Smelting Youth

Daniel just announced to me that he has a furnace.

Normally, I would worry, but after a bit of interrogation, I found out that this furnace is part of his inner-world, nourished by a complex, bizarre video game that he and Ian play that sounds vaguely like the re-invention of industry and agriculture.  In the same breath that he told me about his new metallurgical enterprise, he also mentioned that today he skinned a sheep.  I'm presuming that the babysitter might have mentioned something when I got home if the sheep had somehow been "non-virtual."  Of course, I'm still worried about this exciting new world of Daniel and Ian's, but not as much as I would be if Daniel had a physical furnace in his possession.

Daniel is pleased with his furnace because he can make iron with it.  I took the opportunity to look up iron in Wikipedia.  I must say, Daniel had far more of a clue about it than I did; I thought steel was some kind simple recipe involving iron and some other metal; Daniel believed it was composed of a large number of metals, and of course he was right.

Tonight we learned that China is the greatest producer of steel in the world, with Russia, the U.S., India and Japan only in the second tier.  Daniel asked me if the Chinese perhaps don't know how powerful they are.  I think they know - especially since they're not busy establishing Utopia in the Middle East, which gives them little more to do than Boring-Old Economic Expansion.  I assured Daniel that the Chinese are very smart.

I'm pleased to see Daniel's intellect come to life around this.  Normally, Daniel is mostly interested in military sciences and the technologies that support them.  Of course that scares me more than this new game where seven- and nine-year-olds relive the Dawn of the Iron Age.  But now that he has a furnace, Daniel's also interested in physical matters beyond weaponry.  In fact, he asked me his first intellectual question ever about  metals:  presumably he already knows about nickel, because he wanted to learn more about the metal known as "dime."

(June 20, 2013)