QUOTES by Nathan Myhrvold
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
The dilemma for early 21st century journalism is this: Who will pay for the news?
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster.com, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free?
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
It's really hard to compete with Apple on pure coolness, and if you do, you're probably going to use some of the things they pioneered.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
The best value for money in cooking equipment, in my mind, is first a digital scale and digital thermometer. They're both about $20. They help you cook so much more accurately that they're both enormously valuable.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
I wanted to figure out how long to cook things. I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat is transferred through food.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Mankind is not special by virtue of our address in the universe, or what spins around us, or because life originated here. Slowly, but surely, we've been compelled to renounce the comfort of these beliefs.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
We pay for content that we like, and we like the content we pay for. It's a lot more satisfying to pay $7.50 for Steven Spielberg's next epic than it is to watch my home movies for free. Even for me.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
The prize for ultimate inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that our 'leaders' are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on Earth.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Efficiency in government is a more elusive concept than efficiency in the private economy, which may be measured relatively easily as output per units of input. What is the government's 'output?'
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors.
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Micropayments are great if you use them for a product or service with certain properties. It must be one where you can get away with usage-based pricing, and where there is a strong rationale for making it cheap, yet not free.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
The magic words 'on the Internet,' if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Suppose that 'Unsolved Mysteries' called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people - like the lost identical twin, only younger than you.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
The techniques of being an Internet visionary are just like those of lower-tech fortunetellers through the ages. A technological visionary must tell people what they want to hear, because your company's stock won't rise if you spout an unpopular vision to analysts.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
We collectively have a special place in our heart for the manned space flight program - Apollo nostalgia is one element, but that is only part of it. American culture worships explorers - look at the fame of Lewis and Clark, for example. The American people want to think of themselves as supporting exploration.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented - putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Most estimates of the mortality risk posed by asteroid impacts put it at about the same risk as flying in a commercial airliner. However, you have to remember that this is like the entire human race riding the plane - it is one of the few risks that really could wipe us all out.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
One of the problems with posing a 'bold new plan' is that you can't just extrapolate from previous plans.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Every serious nuclear accident involves operator error, so you want to eliminate the operator altogether.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
What you do on a dinosaur expedition is you hike and look at the ground. You find bones sticking out of the dirt and, once you see something, you dig.
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One of the greatest things that Apple and Jobs were very good at doing was daring to do the very different thing. It's what I did with my cookbook, frankly.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
If we could create invention capitalism, that would be a helluva legacy, that would be a helluva thing to do... We could actually turbocharge the rate at which the world invents things.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun!
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas. And we do that for a couple of reasons. We invent for fun - invention is a lot of fun to do - and we also invent for profit. The two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it isn't fun, you wouldn't have the time to do it.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that's what it is. It's horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don't get any erosion, and you don't see any dinosaurs.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie 'Contact,' which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
One of the things that I love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites. Because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations, and see where they succeeded and where they failed. Use science to, you know, work backwards and say, 'Well, really, what were they thinking?'
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Some article called me the most feared man in Silicon Valley. Good Lord! Why? My teenage boys got a kick out of it: 'Dad, how could this be true? You're not even the most feared person in this house.'
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel. So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It's the reactor of your dreams.
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Microsoft, Apple, Facebook all bought huge patent portfolios to further their strategic game. They're doing what I'm doing!
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
If people don't get paid for their inventions, that's not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren't in a position to take them to the next level. If you don't enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
If people don't find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
I was good at math and science, and I got lots of degrees in lots of things, but in a parallel universe, I probably became a chef.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it.
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold
If I say I've got two versions of Word - that old one from 1982 that's perfect, with zero defects; or the new one that's got all this cool new stuff, but there might be a few bugs in it - people always want the new one. But I wouldn't want them to operate a plane I was on with software that happened to be the latest greatest release!
Quote by -Nathan Myhrvold