A Look Ahead at 2014

I’ve been blogging for several years now, and I’ve worked out a schedule of sorts. For 2014 I’m planning on the following.:

Mondays will remain the same, with comments on our Interior Alaskan weather, gardening, and personal observations.

Tuesdays will be optional. If I post reviews, it’ll be on Tuesdays.

Wednesdays I give the contexts of quotes I post on Twitter and on both my facebook pages. Generally these are from a fairly limited group of authors who I have found from experience produce Twitter-length quotes. This year I will again be using Andre Norton, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, J.R.R. Tolkien and Jane Austin as regulars, but if I find others I certainly reserve the right to use them!

Thursday is another optional day. I may use more YouTube videos on Thursdays.

Friday is the time for Jarn’s Journal. This is the remote back story of how the Jarnian Confederation (the background for most of my science fiction) came into being. Ten sentences are pulled out and repeated on my other blog, Jarnianconfederation.wordpress.com, on Saturdays as part of Science Fiction and Fantasy Saturday.

Saturday here is again an optional day. I may try a few more science fact pieces, or cover special events.

Sunday I participate in Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday. These are blog hops where authors post eight sentences of their writing.

The special events will vary, but I do plan to cover the World Ice Art Championships. The Ice Park is open from February 24 through March 30, and I’ll probably post a video or two leading up to it as well as my photographs. I hope I can make the Tanana Valley State Fair this year (I was too weak from chemotherapy last year) and possibly other events. Anything else you’d like to see from Alaska?

And finally, a video from YouTube, celebrating the New Year on the University campus. We used to have a potluck New Year’s Eve in the glass top story of the farther building to the right, and watch the fireworks display in comfort. Considering that outdoor temperatures were often well below zero, watching from indoors was a definite plus!

Full of Sound and Fury

True or false: The Chinese invented gunpowder a thousand years before it was known in the West, but being a peaceable people, they used it for many centuries only for fireworks.

This is one of those trick questions that is neither true nor false. The real story seems to be that the Chinese did indeed have fireworks at the time of the Roman emperors, that they did invent gunpowder, and that the use of gunpowder in war started sometime around the tenth century. Nevertheless, gunpowder was used as a weapon in China from the time of its discovery. The unstated — and false — assumption is that fireworks require gunpowder.

Early Chinese fireworks consisted of colored and perfumed smokes and noisemakers often called firecrackers. These early firecrackers were simply sections of bamboo thrown onto a fire. The bamboo sections would explode as the air and moisture inside the closed sections heated and expanded. The bamboo crackers may have been used initially to frighten more primitive tribes away from campfires, while smoke was used for fumigation and as a signal in warfare, so even these fireworks were not entirely peaceful.

The first evidence for gunpowder is in about the 9th century, and consists of a Taoist warning against mixing saltpeter, sulphur, arsenic compounds, and honey (which supplied carbon), on the grounds that burnt hands, faces, and houses had resulted from the experiment. By the beginning of the 10th century, however, there is mention of the use of “fire-drug”, the term later used for gunpowder, in war.

The early gunpowders were low in saltpeter and burned rather than exploding. They seem to have been well established in incendiary bombs, poison smoke bombs, and fire arrows — not exactly peaceful uses — by the eleventh century. At about the same time, a new and noisier kind of firecracker appeared, probably similar to modern firecrackers. Fireworks on frames were known by the 12th century, and may have involved gunpowder.

One kind of fireworks, definitely known by 1264, may have been the first step toward the rocket. This was the “ground-rat”, probably a bamboo tube filled with gunpowder and with a small hole in one end. When lit, it rushed violently around on the ground. (A dud firecracker will sometimes behave in the same way.) The exact date has survived because of an incident in which a ground-rat chased the Emperor’s mother at a fireworks display. Luckily for the officials in charge of the display, the Empress-Mother, though frightened at the time, had a sense of humor and was able to laugh about the incident by the next day.

At some point in the next century, ground-rats of this type were used in warfare. They would certainly have been quite as upsetting to horses as they were to the Empress-Mother, and in addition the military ground-rats were fitted with hooks to catch on clothing.

A ground-rat bouncing around on rough ground would at times take flight for a short distance, and some alert designer of weapons came up with the idea of fastening a ground-rat to an arrow. The result was the first rocket, an arrow that could be fired without a bow. The fireworks designers promptly stole the idea back from the military, removing the arrowhead and adding a gunpowder bomb, whether plain or packed with material that would produce colored lights. Modern flights to the moon and planets are based on exactly the same principle, though the details are more complex.

By the middle of the 13th century Dominican and Franciscan friars were traveling to the Mongol court at Karakorum. One of these friars may have sent a package of firecrackers to Roger Bacon, whose writings indicate a knowledge of firecrackers as children’s toys, an awareness of the ingredients of the gunpowder within them, and a realization of the military potential of larger versions. The Chinese, however, had at that time already been using cast-iron bombs filled with high-nitrate gunpowder for a century or more.