Tempus

Nightblood is confirmed to be fundamentally the same as a splinter, and able to bond (this is how he reads minds). I've theorized that any splinter bond is sufficient to form a nahel bond on Roshar, and allow access to Stormlight and some form of surge abilities.

Nightblood is described by word of brandon as being 'full' of investiture. In addition, reinvesting an invested object becomes more difficult the more investiture you are dealing with... This is why Szeth can't lash shardplate and why allomancers can't push metals embedded in a person. So... If you made an awakened spike, not only would that probably 'fill' it up, but even if it didn't, hemalurgy is no where near strong enough to overcome the investiture barrier.

Besides my timeline (cosmere tech) and the one above, the coppermind has a decent timeline: http://coppermind.net/wiki/Chronology

Just a note, updated to 261 theories. Hall of Fame also updated. 7 more pages of Mistborn to go! Late Night Edit: 285 Theories and Hall of Fame update. 4 more pages of Mistborn to go - Kurk has caught up to skaa in Quality to tie for 1st, and passed me in both overall and quantity now to take 2nd.

*dramatic pause of several years*

Canada here. I may note that a number of people have their locations listed in their profile page.

Jan 1st, Year of Birth.

That one sounds great. Proven and Disproven theories will actually be moved to their own tables, and possibly their own pages. This will help reduce clutter in the active index, keeping it (a little) more concise, and preventing it from ballooning immensely over time. I should indeed add a link - I've also been meaning to add links to these from my signature. Since it's a List™, you should add it too! As for the Hall of Fame... Highest Caliber Theorists is a measure of quality. The number there represents the average quality of construction of this person's theories. That is the metric I use to assign stars. Two is an average theory, and five is already exceptional. Most Prolific Theorists is a measure of quantity. It's a simple count of how many theories they have on the Hall of Fame. Best Overall Theorists is a measure of quantity and quality. It tallies the sum of all rated theories for that individual, where the theories are worth 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8pts respectively. You can find notes for those when you click the Edit button on the wiki page, commented out. You might also be wondering how I assign stars? I've tried to develop objective criteria. I have three main criteria, and a fourth sub criteria that is important. If you meet any of the main criteria, you get a Bronze Star. If you meet 2-3 of the main criteria, you get a Silver Star. If you meet all three main criteria and the fourth criteria, you get a Gold Star. Lastly, underdeveloped theories get marked if they are 3-4 sentences or less, or just generally not very good. The criterion are: Length: A good theory should be long enough to explain itself. 3-5 paragraphs are required for a pass here. For Gold Theories, the theory must be at least one full screen long. Formatting: A good theory should have a clear structure, with the necessary formatting to be readable. I'm looking for clean paragraph breaks, bolding, italics, semi colons, bullet or numeric lists, indentation, tables, links or underlining. If you have 3-5 of those elements, arranged nicely, you get a pass. No special requirements for Gold. References: A good theory should reference the text or have Word of Brandon's supporting it. Either direct quotes or indirect quotations will do, though direct quotes are better. 2-4 references/quotations are required to meet this criteria. Logic: To meet the Gold criterion, there must be a semblance of logic as well. Pure, unfounded speculation does not qualify. This is the most subjective criteria, but essentially, if the entire post goes along the lines of 'I feel it should be like this' with no sources, deduction or induction to back it up, the post is lacking logic and should not qualify. Lastly, if I'm unsure whether or not to make a theory Gold, I put a <!--Gold Candidate--> comment above it in the index code. I'm attempting to keep Gold theories between 5-10%. When it drops below 5%, I go over the gold candidates and rank up a few of the most deserving. There isn't any risk currently of it passing 10% (though Cosmere theories might change that temporarily. WoK/WoR should bring it back down, though!). At the moment, it's sitting at 7.1%.

Out of the people in the chat I've talked to, the majority are 14-25. Theorizers, admins, mods and people doing community tasks like major wiki edits or quote compilations seem to be often 25-35 (with a few notable exceptions!). I also have no proof, this is entirely anecdotal from the maybe 30-40 people whose ages I've learned approximately.

I'll be slowly going over all the theories I can find for my Theory Index. If I find anything, I'll be posting it on there, and if I see something you missed that I really think you should redevelop, I'll be sure to send you a message. If you begin to redevelop or update any theories, keep us posted! I have followed this thread, so I'll be keeping my eye on it.

I appreciate you marking your theories as proven or disproven, Kurk! I mark theories when I see and recognize them, but I'm guessing I'm only getting around half. If you do update theories, I will either replace the old theory with the new one, or keep them both, as you desire. In the former case, I'll also update any score or topic changes necessary. Incidentally, updated to 253 theories. Eight more pages of Mistborn to go. Thread hijacking is a big concern for me. There are quite a few theories or good information that I've run across that aren't formal theories, are more of a mash of several different people and comments, or are generally scattered to the four winds. I've been making notes of some of them, and also writing down some topics that people have been looking for but don't really exist yet (though I'm certainly missing plenty). I plan on starting a PM group once the TheoryIndex is nearing completion of the best theorizers, in order to both provide theorizers with ideas, allow them to present formal theories for things they've advocated in the past but never got completed, etc, etc. Just a pipe dream at the moment though - one step at a time. I'm hoping that people will pick up on those theories, choose ones they espouse, and formally make threads for them at a silver or gold level because I feel stating some of these things would really enrich the theorysphere. My plan after that is to hopefully transcribe some of the more important theories onto wiki pages, but that's even further down the pipeline. At the current rate, I'm feeling about one to two months to finish the Index (faster if I can coerce someone into helping me with Stormlight, haha). Then another couple months theorizing, and then maybe a few wiki pages. I'm hoping a good, solid index and theory section can be constructed before the next wave comes along with Stormlight 3 and Shadows of Self.

Alright, did another ten pages of Mistborn boards, now up to 238 theories. Interestingly enough, after Alloy of Law was first released, there were loads of theories - about 12 theories a page. The futher away it got from release, the post count didn't significantly decrease, but the theory count did. Dropped to about 5 theories a page. Even more interestingly, sometime in the last half of 2013, the amount of posts on the Mistborn boards begins to rise. I'm not sure what the cause of that is - no book releases around that time, nothing to draw people to the forums that I can tell, no Mistborn related events or news. Mysterious. I'm eager to see what trends I will notice in the last 10 pages of the boards. When I'm done the Index making a few graphs showing trends might be fun. Another fun fact of cruising like this is seeing all the 'This is my [f]irst post, be nice' theories I've seen, for people like Outis and Observer and Kurkistan. I'm reeeeeally looking forward to crusing the Cosmere Theories board (next on my list, and my favourite board). I'm really not looking forward to Way of Kings and Words of Radiance boards - so many posts, so many posts! And so much of it out of nowhere (though there are a few new theorizers who have limited themselves entirely to Stormlight who I'm expecting to hit my Hall of Fame, like Confused). I'm also keeping the Hall of Fame up to date - it's been fun to watch Kirk rise from the ashes, constantly approaching the top of the boards. I'm excited to see how things will change when I hit up the Cosmere boards. I'm scared to see the wave of excellent WoR theorists though - 75% of the top reputation list are people who have majority posts in the Words of Radiance Boards. That's a scary thought for poor Cosmere theorists such as me. When I get more theories on the board, I'll probably make some 'Specialist' Hall of Fame boards for people who are particularly excellent at certain regions, categories, or topics.

-1 is occasionally used to denote infinity or NaN for variables, yes.

You have old eyes, sir. Old eyes for one so young. I can only see one of them, though.

My current rep goal is to pass zas678 - the highest inactive poster other than Brandon. 500 here I come. My secondary rep goal is to be the highest rep poster who posts most frequently in Cosmere Theories. That means overtaking Outis, Weiry, Observer, and Windy - a tough task. Incidentally, the forum average is about 50% rep to post ratio, or so I calculated once back in March. I was proud of my 75% ratio for a while... Chaos and the other 2011ers get a pass, as rep allocation has significantly changed over time. (possibly because the rep system wasn't introduced for a good long while...)

Swimmingly is managing over 11 posts per day, every day. Just oodles. In my mind Awesomeness is super impressive - been here even less time, and an amazing post to rep ratio.

Moogle is correct - has anyone revisited the waveforms are Focus on Roshar theory yet, incidentally?

With Emotional Allomancy, a coppercloud protects them. With enhanced Allomantic strength like Elend or a hemalurgic spike, you can affect them anyway. It's possible that Aluminium affects Allomancy in this fashion - the higher the concentration, the more the resistance. It's also possible that the bullets WERE only aluminium shelled, and they just call em' that. Just like we pretend our dimes are made of silver, our nickels of nickel, and our old gold coins were made of gold. But they were all alloys or plated.

I've given the stars significantly more contrast, Aether. Not sure if that improves the 'visibility' for you, or if you want something more clear. You can also sort by stars, incidentally. This will put the starred theories up to the top! If you sort by stars, then by topic, the stars sort will stay as a subsort. This makes it easy to find, say, all Gold Star theories on Roshar. Another thing I've considered is colour coding the rows subtly - that could be according to theory tag. I've now finished tagging and topicing all previous recorded theories, and have added pages 21-25 of the Mistborn boards (sorted by Start Date). Total theory count is up to 159. That's about 1/6th done the expected total of 800-900 theories. I've also quickly made a Hall of Fame. If you have further ideas for clarity/tagging/icons, let me know!

I am 100% sure of that, Argent. Here is the link.

Capitalization is usually highly significant in Sanderson books. Words like Investiture, Focus, Intent, Forgery, Aons, and other realmatic terms are always capitalized when used (when referring to the realmatic concepts). Rather than being dismissive about that, capitalization is actually a huge warning flag. In fact, Sliver, when used with a capital in previous books, is used often by people who don't know the realmatic meaning, when referring specifically to... DUN DUN DUUUUUN... the Lord Ruler.

You are thinking of Shards, but that is not necessarily correct. Word of Brandon is that Splinters gain sentience spontaneously if left alone for long enough. Inductive reasoning from a variety of clues tells us that any Investiture of sufficient size will eventually gain sentience, including Shards (but Shards are always picked up quickly).

I assumed it had been observed on Peter's rise from Rambleman to Mistborn. As nobody confirmed it in the thread (or any other thread, according to the forum search), it must either have been noted in PM or by Lord Claincy.

I think we have word from Peter that the Iriali's 'many' in many lands is 'not meta', in reference to it being about worldhopping. I can't seem to find it, though? If I'm mistaken about that, I'd just like to mention that there is a 'wandering shard' currently not on a planet.

Those are looking pretty great.