: A body has muscles, the Breath just animates them. It has to provide all the mechanical energy for the rope to 'grab things'. And the Breath doesn't power them forever. They need maintenance and repair, if they take damage they need more Breaths.

I think it's wildly speculative and not based as solidly as you're making it seem, but I will be the last person telling someone they should give up a theory as long as it's plausible, and this one is. (Ask me sometime about my crazy allomantic copper hypothesis). I still think you're ignoring the power problem; you're making it seem like literally anything, no matter how much power it might need, can be fully powered on one Breath, and I think that's ludicrous. I also don't understand how you're not writing over the "attunement" Command when you send a Breath through the wand with the generic Command. You'd have to assume a dozen other laws of BioChroma that haven't even been hinted at in the books for your idea to work, and the best that can be said of it is, "it has not yet been directly refuted by WoB." Sorta damning with faint praise, there. Still, it does have the virtue of people something that might be true. I do, however, hope it's not. One of the Sanderson laws is that limitations make for interesting stories. Breath is fascinating because power for one person requires self-sacrifice on the part of many. That's powerful, and very interesting. Mistborn spoilers. On a world where anyone and their brother has all of the power with a sacrifice approaching zero, the stakes of the story are dropped and the novel gets a lot less interesting. It's sorta nice in a throwaway fantasy sorta way to imagine that you could have incredible power without any sort of cost or sacrifice, but a story based on that premise wouldn't have any tension, it would just be fairy tale wish fulfillment.

To my knowledge, there hasn't been a case of the Mists powering allomancy that didn't involve direct shardic intervention. It's not like any Thug can just step outside, breath in some mist, and start burning.

While I don't personally believe that Kwaan was a Surgebinder, I disagree that it would make the story any less stand-alone. It's exactly like Hoid. For someone who reads just Elantris, Hoid has a bit part you forget about, and move on. If Kwaan does have magic memory, then people reading just this one book will assume it's simply eidetic. People reading more books will see the connections. That's pretty much what Mr. Sanderson says he's going for. To let the books stand on their own, doesn't have to mean "no connections, ever," it just means the connections have to be subtle enough that you don't scratch your head and say, "well that doesn't make any sense."

Skaa: I don't know if we're using the word "hinges" to mean the same thing. Let me start over. There's not a ton of evidence that a single Breath has infinite power. There are ways to make power work more efficiently; see Lifeless being Commands that take only one Breath. As Voidus pointed out, it takes fewer Breaths to awaken things the closer they are to human; a Lifeless is an actual human. I don't see why many Breaths can be shaped by "intent" into doing a specific thing, but then also one single Breath can be done the same way. Doesn't a Command already do exactly what you're claiming a wand would do? It's putting a specific intent to the Breaths, the way you're claiming your wand could do. If that can't be accomplished with a Command, why can it be accomplished with a wand?

I note that your hypothesis hinges on one thing you pointed out in your initial post, that the Returned are able to "heal" with just a single Breath because the Breath has a healing "intent" already in it. I'm not sure I buy the premise. You seem to be saying that there's nothing unique about a Divine Breath, and I disagree.

I figure it's something specific and sorta formal sounding, like the Commands to make a Lifeless. Simplicity is cool, but that we've seen it's the hallmark of Type 3 entities. Even just handing over your Breath, with no real effect other than a transfer, requires a specific, some would say formal phrase of two sentences. "Awaken to my Breath, serve my needs, live at my Command and my word." And then you have to add the security phrase. I wonder how that works, on a Realmatic level... well this is prolly not the time. I'd expect Endowment says something more than, "Return." "Return to my Divine Breath, serve these visions I have shown you, live once more with purpose divine until you come back once more."

I'm a little unclear at the point of this post... it seems that you're making two main points. 1. His actions, regardless of his motives for doing them, will end up working out in some fashion that does, in fact, make the world a better place. 2. His intention isn't "I hate the world and I'm evil so die die die," he, like almost every evil person in real history, was under the delusion that his actions were in pursuit of some "greater good." So he's a horrible person who justifies things to himself, like most horrible people do. Am I missing something?

Recall that Dalinar offered to pay the price to borrow King's Plate and Blade in order to fight alongside Adolin, saying it would have meant they weren't being risked. So apparently, yeah, that's a rule. As has been pointed out, it sounds like poor sportsmanship, but not actually against the rules.

Are you being deliberately obtuse here? I never once said he never had a single bite to eat. However, you founds the facts and figures yourself. He traveled six weeks' of distance in six days. That's a week's worth of distance in a day. How much food do you eat in one week, not even in a week where you walk hundreds of miles? Could you eat all of that in a single day? Do you know how much that much food would weigh? And it is mentioned in the book that he doesn't carry much food. When he gets to the village with the crazy cannibal, he comments how he's stopping because he needs food. When he travels with Marsh briefly, they set up camp, and he talks about how all he's really got are some spices to boil in water for broth. There is no way he carried with him enough food to power six weeks' worth of walking, even if physical speed did make your digestion go faster so you could eat an entire week's worth of food in a sitting. Whether he uses the speed constantly or in spurts is immaterial; either way, he needed to express as much energy as it would have taken to push his body across a dominance, and we know that he wasn't carrying very much food, anyway. If you want to disagree with me, that's fine. if you'd rather ignore my points then straw-man me by claiming that I'm insisting he never ate a bite of food when I've clearly stated otherwise, please try to restrain yourself. You can argue against the points I've actually made all you want. Once you start changing my arguments to make me look bad, you've crossed a line.

First, no, he did not. Second, even if he stored 90% of his weight, he still has his packs, gear, clothes, and all those metalminds. (though he does mention dropping empty steelminds to reduce weight.) Third, your reasoning is flawed. As Wax says, once you get under about 3/4 weight, it's difficult to move around. A human's walk is a fall indefinitely postponed. The only thing you have to push against is the ground, which is at a 90 degree angle (roughly) to the direction you want to go. You own weight is a large part of how humans are able to walk. If you barely weighed anything, you'd have difficulty getting traction. Errant winds would blow you off course and you'd have to spend effort on constant course corrections. Wax goes around at reduced weight all the time, and he still has trouble with "less than 3/4". For Sazed, who is untrained in traveling around at reduced weight, or at the very least isn't as experienced as Wax, it's unreasonable to assume he could jog along for days at even that much. In conclusion, it's never mentioned that he's storing weight (and while I know he's a scholar, he's shown a frustrating tendency to be not very good at feruchemy. He never once tries to store or tap aluminum, duralumin, or malatium, so we unfortunately can't really assume he'd do it just because it would've been a good idea). Even if he did, he could have reduced his own personal weight by a fraction, reducing the weight of the system of "himself, his clothes, and all his gear including a lot of metalminds" by an even smaller fraction. The amount of metabolic deficit we're talking about is so large, this would be a very small benefit that wouldn't begin to cover it. First, so which is it? You first say, "I'm not repeating the same point" then you say "I'm repeating the same point because you don't get it." Which is your argument? Second, you're mistaken. Your very first exchange was to say "the body creates energy, steel makes the body create energy faster" and my very first reply was, "that doesn't make sense, the body does not create energy, it produces energy from food, and my point is that he's not getting enough food to power the process of creating energy." I'm not misunderstanding you. I understand exactly what you're saying, and I still believe you're ignoring the one salient fact, and you can restate your initial case as many times as you want, I won't suddenly overlook the gap in logic. Every reply you've had on the subject has been to restate your initial "your body will make energy faster" and you've never once addressed the issue I have brought up time and time again. Think of it like this. We've got a car that can burn a gallon of gas and let you travel a mile in ten minutes. You're trying to tell me that an engine which burns the same amount of gas faster will let you travel a mile in one minute. I'm trying to tell you, it doesn't matter how fast the engine will burn a gallon of gas, it will never let you travel ten miles on one gallon. The engine would have to somehow burn gas more efficiently, or it would have to add more gas, and neither of those things are happening. And you keep saying, "But you're not listening. What if it burns the gas faster?"

You keep saying the same thing, and I keep pointing out the flaw, and then you keep explaining the exact same thing again, like the issue is that I don't understand you well enough. Your body cannot "metabolize sugars and such" that you don't eat. Sazed crossed, I dunno, hundreds of miles, and he did it without eating enough food to power the process of recycling your ATP. However fast your body digests food, it can't digest food you don't eat.

It is from his own POV, and gives us the best idea of what storing zinc feels like.

Force is mass times acceleration; since a bullet has both mass and velocity, it has force. I guess in a weird sorta way no thing every has force, forces just exist in the world a function of other things, but you're being preposterously pedantic right now. The meaning was clear, and pointing out that "technically" isn't doing anything useful. When a bullet hits a human body, force will be applied to the body and to the bullet. If you attempt to change the trajectory of a moving bullet, you must apply force. Arguing about where the force "actually" is serves no real purpose. A few other notes: if you can see steellines, you prolly aren't relying on sound to know when bits of pushable metal are suddenly flying at you. If you're not burning steel, then yes, it's definitely too late to deflect. Yes, there will likely be a slight angle between the trajectory of the bullet and your center of mass, but you have a very short window, and applying enough force at an angle that steep to make the bullet actually miss you is less easy than people are making it seem. If they're smart enough to aim roughly below your core, you could easily have to push the bullet two feet or more off target before it's not heading right for one of your favorite internal organs. You'd be much, much more effective at Pushing enough to deflect bullets being fired at your buddy. Just for those of you keeping score at home; let's be careful not to conflate modern bullets with examples from Wax. Between Wax's current time and our modern day guns, force (yes, I'm using the term force here) changes drastically. I recognize that no one has yet gotten chocolate in their peanut butter, but I see both chocolate and peanut butter at play, and I wanna make sure everyone knows what everyone's talking about. EDIT: I read the thread and I don't see where you're getting this from. Vin should not shoot upwards when she pushes down on a coin, any more than I should be able to fly by flapping my arms. Yes, I'm pushing air molecules down. That same force is being applied to force my body upwards, but it's nowhere near enough to fight gravity. Vin Pushes downwards on the coin, and force is applied to her body giving her an upwards vector. It's not enough to make her rise, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I disagree wholeheartedly with everything you say here. Allomantic steel makes perfect sense. Feruchemical copper. I could go on. There are some metals that make a certain amount of sense but the specifics get a little fuzzy; you can say that about most branches of hard science in real life. You're bringing up the opposite of the point Frosted Flakes brings up. Basically, you're so used to magic being terrible that you don't bother checking to see if this one is mostly good. It really, really is. Steel is pretty unique in being one where rather than being a good, concrete system with a few fuzzy bits, it sorta doesn't really make a lot of apparent sense fundamentally. Interesting, but see my thing above. Wouldn't this mean that you can't store if you're not moving? Sazed was storing while sitting in one spot, occasionally moving an arm to spoon himself soup. Logically he'd've stored up about twelve seconds of moving double fast, if he was only storing the kinetic energy he'd otherwise produce. Not to mention, humans use metabolic energy to make kinetic energy. Again, shouldn't he be starving himself while storing? Does it mean any steel ferring has to starve to store up speed?