Oltux72

I guess it is an Elantriann, just based on the baldness, but I may just as well be wrong.

Her base is off world. And would Kalak really transfer a Voidspren? Him being Restares seems to show that hthe Sons of Honor were a front. It really looks like there is a group of Terrispeople in a colony somewhere that is not Scadrial to me. Why did he have multiple rings? Are we looking at a full Feruchemist?

Well, obvious questions Why did he let his son ruin the kingdom for years? Why would he fight for his kingdom to be handed over to Parshendi? Sure, Gavilar was no saint. But why this battle? Just so that he can be really evil?

A Kandra who has centuries of experience letting himself be surprised by an amateur? And why would a Kandra draw attention to his arcane powers? And why would a Kandra look foreign? Or alternatively, if the Kandra is an avatar of Kelsier, why does he look like an old, bald man? And if Kelsier wants an agent in Lasting Integrity why does he not send a trader or an official delegation? The problem with Sixteen is not only that you have to find somebody who is capable of this feat, but also somebody who does not care or must disregard that his feat is blowing his cover. I mean sure, this could be Cultivation's youngest son, who has a drug problem, waiting for mommy to bail him out, but why the disguise? Is he so broke that he cannot afford food? But why let Shallan surprise him?

That makes an extreme amount of sense. Writing reports? They could have one in every city. Surprised by an amater assassin and then running away?

If Kelsier really wanted people dead, why wouldn't he just appear to a few of his priests and hand over a list?

Head of the Windrunners .And there is a book V to come.

That's Engineering.

It is quite dangerous to simply assume that species are alike. Yes they form some form of relationship past mate form. But for all we know that is an effect of having mated in mate form. I have a group of platypodes here that wants to have a word with you in a dark alley.

OK, let's ask a basic question. Does the Shard of Honor still exist or is it splintered? If it exists, where is it?

In humans. And that is the problem with any speculation or reasoning in that area. Missing data. You cannot even use evolutionary biology, as it looks liks Adonalsium meddled with their biology. Anything is possible. In fact, as they derive from Rosharan fauna, can we tell for sure that they don't lay eggs?

The issue with your analysis is the Blades. If deadeyes were new, so were dead Blades. Under the assumption that the Recreance took more than a few days, remaining Knights would have investigated the sites. And they would have found lots of corpses with their eyes burned out, That alone would have freaked them out, as ending the bonds should have ended the possibility of Blades in their minds. Do you really want to say that no Knight Radiant would have recovered a dead Blade? Yet as soon as they had a dead Blade surely one of them would have touched it. And then they would have heared the scream. Are we to assume that they just continued after that? Without a significant number of exceptions? It seems to me that the assumption that the Recreance happened simultaneously within a few days at most is inescapable.

The deep problem is to me that we are accepting the official reason for the Recreance without questioning. And that is just not plausible. People who have been fighting a war for years just do not all react in panic to the destruction of the enemy. Many, possibly even a majority, would have reacted quite simply with relief and even joy to know that this proble is solved once and for all. And some among the orders would have refused. What would the Windrunners who dropped their Shards do against those who refused? And there really is no reason they would have to do it simutaneously. They could have drawn straws and let a few unfortunates try it out. No. It really looks like the Recreance was not purely a reaction, but a planned action with a desired effect, that is there was a reason rooted in the oaths or the nature of Roshar that meant that they had to take the risk under all conditions and that had an aim. Logically we may assume that they wanted to undo something that happened due to the capture of Ba-Ado-Mishram, yet for some reason just releasing Ba-Ado-Mishram was not an option either.

Yes. It is, but it would be for any constant number. It is possible that they don't go for common denominators. Right. Though you may argue that four Scdrians 1 / 100 is nicer than 1 / 25, as it at least contains a factor of 4. Apparently there is a symbol for the next power. Hence they do not use 35 but 3 * 10 + 5 in writing.Or maybe they do this only for numbers between 16 and 31. That is they directly write the language, which needs to have a simple word for sixteen.

The Hero of Ages, chapter 36: 1/16 not 16/100

Vin IIRC. But the 16% are not important for that. Any percentage will do. The oddity is that the number of afflicted people was always (within the limits of group size) 16 / 100. And that is not how natural afflictions behave. The numbers should have been on a bell curve centered on 0.16 No. That is half the problem. You had two observable phenomena 16% of the whole group became sick. Expressed as a fraction: 4 / 25 Of those 1 / 16 become sick for longer (the future Atium-Mistings) - That turns into 1 / 100 of the whole group If you equalize the bases you arrive at 16 / 100 for the first group and 1 / 100 for the second group. Hence the number communicated was 16 (or theoretically any multiple thereof). The solution can be derived independent of the number system. The only knowledge you need is the normal distribution (Gaussian curve a.k.a. bell curve) and to know that numbers between 0 and 1 can be expressed as fractions. Late 18th century math by our standards. The psychological and cultural problem why Leras chose 16 / 100, as opposed to 16 / 256 of course remains. But that depends on his number system, not the Scadrian system.

Leras was not Scadrian. He was Yolish. For all we know Yolen was using base 10. Or they noticed a constant fraction 4/25 and given that one in sixteen was specially afflicted they came to 16 / 100 and were just using fractions rather than a positional system for numbers between 0 and 1.

Sorry for getting things wrong. Writing about physics in a foreign language. Anyway. At a very basic level objects change their shape if you exert a force on them. Suppose you press on a football. It will get flatter. If you stop pressing it will spring back into the original shape. Do the same thing to a lump of clay and its shape is permanently changed. So far with me? Now suppose we have a length of wire. With Tension you can control how hard you need to twist the wire to change its shape. Even more, if you tell the wire that it is very hard to twist and is twisted in its current shape, it will change its shape. But if you want to make a permanent loop out of the wire, you'll need Cohesion. To us these differences look like differences in degree of the same phenomenon. But then to us a liquid is a liquid and we do not see a fundamental difference between oil and blood.

We haven't seen Tension used. But we got something almost as good. Zu describes what he can do with Tension: making clothing strangle people. The descriptions of those Surges has the unfortunate naming of the strong versus weak axial interaction. Discussions tend to derail at that point. The problem is that Rosharan atomic theories cannot be all that accurate. They consider the essences fundamental. It makes much more sense to approach Rosharan physics from a classical level before atomic theory. And if you look at it that way there is something we have that could serve as a candidate phenomenon. Tension controls plastic deformation. Cohesion does only aplastic deformation and hence cannot give you what Tension can do: turn stuff into springs. What do you think? EDIT: And I messed it up mixing up terms. I should have said: Tension -> elastic deformation Cohesion -> plastic deformation

For whom? I am sorry, but this is rather simplistic. Cultivation is no naive altruist ready to sacrifice herself and her planet for some nebulous common good. Setting Odium free means that if the rest of the Cosmere thinks that Odium should be fought, they are free to do so themselves, rather than put the burden on Roshar and Cultivation.

Why? We know Hoid has seen Valor. And that read to me like it was not just for tea. Valor's system should be obversable in Hoid. Why isn't it? Or is it?

Cultivation isn't into that circle of life stuff. She is a Shard of clearing forests for fields. Eternal growth is fine. The easy way out is to design a mechanism that makes the point moot. A Feruchemist gets onto a platform resting on springs. The Feruchemist stores weight. The platform rises. He taps. The platform lowers. The key insight here is that the device will generate energy out of nothing even if the efficiency of tapping is zero, as just stopping storing weight would result in movement. Free energy.

Us not having seen Invention is not the same thing as hiding. And that feature is shared by multiple Shards. The Cosmere in general just has a problem. It is too old to have a peaceful prosperous history and be so primitive technologically speaking. Here things get complicated. Feruchemy and Awakening clearly break the law of conservation of energy. The Cosmere is not a closed system thermodynamically speaking. You could just as well put Cultivation here. Why isn't Mercy here? Or Dominion? You might just as well put Odium here. Or Endowment for that matter. The problem with such groupings is that too many are plausible. About the only ones that would be clearly wrong are those putting Ruin and Preservation into different groups, aren't they?

Sorry to be trivial, but a really misty night in autumn or winter.

I am afraid this cannot be. The numer on Scadrial was 16 before people knew that there are 16 metals.