Oudeis

Real quick, kind of important. This isn't even close to what I'm saying. Obviously the glow is Stormlight. I never said, and I'd never say, that it wasn't. What I'm saying is, you think we can assume a direct ratio, and I'm saying that's not an assumption with much basis. It's the simplest possible explanation, just like it's the simplest explanation to someone who understands state-change as well as we understand stormlight that applying contant energy to a pot of water will result in a steady increase in temperature. In that case, it proves to be wrong. I'm saying we don't know enough to know if maybe there are bumps on the road, other factors we don't know about. Stormlight, if anything does, can be affected by circumstances in the cognitive and spiritual realms, so two thirds of its reality are not only out of our control, but entirely unobservable. I disagree with several more things you say, but I'm only going to address the salient one. Your contention is that we can accurately gauge stormlight, despite not being able to directly measure it, by the luminosity it provides. In my analogy, you're assuming we can measure both temperature and joules, but we've discussed the fact that we can't measure joules. I didn't make this point as well as I could have. With only the ability to measure heat, trying to determine how much energy something was outputting, you'd measure the temperature of the water, it would plateau... and you'd be stuck. You would have lost the ability to determine how much energy is being applied to the water, because the temperature is no longer changing. Once it moves again, can you assume the same ratio from before? Without a way to measure the joules directly, you will never have any perspective to get the first idea how many joules were required to make it through the temperature plateau. I still disagree with your assertion that control is this easy. People have moods, sleep patterns, many things which could affect the experiment, none of which even modern science can control. There's no way Rosharan technology could do it. And that's again assuming that you can even see all the factors. How have you ruled out climates in the spiritual or cognitive realms beyond your control? And remember the experiments from those ardents. Measuring spren changed them, fundamentally. Considering the link between spren and stormlight, it's not a leap to suggest that by the mere act of measuring stormlight might impose the most direct form of confirmation bias ever on the experiment. I don't disagree, I just think the manner you suggest will be too inaccurate. At this point, it would be a ton of effort for, at best, a rough estimation. Why not just count it as a clearchip's worth, then? That'd be about as accurate as the results of your experiment, and are a ton easier to achieve. Have a radiant (or larkin) remove all the light from a bunch of spheres of various denominations and colors, and get a cut gemheart with a ton of charge. Have the radiant suck in light from the gemheart, and see how much a single clearchip can hold. Fill a few dozen clearchips, and then drain them all at once and see how many will fit inside a clearmark before you can't put any more stormlight in. It would be crude and the time factor would make it vague, but I still think it would be as accurate, if not more, than your experiment. I agree that the conversion of the energy itself would be constant in both directions. But until you do it in both directions, you can't know what the energy cost of the conversion itself is. If there's a cost, and you only ever turn stormlight into breath, your results would be skewed to making stormlight weaker. If the conversion actually somehow adds investiture, your results would be skewed the other way. I agree that the conversion is constant. Maybe it doesn't cost anything, or maybe it costs a fuel that isn't Investiture. If we knew for a fact that was true, then we could safely assume that converting just stormlight into breath was accurate enough. But we don't know that. As for before, I enjoy talking with you. Your points are all logical and well-thought-out. I don't agree with you, and every so often you make an assumptive leap I'm not willing to follow, but I will always gladly debate anyone who relies on facts, reason, logic and science. You seem to have a tendency to misconstrue my arguments, but that is likely my fault for not expressing myself well. Please let me know if I say or do anything that gives you the impression that I'm offended, or that I'm offending you, and I promise I will apologize for my mistake.

I disagree with you on several points, and let's see if I can calculate them all... Even if gems were capable of being weighed to within an acceptable variance of each other, the skill which which each is cut cannot possibly be uniform enough for the experiments to be meaningful. Cloudiness, clarity, other gemstone terms like "fire", each are beyond human ability to eliminate as a factor, and not possible to be measured to required degrees of rigor with the technology of Roshar. Second, I actually wasn't going to mention the different speeds at which stormlight flows, because as you mention, if we ever do prove a direct correlation then the change in luminosity will simply be a matched parabolic curve. I will, however, restate the point which you don't address, which is that we have no idea if luminosity is a direct correlate of stormlight held. We can assume, but we don't know. Yes, we know that a little stormlight glows a little and a lot of stormlight glows a lot. We also know luminosity changes whether or not you breath (which, to address Kurk above, is when they tell us that you glow more the faster you lose stormlight). Until we have a way to directly measure stormlight itself, there won't be a way to know for sure that luminosity is directly affected by amount of stormlight, and by nothing else. Think of heating water. Once you bring water up to 100 degrees celsius, you then have to apply an amount of additional energy during which the temperature won't increase while it converts to 100 degree celcius steam. In that example there's an obvious physical change you can see with the naked eye... but that doesn't mean there isn't some change on the spiritual/cognitive level we simply cannot see. If we were to take the amount of joules you have to apply to water to increase it from 70C to 130C, we'd be able to extrapolate a graph, but that graph would be wrong. Also, humans are terrible controlled circumstances. Stormlight will get used up to heal you; how can you tell how "healed" someone is before they inhale it? Did he cut himself shaving this morning? Does she have blisters on her feet that would heal over real quick? This guy didn't eat much today; will the stormlight "heal" his hunger? And there are other effects. Stormlights compels you to action. Does resisting this impulse hold stormlight in more? Less? Does it not affect it at all? What about your heartrate? There are simply way, way too many variables. There's no way Rosharan level technology could account for them all, and that's even assuming, as we'd have to, that luminosity is, in fact, a direct correlate. Also, re: conversions... so you're agreeing with me? We both agree that there IS a conversion, and you agree with me that the conversion may be endoinvestive, exoinvestive, or purely neutral (or use up a more mundane fuel). So, until we have a way to calculate how much Investiture gets used up (or even added) as you convert, there's no way to know what the ratio would be one way, even if we can determine the ratio the other way.

Eh... that feels like something of a stretch, for all the alethi to just assume that the listeners worship greatshells without any reason whatsoever. The listeners must've said SOMETHING which ended up being misconstrued; "We believe Gods exist" seems like not enough. Though, I guess since it's pretty commonly known that the Reshi worship their islands... though it's not as well-known that their islands are Greatshells...

Even if you were right, 1:12 would still only work in one direction. If you tried using Breath to mimic the effect of Stormlight, you could not simply invert the ration to 12:1. It could be as low as 8:1, or even lower. And your lumen idea is based on some assumptions. Do we know that it's a direct proportion to how much stormlight you're losing? Is there a maximum luminosity, even when you hold/lose more stormlight? Without already having a direct way to measure the stormlight itself, we can't be certain that luminosity is an accurate way to measure stormlight.

Since, according to Adolin, they are connected by "sinews and veins", they almost certainly touch moving blood. It's widely assumed that it must have something to do with their size, and we know their size is connected to their spren. The question, of course, is how are these things all connected to each other?

They were almost certainly a misunderstanding, but my question is, what was misunderstood? I find it unlikely that the listeners tried to get across the idea that, "We were thinking we might have soup for lunch today," and the Alethi misunderstood it as, "The Chasmfiends are our gods!" so I'm speculating as to what the initial idea might be. Pointing to a greatshell and trying to use gestures and limited vocabulary to explain, "We can be here because those things trap our gods" could possibly be misunderstood as "those big things are gods!" Massively speculative, I grant. Just throwing it out there, trying to tie together a few random scraps of information we suspect/know.

Eeeh.... I still find flaws with your reasoning. The koloss were never able to breed in the first place, and their race would have died out without intervention. A side effect of Sazed making them a stable race was that they are (apparently) capable of interbreeding with humans. Mistwraiths have always been able to breed (and I'm not sure whether or not the Kandra ever could). There was no pressing need to change them, they could already breed amongst themselves and their race was not going to die out. Also, Koloss were always physically humans who had been altered via hemalurgy. Kandra had once been human, true, but changed into something utterly different via Direct Shardic Intervention. It would take significantly more finesse to adapt Kandra to make them able to interbreed; as we saw at the Ascension, Harmony had none of this finesse. His vast stores of knowledge gave him the specifics to remake the world, not according to his own plan, but according to a strict set of guidelines. We know from experience that trying to invent a goal and then achieve it was the next thing to impossible. ((EDIT: Actually, I realized I'm wrong here. Rashek made the kandra in the first place. So clearly, whatever alteration that required was something he was actually capable of with little to no experience. Still, it's one thing to take a human and change it into a completely different but stable race. It might be much harder to change that other race in only the specific way of the capacity to interbreed with humanity, while keeping it an otherwise stable and unchanged race. Still, I concede that this objection is now significantly weaker than it once was)). Without a pressing reason, I don't think he would have felt compelled to take the enormous risk that would have been required for him to attempt a genetic alteration of that level with no template, and there's every reason to think that if he tried, he'd've done more harm than good. That said, he's had 300 years to test and practice, so maybe it's something he only just recently did. I still don't see why, but it's possible. Regarding his acting skill, since we never get the PoV of a kandra in character, I'm not sure where you're getting your information from. TenSoon, in his P's-o-V, is almost always himself. The one time he's not, he's actually a reasonably terrible portrayer of Kelsier (never having seen him and not having digested his own body.) It's never mentioned or even implied that any part of the process, or any aspect of being a Kandra, magically enhances their acting skills. We see that they have extraordinary skill, but not supernatural skill. There's nothing to say your idea is false. But it's entirely speculative, with no factual basis. Which is totally fine, if you want some real speculation with no basis, check out my vague brainstorms about gemhearts over in Stormlight Archive (spoilers, duh). It's an interesting idea that has sparked a fascinating discussion, and if you want to believe it personally, whatever increases your enjoyment of the book is awesome. Personally, I like the idea that Wayne is simply skilled and talented. Not everyone has to have powers. Marasi has allomancy, yet her skill with a weapon and her brilliant intellect are what gives her agency in the story. I like that not everything has to be dependent on magic or supernatural phenomena. I almost feel like it would cheapen Wayne to say, "Oh, no, this special thing about you? It's not actually special. It's just something tacked on to you. If all arcana were removed from you, you'd be a boring person." EDIT: To add a link and to concede half a point.

What about the cost of transference? If Stormlight is used to Awaken a Lifeless, will there be an attrition on the amount of Stormlight it needs? i.e. you start with 12 units of Stormlight, but by the time you've changed it into a form that can be used to Awaken, you've spent 2 units, so now you only have 10 units of Stormlight to use. If that's what it takes to Awaken a Lifeless, your experiment would lead us to conclude that 1 Breath is 12 units of Stormlight, since we have no way to measure how much is lost in transference, when the true answer is closer to 10.

Realize that we yet have no reason to assume that "gemhearts" have anything to do with the cardiological organ which pumps blood through the human system. It's theoretically possible, but not necessarily presumptive.

"The feast I must drink clings to their faces" is at least sort of a metaphor. Also, "Two men come from the pit," that detail was... off.

Endowment? When did Endowment leave Nalthis?

...But again, "the ability to learn how to perform" is not something genetically inherent to the kandra. It's something they all, perforce, had to learn how to do extremely well. That's like saying that if you cut off the tails of rats for generation after generation, you'll eventually breed tailless rats. And while all of the original mistwraiths were once Terrismen, only ten living kandra remember being them, and that was 1500 years ago, if those ten all survived the Resolution, which even if they did, their minds and memories would not have remained fully intact. Again, it's not impossible that the kandra would have joined and interbred with the Terris, but there's about as much reason to think that's true as to believe I am Prince Harry Windsor. People exist in the world, he's one, I'm one, and you've never seen us together, so there's no reason I can't be Prince Harry; there's just no reason to think I am.

Ah yes. So... this is odd, however. Since gemhearts are probably comparatively common, yet if they form "like atium" you might expect them to be godcrystals, the way atium is a godmetal... yet there is no mention of gemhearts being any different from other gems, apart from simply larger. So I guess it's an example of a perfectly mundane focus, simply being created via spiritual leakage a la atium? We've seen many gemhearts peripupation and at least one post-pupation... did the text indicate whether or not the one Kaladin slew had pupated yet? Regardless, there didn't seem to be anything altogether special about the first one we ever see, from one of the biggest chasmfiends there's ever been, which had already pupated. Hrm. And Gavilar said something about the chasmfiends being the listener gods, and the listeners didn't want their gods back, and the Forms of Power are supposed to be 'of the Gods'... do the gemhearts have something to do with voidspren? Can chasmfiends bring on voidspren? Are the gemhearts prisons, perhaps? Do chasmfiends, with their massive gemhearts inside, draw in voidspren and lock them away safely? Is that why the Last Legion moved to the Shattered Plains, to stay in an area where voidspren would have trouble appearing? Is this the ecological impact said to be brought about by the two armies killing so many greatshells before they can pupate? I'm wildly down the rabbit hole at this point, I'm not even claiming I actually hypothesize any of these, I'm just spitballing to see what conversation it sparks.

Concur: I didn't meant to imply that I think the idea is impossible, simply that the evidence you've provided does not support it. It could end up being true, but if so I hazard the opinion that it would be completely unforeshadowed.

((Standard new-theory disclaimer: I believe I've confirmed that no one else has posted a thread on this topic yet, but if I'm wrong, I apologize)) What's up with gemhearts? What biological purpose do they serve? How can they possibly interact with greatshell physiology? From Chapter 26, The Feather, gemhearts are connected by veins and sinew. Huh? Sinew I guess maybe just holds it stationery, or is it actually connected as though it's a muscle? Do the muscles/organs connected to the gemheart matter? And what about veins? So... blood is pumped into/away from the gemheart? (Recall that this is Adolin looking at it, so it's possible he doesn't actually understand enough biology to give us an accurate description). So... random hypothesis. The sinew holds the gemheart in place. The gemheart absorbs stormlight from highstorms in bursts, then lets it out slowly in a form the rest of the body can use. Much as stormlight-infused gems encourage rockbuds to grow faster for the listeners to eat them, maybe stormlight infuses the blood? Isn't the heart the first thing that gives out when a creature grows too large? Perhaps there's a special organelle, not much more than a sack, that brings blood to the gemheart, where it can get stormlight enriched, then dispersed to the rest of the body? Does this allow the actual biological heart to do less work, explaining why such a monster is possible? Does the stormlight simply feed the spren, and then the spren does something else? If so, then presumably not much other physical, biological infrastructure would be necessary. Are gemhearts Invested when they are pulled out of a Greatshell? Also how do gemhearts grow? Are carbon molecules simply added via a biological process until a diamond grows bigger?

...But the kandra aren't supernaturally skilled at acting, they're simply excellently trained at acting and are supernaturally skilled at having a malleable form. That I know of, Wayne is never indicated as having any ability, however limited, to alter his own actual shape, he's just a superlative actor. Unless there's an example somewhere?

When "Set Fire to the Rain" always makes you think, "Jasnah could prolly do that..."

I was thinking that (Chromium) but, since the people he gives his hats to soon have very BAD luck, it almost seems to be the other way around. Like he's got anti-chromium that lets you go into luck-debt, drawing out luck you don't really have, and then sucking the luck out of the next guy to wear it.

He spoke of sharing a drink with Tanavast, so there's that. Hrm... it does get into the definition of "age" though, doesn't it? I believe we have WoB that Hoid has passed at least some time via time dilation. If I recall correctly, he says "Hoid has not lived all the time" that's passed. So... is he still as old as someone who has experience all that time? Let's say my friend is six months older than me. Let's say that I somehow managed to jury-rig up a bendalloy machine, and overnight I spend an entire year in a bubble. For the sake of example let's say this year gets me from 15 to 16. I just aged a year, subjectively to myself. I got a few inches taller, started growing a beard. I'm obviously now older than my buddy. But by the calendar, he's still six months older than I am. Which of us is really older? Is it simply the objective passage of time since our respective births, or is it the subjective time we've experienced? I suppose, in the scale of things, Hoid is likely FAR closer to her in age than to any typical mortal, so by that metric he's "around her age" the way I'm "around the age" of my buddy who is six months older.

Is this true? Szeth and Kaladin fly around in the highstorm, constantly replenishing, I thought, traveling around in various directions, certainly not deliberately staying at the exact right spot to constantly Infuse.

While I don't believe he ever flat-out says he only means the main stories, I think it's a more-than-reasonable assumption. We do know, for sure, that Alloy was not part of the initial "main" Mistborn storyline.

This is obviously the secret to Wayne's Lucky Hats. He wears a hat, uses up its luck, then trades it so some other poor sap who possesses a lucky hat (he's got a charm that lets him know which hats are lucky). This is why all the men he trades his hats to end up dead shortly thereafter, while Wayne hogs all the hat-luck for himself.

Chapter 5 of The Final Empire, Kelsier kills a lot of hazekillers with a paperweight which is referred to as "silvery". Frustratingly, he never flat-out calls it silver.

Words of Radiance, Chapter 19, "Safe Things." Bold mine. Italics from text. Why glance upward? The simplest explanation is that it simply means the father was sitting down, so "upwards" was to look Helaran in the face. It seems... like a really awkward way to phrase that, though. Why, though, would he be looking actually upward? To the sky? To the second floor? Perhaps to the room where his wife tried to murder their daughter? Does he know that Helaran's 'new friends' are the same group his wife belonged to, is that why he's making the connection? It's different. The Blade is? Different from what? Different from other Blades? We know that Amaram's Blade wasn't an officially recorded one. I have trouble accepting that Lin has simply memorized all 90 some odd Blades and can confidently rule out Helaran's as a known one. Does he simply mean, "I had assumed you won it on the field, as is the only way I know of to earn Shards, but no, it's different, you were given your Blade." Basically what does any of this mean? Thoughts?

Sorry for the misunderstanding, I meant what Joe said. Bluth in no way looks or acts like Wayne. I think Wayne popped to Roshar, made a trade with Bluth for the hat, tried some chouta, and then headed off somewhere.