printing press, first invented by Johannes Gutenberg (1398–1468), was eventually wholly adopted as the standard in China, yet the tradition of woodblock printing remains popular in East Asian countries. Other achievements in science and technology Shen Kuo described the phenomena of natural predator insects controlling the population of pests, the latter of which had the potential to wreak havoc upon the agricultural base of China. Shen also wrote about advancements in metallurgy. While visiting the iron-producing district at Cizhou in 1075, Shen described the "partial decarburization" method of reforging cast iron under a cold blast, which Hartwell, Needham, and Wertime state is the predecessor of the Bessemer process. Shen was worried about deforestation due to the needs of the iron industry and ink makers using pine soot in the production process, so he suggested for the latter an alternative of petroleum, which he believed was "produced inexhaustibly within the earth". Shen used the soot from the smoke of burned petroleum fuel (石油 Shíyóu, "rock oil" as Shen called it) to invent a new, more durable type of writing ink; the Ming dynasty pharmacologist Li Shizhen (1518–1593) wrote that Shen's ink was "lustrous like lacquer, and superior to that made from pinewood lamp-black," or the soot from pinewood. Beliefs and philosophy Shen Kuo was much in favor of philosophical Daoist notions which challenged the authority of empirical science in his day. Although much could be discerned through empirical observation and recorded study, Daoism asserted that the secrets of the universe were boundless, something that scientific investigation could merely express in fragments and partial understandings. Shen Kuo referred to the ancient Daoist I Ching in explaining the spiritual processes and attainment of foreknowledge that cannot be attained through "crude traces", which he likens to mathematical astronomy. Nathan Sivin proposes that Shen was the first in history to "make a clear distinction between our unconnected experiences and the unitary causal world we postulate to explain them," which Biderman and Scharfstein state is arguably inherent in the works of Heraclitus, Plato, and Democritus as well. Shen was a firm believer in destiny and prognostication, and made rational explanations for the relations between them. Shen held a special interest in fate, mystical divination, bizarre phenomena, yet warned against the tendency to believe that all matters in life were preordained. When describing an event where lightning had struck a house and all the wooden walls did