When the tool is more interesting than the thing it was designed for....

I remember learning cursive handwriting in 3rd grade and being very excited about whatever letter I was going to learn next.  It seems obvious to me that cursive was designed to be faster than print since you don't have to lift your pen, but now that computers have taken over, the advantage of speed that cursive writing once had has now become moot.  

The capital G in particular is one of my favorite cursive letters I think.  It's just pretty to look at.  And cursive in general is pretty I think.  While it was designed for speed, now it seems to be more elegant than anything else.  It kind of seems fun to think about printing cursive G's on that old gray multi-lined handwriting practice paper for a day, even though it would serve no practical purpose.  

So the tool once used for enhancing communication speed (cursive) seems more interesting to me than the ability to print a message quickly.  The yanghaiying YouTube channel, with its sporadic focus on Chinese calligraphy, kind of reminds me of the elegance of cursive writing.

Moving on, I know some mathematics was developed as a tool for engineering or some other related field, and other mathematics was developed for its own sake, but often I feel that mathematical tools are more interesting than whatever they were designed to accomplish.  I know very little about Fourier series for instance, but it's my understanding their initial function was to deal with heat equations.  The 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel instead focuses on how they can be used to draw pictures with circles.