A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
Fingerspitzengefühl: What Elite Tank Commanders, Chess Grandmasters, and Entrepreneurs Have in Common
What are the shared attributes of people who have achieved mastery across different domains? How to become an expert in your field?
Likely you’ve heard the cliched advice: work hard, work smart, be passionate, etc.
Here’s one you probably haven’t heard that’s actually more important: Fingerspitzengefühl.
Fingerspitzengefühl is a German word that translates literally to “finger tips feeling,” but it’s probably easier to understand as “intuitive feel” or “having one’s finger on the pulse.”
A Guide to Miyazaki’s Weird Little Guys
After 12 films, it’s abundantly clear that there are certain things that Hayao Miyazaki really loves. Airplanes! Nature! Capable, hardworking young women! Japan, but also a lot of European aesthetics! The animation legend’s latest movie, The Boy and the Heron, is full of almost all of Miyazaki’s go-to motifs, making it a veritable Easter egg hunt of references and thematic connections to his past work in addition to being one of the most impressive and moving films of the year.
One of the things that Miyazaki loves, and that he returns to in The Boy and the Heron, is a bunch of weird little guys.
A Worker From Berkeley’s Urban Ore Has Opened a Museum Celebrating Wingnuts
The wingnut was invented in the first half of the 19th century and quickly became an indispensable piece of hardware. It lets users fasten bolts by hand, without tools, using little wings jutting out from the nut.
Over time the term became slang, applied pejoratively to mentally unsound people, to political extremists, to freaks, eccentrics and weirdos. But in the Bay Area especially, it’s come to take on a more positive connotation, describing a certain type of creative tinkerer with a DIY, outsider ethos.
Why 1994’s Lair of Squid Was the Weirdest Pack-In Game of All Time
In 1994, Hewlett-Packard released a miracle machine: the HP 200LX pocket-size PC. In the depths of the device, among the MS-DOS productivity apps built into its fixed memory, there lurked a first-person maze game called Lair of Squid. Intrigued by the game, we tracked down its author, Andy Gryc, and probed into the title's mysterious undersea origins.
How Lonely Planet Founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler Revolutionized the Way We Travel
They hadn’t set out to write a guidebook, but soon after they made it to Sydney, they found there was a huge interest in the notes and anecdotes they’d gathered along their route. Others wanted to follow in their footsteps. Demand was so great that the young Wheelers, who were still trying to earn money to buy their flights home to England, started to wonder if they could find a way to charge people for the information they were sharing. One day, Tony suggested they write a guidebook. “But how would we find a publisher?” Maureen asked. “We don’t need a publisher,” Tony replied. “We can publish it ourselves.”
Day Zero Antivirals for Future Pandemics
Our next generation of broad-spectrum antivirals should aspire to these mucus-like qualities. They should target fundamental properties of viruses, they should be prophylactic such that they are effective against the next pandemic virus regardless of its identity, and they should be widespread so that we can immediately pull them off shelves at a pandemic’s onset.
About Half of TikTok Users Under 30 Say They Use It to Keep Up With Politics, News
For 48% of TikTok users ages 18 to 29, this is a major or minor reason why they’re on the platform.
By comparison, 36% of those ages 30 to 49 and even smaller shares of older users say the same.
It is all about the Fingerspitzengefühl!