How I find ideas in trivial details. The guy who stares at screws.

http://ninjasandrobots.com/i-like-screws

by nate • 14 years ago

52 15 14 years ago

Mz• 14 years ago

I can relate to the first part, the part about being a kid in his dad's shop with nothing better to do but examine the small details of things around him. But I didn't wonder at the long journey a screw took to wind up in a hinge. I created imaginary worlds where the crack in a bathroom floor tile was a cliff on an alien planet where all kinds of drama unfolded before me.

Maybe that bodes well for me to have a future telling fictional stories of some sort.:-)

mrgreenfur• 14 years ago

Why is this valuable at all? Has nothing to do with anything... Is this what people think is good blogging?

adam• 14 years ago

Why the snark? There is much talk on HN and elsewhere about how new ideas are generated, how companies try to be "innovative," etc. This is just his take on one way he comes up with new ideas. I don't have the same fascination with screws, but he obviously didn't mean it to be literal for everyone to do the exact same thing. It certainly made me think about both the physical things and processes all around me that I constantly take for granted. Questioning these things is how we are always evolving and improving. I'd say reminding people of this is valuable.

dthunt• 14 years ago

I'm with GP on this one. Most HN articles these days are fluff. These aren't bad bloggythings for the most part, but I'd just as soon see these things show up on a more general aggregator. (This is, in part, my failure to recognize the HN audience itself changing over the last year and a half).

Fluff isn't necessarily bad, in that it's a discussion point, but it is very bad for this format of site.

pwpwp• 14 years ago

That Kudos shit even fires if you come close to it, not only if you actually move over the kudos shit circle.

Sorry, but I find this highly annoying and indecent.

roryokane• 14 years ago

That kudos circle is a feature of the blog platform, Svtble. I agree that it is terribly designed. Svtble’s creator wrote an unconvincing defense of Kudos: http://dcurt.is/unkudo. See discussion of Kudos on Svtble’s original announcement story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742654, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3743125.

nickgeiger• 14 years ago

I didn't know what you were talking about until I went back and accidentally kudos'd the post myself. The creators "defense" sounds more like an FU or maybe that the whole thing is really more of a joke. In the end, I'm not upset that I accidentally kudos'd since to me it's pretty clear that the whole feature is meaningless anyway.

naner• 14 years ago

I think everyone misfires a kudos on their first visit to a Svtble site. They could at least add an undo button.

jerf• 14 years ago

For some reason, traditionally, this sort of observation is made about pencils. http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html is one of the more famous examples.

nate• 14 years ago

Thanks for posting that jerf. Someone sent that to me this afternoon as well. I've also had a couple people mention this book Mezzanine of a similar ilk:

http://www.amazon.com/Mezzanine-ebook/dp/B003OYIG1O/ref=wl_i...

Richard Feynman also has a neat bit (the whole interview is awesome) about teaching his kids. He mentions a game he'd play with his son where one person would pretend to be miniature and describe the experience. The other person would need to guess the miniature person's location.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXiOg5-l3fk

zafka• 14 years ago

I can relate. I believe that this ability to think about mundane items, is the root of creativity. I am still fascinated by a story my uncle told me about a man who had a little metal casting setup in his garage, and made lug nuts for semi-tractors. Who would have thunk it? Since then I have often thought that this would be a way to start a business. Pick one small part of a piece of machinery and develop a way to make it. Then keep adding parts until you "owned" an entire vertical market.

astrodust• 14 years ago

The amazing thing about screws is how they're made. Imagine you were tasked with producing them. Where would you even start? Making a nail seems like an easy process in comparison, it's basically a bit of wire with one end blunted and the other sharpened, but a screw is an entirely different beast.

Deconstructing objects and imagining how they are constructed is an important exercise for anyone serious about their craft.

dhughes• 14 years ago

I wonder if I should ask him about Robertson (square)screw heads versus Phillips (star or X) screw heads or will I dredge-up the Canadian versus US war?

It reminds me of Shelbyville turnips versus Springfiled lemons.

nodrama• 14 years ago

"One thing I’ve noticed about myself is that a lot of things interest me.

I’m not entriely sure this is a thing that can be taught."

All kids have this curiosity; the parents are the ones that kill it ("don't do that!", "behave!", "you are not allowed!")

jsilence• 14 years ago

I can relate. Ever so often I think about how effortless my life is. Someone picked the coffee beans. Someone fed a cow. Someone roasted te beans. Someone drove a truck. Someon build a factory where the beans are made into instant coffee. And so on.

All I did was drink the coffee.

How I find ideas in trivial details. The guy who stares at screws.

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