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I really like this idea (at least the first half about the role of perception). I'm not completely convinced, because Shallan's facility with obfuscation was very much internal, and hidden even from her own perception. I'm also not sold on the idea of squires strengthening the radiant bond. It's an intriguing idea, though.

There was a discussion about this in the WoR Typos thread. (http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/6400-typos-in-wor-spoilers-ahead/page-5#entry223552) Peter says it is a continuity error, which is being corrected: As far as Elit not risking anything, I don't personally have a problem with it. He wasn't the primary contestant, just recruited in support of someone who had wagered Shards. In lots of contests or gambling set ups the stakes are unequal. On the other hand, the whole match was pretty unfair with loopholery, so I'm not surprised that there are smaller aspects of the situation that also smell a bit off.

"Do You Wanna be an Epic" (sung by Regalia) Do you wanna be an Epic? It would be so very fun to have powers that put you on top, in charge of everyone! I used to be quite normal, and now I'm not. You can be awesome too! Do you want to be an Epic? I'll make you into an Epic. [David] No thanks, Regalia. Do you want to be an Epic? Abuse power all day long, kill and maim and cheat your underlings; you can do anything and feel no moral qualms! Yes the initial Rending can be a bit traumatic for everyone. ........ David, tell me what just happened. Why don't you have powers now? This process always worked before. No stupid metaphors! Just let it in! Calamity was right here empowering you. Why aren't you killing things? Don't you wanna be an Epic?

That's a good thought. Either swirled together with colliding hurricaney violence, or with one as the glyph color and the other as background stormlight glow misting off of it.(Haha! My phone auto corrected Stormlight to "storming." I'm going to have to be careful of inadvertent swearing when using the mobile site.) :-)

The question arose because of this epigraph from WoK ch 55 “A woman sits and scratches out her own eyes. Daughter of kings and winds, the vandal.” After surmising that shalash was baxal's mistress, the vandal association seemed clear, and jezrien is described as a king in the prologue and wears a crown in the icons.

Good questions! Fever is established by changing the body's thermostat toward a higher-than-usual target temperature, not by a "stoke up the furnace for an hour" mechanism. So if you wrap up in an electric blanket to warm yourself, your body will do less work in raising your temperature but will still reach the same set point. (Interestingly, exothermic animals like reptiles can have fever reactions too! Their thermostat gets set higher, making them seek out warmer environments to raise their internal temperature.) How feruchemy works into those feedback loops is unclear, but I suspect it would work similar to ordinary external heating processes like sitting by a fire or drinking something hot. As far as the prophylactic brass tapping, my guess is that it would not do very much, but it is hard to be sure. This review (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16613288) discusses the evidence for and against fever being beneficial on various situations (infection, cancer, stroke, etc.) They conclude that "The role of fever for the recovery from low risk infections is marginal at best" and that our modern use of antibiotics in serious infections masks any benefit of fever there. If your brass minds are really full, I wouldn't discourage you from trying it, but if walking around with a fake fever is uncomfortable you may not be getting much benefit in trade.

Another option is to go as an Alethi from SA. Clothing can be pretty generic, and if working class wear a glove on your left hand; if noble then use a scarf or other material to extend the left sleeve over your hand. For bonus points, draw a ghostblood tattoo somewhere visible.

To weigh in on the original question: There is a possible benefit, but probably not as dramatic as you are hoping (or at least only useful in certain cases). In general, fevers function not to directly kill bacteria but to slow down their growth so that your immune system has time to catch up. So I suspect that the proposed 45-minute scenario would probably be insufficient unless timed exquisitely at an early stage of infection. While it is true what Lord Tavash Shar said above, that fevers are not necessarily helpful in every instance where they occur, your body is pretty good at deciding when it needs one, and how high to push it. There would be limited occasions when a feruchemist would know they needed to combat an infection with a fever before their immune system figured it out. On the other hand, as has been discussed already, there appear to be at least some mechanisms in place to protect yourself from the effects of your own feruchemy. The major reason that fevers are so tightly regulated physiologically is that they can do harm by themselves. If you really can crank up the heat an extra 5 degrees with no ill effects to you, a feruchemist with a mild fever could very plausibly increase her temperature to high fever range to enhance the benefit / shorten the duration. Extending that to a serious infection where the body is fevered as far as it will go to try to get an advantage over the bug, artificially enhancing the fever with feruchemy (without further harming the patient) would be helpful for sure. In fact, in that last scenario, if the feruchemist could store the natural fever to reduce the harmful effects in her body while at the same time tapping heat to create an artificial fever (from which she would be magically protected), there would be incredible benefits ranging from "I-don't-feel-so-Rusting-awful-now" to "Thank-Harmony-I-didn't-die-from-malaria". For that to be possible, though, we have to assume a certain level of protection from your own feruchemy, and that is clearly a topic of some debate. Good, thought, though! I love the various medicinal magic ideas that pop up here.

No WoB as yet. Previous discussion has suggested that a soulcaster can choose which type of blood to create, though Rosharans may not have the same set of blood types that we are familiar with. (It is not confirmed that "blood type" as quoted in the book means "blood type" as we think of it for transfusions, rather than human vs. parsh vs. aimian blood.) From a health perspective, it would be a whole lot easier to change the blood that was going to be transfused than to modify the person's acquired immunity to blood antigens. Whether that addresses the question you want to ask, I'm not sure.

Thanks for the generalized 9-point conics explanation! Clear, concise, and helpful. I wasn't sure I was doing it right, especially when it came to the hyperbolas, and I totally forgot about the degenerate cases. Okay, this post ended up being much longer than I intended, so I'm spoilering sections for length. Thanks for getting me thinking about this! About curvature and Nebrask's Great Circle Postulate on Bind Point Requirements (referencing the Eskridge Defense) About the Blad defense, and a possible problem with the above postulate Open and Degenerate Conics Possible constructions related to the Blad Defense: One more observation on bind points:

Great work, KalynaAnne! I'm sorry I didn't run into you at the signing. Oooo, I like where this is going. Also, the effect on LoS on LoV is a fascinating question. I can't decide what I think would happen. And here's a thought for a great defense against LoV: Rather than one long Line of Forbiddance like this _________, construct a series of short LoF at right angles, to give you a zig-zag pattern like this /\/\/\/\/\. This generates a retroreflector, so any LoV sent at you go approximately back where they started, striking your opponent or his/her constructions. (That thought came from wondering how to utilize a parabololic LoF to aim them all at one place, but the scale you would need seems too large to be practicable, and we don't have confirmation that open conics are LoF.) A question about your 9-point constructions: You tried the incenter, orthocenter, circumcenter, and centroid, which all gave 9-point ellipses (or circles). Aside from the fact that the constructions in the book use the orthocenter, is there any reason to use a "center point" (by whichever definition) at all? I haven't done any geometry to check this, but my impression is that any point internal to the triangle would similarly generate a 9-point ellipse. Do the "centers" have a special property? And if all internal points work, and obtuse triangles have external orthocenters, we could generalize to say that any complete quadrangle is valid.... (Okay, I thought about what I just said, and obviously it doesn't matter which 3 points in the quadrangle you choose as your starting triangle, the result will be the same. So I think it is self evident that this must be the case.) My formal geometry is a little fuzzy though, so please correct me if my assumptions are false here. EDIT: One more question (though this probably doesn't have an answer yet). In the final chapter Joel says, "That was one of the great things about an Easton Defense--a large circle with nine bind points, each with a smaller circle bound to it. Each of those smaller circles could theoretically hold up to five bound chalklings." If our suppositions so far are correct, any circle can be a 9-point circle, but he seems to think that the smaller ones were limited to 6 bind points. It's possible that their theory is wrong here, since it is clearly incomplete in other areas, but I have a hard time believing nobody has tried making the subsidiary circle a 9-pointer. Assuming that there is a limit, does this suggest that smaller circles have less binding strength to lend? Or that some of the lines/angles used to construct the smaller circle must be shared between it and the one it is bound to? That makes the most sense to me, but I can't see an easy rule that would force the outlying circles into the special cases (with reduced bind points). Thoughts?

Always open. The Oregon one is fine, but the other two have an empty spoiler box followed by all the text. I am guessing that the issue may be with the /spoiler end tag? EDIT: Actually, maybe it's my browser. I just opened the page in a different one and all three looked fine. Carry on!

Yes, though in fairness Brandon has mentioned that it is hard to find superhero/villain names that aren't already trademarked. I do think it is representative of what would happen if random people off the street had to come up with a name related to a random powerset. Not everyone is super creative, and the clever idea they had might have been for that other Epic's powers, not their own. Once you get this list to a good stage of completion, it would be great if you could transfer the information to the coppermind. That wiki needs some love, especially on non-cosmere works like the Reckoners. @Joe: Off-topic note--the theory and elimination spoilers in your signature aren't working.

Thanks, Weiry! That's a lot of work. I haven't gone back to listen to the Q&A yet, but I just finished my rough draft of the signing line. I'm going back over it now to proofread, and should get it posted tonight or in the morning. EDIT: Here it is! There were a disappointingly small number of new questions spread out over those two and a half hours. The majority of information has already been conveyed in the earlier posts, but here are the verbatim responses. (Some of them are included for the purposes of wording, even though we already have similar answers in the database.) I want to also point out that KalynaAnn is very cool for two reasons. First, she bought a copy of Firefight for Brandon to sign before she donated it to the Atlanta Public Library system. Way to be generous and spread the joy! Second, the transcription doesn't get across how quickly both Brandon and Ben (the illustrator for Rithmatist) responded to her questions. They looked at her diagrams and both said, "Yep, that's right." So her Rithmatics theories appear to be exactly right. In addition, there was an indecipherable question at the 40-minute mark from someone who identified himself as a Sharder. It was RAFO'd but maybe he will come claim his question and let us know what it was. It was immediately followed by the time bubble discussion, but I'm not sure if it was the same person or the next in line. I included the Shai question because it sounded like there may have been a sotto vocce hint at the end, but I'd like a second opinion on that. It is just past the 2:01 mark. Finally, Ben had a lot of interesting conversations, and was fun to talk to. He said he knows a lot about certain aspects of SA, since he had to know background to make good illustrations, but very little about others. For example, he knows "a ton" about flora, fauna, and shardplate, but next to nothing about the politics, the Diagram, etc. (emphasis mine)

A few thoughts. First, Patrick, thank you for making that connection for me. I had previously assumed that the dart was loaded with kill-you poison not kidnap-you poison, but you make a very good case. Regarding the Chasmfiend investiture, I don't think there is explicit mention of whether the harvested gemhearts are glowing or not, but I'll have to check. However, Brandon has said in several interviews that the gemheart-stored stormlight and/or symbiosis with spren (which I think are related) are what allow the chasmfiends to grow so huge. I take that to mean that the investiture is a necessary part of their regular activities, and every chasmfiend out there absorbs stormlight to stay alive. Granted, there are other interpretations, but this makes sense to me. Parshendi and Szeth. This also strikes me as odd, and I don't think the Nalan-gave-them-the-Oathstone explanation holds water. At the end of WoR, Szeth only recognizes Nale as someone he'd maybe seen before. I think he would have remembered a former master better than that. At the feast, Szeth sees Nale eating with Elhokar and dismisses him with the thought, "The heir's feasting companions were unimportant." Also, the Parshendi had enough notice to tell Szeth to wear white to the feast (Szeth specifies that it "was a Parshendi tradition, foreign to him"), so Gavilar's revelation must have come earlier in the day, at the treaty signing, with a gap for the Listeners to deliberate and vote on a course of action (as Eshonai describes) before the feast happened. It is made clear in WoR that the Listeners recognized the Honorblade for what it was, so I can see them retaining Szeth as backup in their interactions with this new culture they don't yet understand. How they acquired him (no Alethi remembered seeing him before) and why they got rid of his stone afterward are still mysteries to me.

Thanks for going through it, especially so late at night. I agree that there were few theory-relevant answers in the Q&A. However, I do recall some interesting ones that would be worth getting the full transcription for later (possibly when the Jordancon people post their video, if it's too hard to hear in this recording). The two I remember noticing in particular were about how to make Horneater stew (it's based on a spicy Korean soup) and which actor inspired the aspect J.C. (Adam Baldwin, whose roles often have one or both of those initials, most memorably Jayne Cobb in Firefly). If I have time this week I'll work on the transcripts, but we'll see.

I have to add that it started out as a very surreal experience. I'm talking to the woman behind me in line and she says, "Have you read Legion? I'm Kalyani." My first thought was, "Well, one of us is going crazy. I wonder if it's her or me?" I'd never been addressed by a hallucination before and wasn't sure how to respond. After that, it still took me a minute to realize she didn't mean she was in costume as Kalyani, but in fact the inspiration for the character.

Actually, I had been almost fully convinced before, but the wording on this WoB makes me less certain. Yes, he's saying we'll find out who they are in the Mistborn sci-fi trilogy, but presumably that trilogy is already intended as a massive crossover. We could easily meet spacefaring Nalthians, Rosharans, etc. and have them be the "Ones Above" Note: I still think Scadrial is most likely, this quote just makes me less confident in that assumption.

Here are my recordings of the the Q&A (25 min) and signing line (2:20) from the 1/24 Atlanta signing. Note that the recorder was placed between Brandon and Ben McSweeny, who was also at the signing, so some questions/conversations may have been directed at Ben. Those links are to Google Drive, where they are uploaded as .wav files. If this doesn't work, I can try something else--just let me know.

Just got in from the signing. It was fun, and there were quite a few sharders there--I only met a few, though. Sorry, Andrew I didn't see your post before I left so I didn't ask about the soda Epic. Maybe someone else did? The talk and reading at the beginning were pretty much the same as the other Firefight signings (discussion of creativity, reading from Perfect State), so I won't post any of that. However, the JordanCon people were present and taking high-quality video of that and the Q&A, which will be posted on either Dragonmount or the JordanCon site (forums?). I recorded audio of the Q&A and the signing line, for a total of almost 3 hours. I'll post those in the transcript request thread for some enterprising souls to go at. I haven't listened to much of it yet, but there were at least a few great questions. Paraphrases of the ones I asked are below. (Of note, Ben Mcsweeny--the artist who brought us Shallan's sketchbook and Rithmatic diagrams--was also present and signing books. At least some of the signing questions were directed his way.) However, the coolest thing I learned was in the signing line. The couple standing behind me were named... Kalyani and Rahul! Yes, they are the people who became Stephen Leed's aspects. Apparently Brandon asked her one time, "You have a pretty name. May I use it in a book?" So then he included both her and her husband, basically as they are in life. They are wonderful people, recently moved to Florida from Maine. Whenever Brandon has an event within 8 hours of them, they drive out and host him for the night so they can cook him Indian food, which he loves. I got their permission to post this photo. Both Kalyani and Rahul are wearing shirts with Stormlight art that she drew (his is a chasmfiend, hers is the Oathgate network). Also in the picture are me (as a Rithmatics professor) my son (as Pattern) and my sister (as Megan/Firefight). Questions answered (not verbatim--transcript is pending). The first two were written in books as personalizations. That's all I've got for now!

This is actually a fairly straightforward question. We know that Nightblood "destroys evil" so we can just look for the person who has been most destroyed by Nightblood. Shashara is a strong candidate, but then again so is Vasher, since so much of his life was ruined by that sword. There are probably a few others in the running, none of whom show up on that list. But you'd better vote fast because I have a feeling the stone shamans will qualify as "most destroyed" pretty soon.

Recently started using the mobile version of the site instead of the full site: where is the report feature? I can't seem to find it.

I was told the same today: a Reckoners book gets you a wristband. Also of note, the in-store price is $18, not the discounted 13-ish that is advertised for online sales. The employee I spoke with today did not know anything about a Q&A or reading beforehand--doesn't mean it's not happening, just that it isn't part of the store's schedule. They will start lining people up about 2:30, with the scheduled 3:00 start time. However, Brandon's most recent post on his site said it may be delayed until about 3:30, which I'm guessing is due to his travel time.

The date inthe title is wrong. I should have said 1/24, not 1/27. Can a mod fix this please? Sorry for the typo.

This coming Saturday at 3pm is the Atlanta (Newnan) signing. Do we want to have a 17S meetup beforehand? Event details below: The event is at a Barnes and Noble in Newnan, at the Ashley Park mall. Basically, go take I-85 South from the airport for 30 minutes and you'll get there (exit 47). The address is 342 Newnan Crossing Bypass, Newnan, GA 30265. The B&N event page says you can go get a wristband for the signing beginning at 9am when they open that day. According to the employee I spoke with, the wristbands loosely dictate your position in the signing line, probably with 15-30 minute waves of people. She said they have been getting a lot of calls so they expect a big turnout, but they have plenty of Firefight copies in stock so there is no need to preorder. In order to get a wristband, your book must be purchased at a B&N, preferably that location. Officially, the policy is that you need to buy a Sanderson book to get a wristband, but I assume if you came and bought something else they would probably let you in anyway. As usual, you can get as many books signed as you want, with up to 3 personalized. I am attending for sure, but I am carpooling (from Decatur) with some less enthusiastic fans, including my 10-m.o son, so I don't know how long I will be there. If nobody else is going to record the Q&A and signing line I will try to do so, but I may not be able to get as much of it as someone planning to stay for the full event. At the same time, I have some open seats in my car, so if anyone needs a ride from my neck of the woods and doesn't mind being partially beholden to a baby's schedule, let me know. I do think it would be fun to meet other Atlanta area Sharders beforehand, so if there is interest from others then I am up for a 17S lunch etc.