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It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do.
Nathan Myhrvold -
Software-industry battles are fought by highly paid and out-of-shape nerds furiously pounding computer keyboards while they guzzle diet Coke. The stakes aren't very dramatic. Life? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness? Nope, it's about stock options.
Nathan Myhrvold
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One of the ugly secrets of the renewable-energy industry is that its products make no economic sense unless they are highly subsidized.
Nathan Myhrvold -
Don't let the secret recipe die with the inventor.
Nathan Myhrvold -
Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid.
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.
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.
Nathan Myhrvold -
In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.
Nathan Myhrvold
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We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it.
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.
Nathan Myhrvold -
The whole hardware industry has experienced the phenomenon in which every time computers get cheaper, they appeal to a new set of users; every time they get more powerful, old customers upgrade.
Nathan Myhrvold -
The dilemma for early 21st century journalism is this: Who will pay for the news?
Nathan Myhrvold -
Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing.
Nathan Myhrvold -
The Internet is the ultimate vanity-publishing medium, and therefore, the ultimate place for those of us who like to watch. The Internet can reach an audience at lower cost than any medium before it.
Nathan Myhrvold
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If you have two steaks, one that's an inch thick, one that's 2 inches thick, how much longer does the thicker one need to cook? It's four times as long. It goes roughly like the square. How come cookbooks don't tell you that?
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.
Nathan Myhrvold -
Being a visionary is a new profession, but it is really just a variant on fortunetelling, which may be the world's oldest. And its marketing appeal is similar - people will pay for reassurance about the unknown.
Nathan Myhrvold -
If people don't find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important.
Nathan Myhrvold -
Many of the things the slow food people honor were innovations within historical times. Somebody had to be the first European to eat a tomato.
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.
Nathan Myhrvold
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We should have more invention.
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!
Nathan Myhrvold -
I think you would find almost anyone who stands up for their patent rights has been called a patent troll.
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.
Nathan Myhrvold