"Comparing the necessity of firing Porcelain to a high temp 1200+ degrees to make it durable and useful to the travails and suffering of humankind?"

I almost feel silly answering this one as the difference instantly appeared to me and should be obvious to even the most casual observer, I will of course do so anyway. I will first speak for a moment about porcelain as we will need to establish some basic facts in order for you to understand what metrics I used in my comparative analysis between it and the painful or laborious nature of human suffering. I feel I would be doing a disservice to my followers if we only used the 1200+ degree attribute of porcelain in this discussion so I will intersperse others as well throughout the dialog.


As you stated porcelain is fired to at least 1200c or 2350 degree Fahrenheit but that is not the only thing about porcelain that is unique. To truly be porcelain there is more than just a different firing method than normal ceramic and while the additional heat is needed to provide the same amount of vitrification, or glassiness it is, as I said, only one attribute. True porcelain also contains kaolin (sometimes called china clay), feldspar, silica and aluminum oxide. I bet you never thought your high school geology class would come in handy while reading this blog huh? This is unlike traditional ceramic which is most often ball clay, which contains free silica, quartz, alumina-silicates and other minerals that are beneficial to the final product along with a lot of organic materials. As you may guess, the color of the ball clay is red. Anyway I think I do need to mention that there are three main kinds of porcelain: (1) hard-paste porcelain, (2) soft-paste porcelain, and (3) bone china. Hard-paste porcelain, which is sometimes called true porcelain or natural porcelain, has always been the model and ideal of porcelain makers. Soft-paste porcelain, sometimes called artificial porcelain, was developed in Europe in an attempt to imitate Chinese hard-paste porcelain. Bone china is basically made by adding bone ash (burned animal bones) to kaolin and petuntse. English porcelain makers discovered this combination of ingredients about 1750, and England still produces nearly all the world's bone china. Though not as hard as true porcelain, bone china is more durable than soft-paste porcelain. The bone ash greatly increases the translucence of the porcelain.

It is the type of porcelain first developed by the Chinese that resists melting far better than other kinds of porcelain. For this reason, it can be fired at higher temperatures. These hot temperatures cause the body and the glaze to become one. When hard-paste porcelain is broken, it is impossible to distinguish the body from the glaze. This also makes for a very low absorption rate, less than .05% which is very low. Because it is the hardest ceramic product, porcelain is used for electrical insulators and laboratory equipment as well. I want to go back to the high temperatures for a second as well, porcelain is basically made from a mixture of two ingredients -- kaolin and petuntse. Kaolin is a pure white clay that forms when the mineral feldspar breaks down. Petuntse is a type of feldspar found only in China. It is ground to a fine powder and mixed with kaolin. This mixture is fired at extreme temperatures and causes the petuntse to vitrify, that means that it melts together and forms a nonporous, natural glass. The kaolin, which is highly resistant to heat, does not melt and therefore allows the item to hold its shape. The process is complete when the petuntse fuses itself to the kaolin. remains somewhat porous. Breaking a piece of soft-paste porcelain reveals a grainy body covered with a glassy layer of glaze.

So by now you are probably wondering - what are the analogs of that when compared to basic human suffering, well let me tell ya. I will start with the high temperature that porcelain has to be fired, one could, and I do, equate that to the white hot speed at which we live our lives. As I spoke about the other day I am concerned we have outpaced our evolutionary capabilities and we live our lives at a pace that will end up killing us. With the ever increasing speed of our lives and due to simple friction the temperature will continue to go up, if for example we were to say today we are being fired at 2350 degrees due to friction where do you think we will be, temperature wise, in 10 years – or 20? We will have reached a point in our evolutionary path that has us heating up to only slightly cooler than the surface of the sun. Well by now you might be thinking about how hectic life seems, even when compared to your own childhood and it should scare you. When imagining a simpler life we oft times long for the good old days, when things were easier, trouble and care free as well as less complicated. So has the progression of human kind being driven by technological advances or are we actually being tortured by them. So the extremely faced paced lives (that are full of anxiety, troubles and worries) we lead is the analogy to the extremely high temperature at which porcelain must be fired.

But wait there is more, when we talk about porcelain we also to have to think about the ingredients themselves. Kaolin deposits occurred in the Late Cretaceous (about 100 million to 65 million years ago) to Early Paleogene (65 million to 45 million years ago) paleoanthropologically speaking we mammals had not even started our trek to top of the food chain when these sedimentary rocks were derived from weathered igneous and metamorphic rocks were transported by rivers to coastline deltas and to estuarine and back-barrier island locations. So like most things in our world the ingredients have been available since before we were around to combine them into a usable product. Basically that rolls around to our human condition in this way, we have had and always will have everything we need to succeed or run ourselves to extinction and that bond there is just now beginning to show itself to be a potentially more destructive force in nature. If we move onto the types of porcelain we quickly see that there is an easy comparison to us humans, hard, soft and bone. I know hard people and they, as a group, are just no fun for us to be around, suffering for all those around them and for them as well but they are to hard to admit that, I am sad for them for that attribute. The soft people group is another group that suffers, more than they make those around them suffer but I can empathize more with these folks for they are my kind. We only appear soft to hardened humans but we lead fulfilling lives and have learned to control our egos which alleviates some suffering for us. The bone is a magnitude of order more complicated to compare directly so I will not do it in the confines of this blog.

So we still have a few attributes to discuss the electrical insulator reference, the less than .05% moisture absorption and the inability to distinguish between the glaze and the porcelain. The electrical insulator can be equated to our ability to attempt to insulate ourselves from the rigors of our ever increasingly hectic lives. The suffering that could be eliminated by being able to insulate ourselves from this crazy ride we are on could be a save-all for human kind. The moisture absorption rate is a nice contrast to humans, who are made up almost entirely of moisture, I mean 61.8% is water alone so that juxtaposition seems a dichotomy that may not be able to be reconciled, at least by the likes of Mr. Oatmeal. As for the last one, I would like to see what your answer would be to that one – please tell me !