Special Guest Blogger: Zhang Heng

After 200,000 years of living in caves and bopping each other over the head with clubs, us homo-sapiens finally got our act together and began using our large brains to make specialist tools, develop cities, agriculture and trade.
Considering the dinosaurs were around for over a hundred million years and never invented anything at all and never evolved beyond walking around and eating each other, us humans have not done bad and i was lucky enough to be born in a time in China when inventing things and catching smallpox were the only pastimes.
I improved on Pi, tinkered with the Chinese calendar to make it more in sync with the seasons, invented the ode-meter and an Earthquake Siesometer before turning my attention to astronomy and documenting 2,500 stars in an extensive star catalog and explained that the Earth, Planets and Sun were all spherical and tried to explain eclipses to people who considered it so far out of the box that i would have to invent binoculars for them to actually see the box.
I began with how the Moon merely reflects the light of the Sun and sometimes the Earth gets between the two, eclipsing the light of the moon so a lunar eclipse and sometimes the moon gets in the way, or eclipses the light of the Earth and Sun and that's a solar eclipse.
After a while of repeating light here, big thing in way, no light there to the local yokels, this got the attention of the Emperor An who summoned me to his court and i assumed it was to relieve me of my head but he made me the Chief Astronomer and paid me a handsome salary of 600 bushels of grain.
Despite all my other inventions, my most satisfying was the earthquake weather-vane. China was prone to Earthquakes which we knew was down to the giant frog which was holding up the Earth twitching which shook the earth and when the frog's twitch manifested itself hundred of miles away, we wouldn't find out for days and by the time help arrived there, everyone was dead so i produced something which could indicate where an earthquake had happened.
It was a vase with an inverted pendulum that tipped in the direction of a detected earthquake, which triggered the mouth of one of eight dragons holding a ball to drop it, showing the direction of the tremors and luckily we didn't have to wait too long until a ball of the North Western facing dragon dropped, indicating an earthquake in that region.    
As there was no tremor felt in our location, my political enemies who thought me way too much of a smart-arse anyway, were briefly able to relish the failure of my device until a messenger arrived shortly afterwards to report that an earthquake had occurred about 310 miles away in the northwest region of Longxi, the same direction that my device had indicated.
I was later sent to serve as administrator of the city of Hejian, and briefly returned to the Emperor's court before my death months later but my earthquake invention was the first step in making frog related quakes more manageable and was light years ahead of those dozy Japanese who thought they were caused by a giant catfish living beneath the Earth's surface thrashing about, i know, a fish!! Those crazy Japs, so scientifically backwards.