Nathan Myhrvold Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• The magic words 'on the Internet,' if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Magic, Normal, Internet

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Long, People, News

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• Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Lobster, Tails, Freeze

  "After Microsoft, Bringing a High-Tech Eye to Professional Kitchens". Interview with Kenneth Chang, www.nytimes.com. November 16, 2009.

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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

  Secret, Energy, Ugly

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• The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Girl, Boys, Ideas

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• An efficient government is dangerous in the hands of the wrong man. Sadly, the right sort of man never seems interested in the job.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Jobs, Men, Hands

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• No CEO ever says, 'Damnit, we need to increase research!' I want to encourage them to do that.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Needs, Research, Want

  8 Copy quote

• 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?

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Jobs, Character, Ebay

  4 Copy quote

• Near Marseilles in the south of France, bouillabaisse is a cult food. In Toulouse and Carcassonne, the bean-based stew cassoulet is a cult food. Spain has paella and a number of others. Italy has so many, its cuisine is practically defined by them.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Numbers, France, Cuisine

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• When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Thinking, People, Insane

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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

  Two, Squares, Long

  "Microsoft's Former CTO Takes on Modernist Cuisine" by Mark McClusky, www.wired.com. February 28, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• If you had a really good - battery, it wouldn't matter that the sun goes down at night and the wind stops blowing sometimes. But at the moment, battery technology is nowhere near good enough to use at utility scale.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Night, Technology, Wind

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• 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

  Rights, People, Levels

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• 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

  Zero, Two, People

  "The Physicist" by Stewart Brand, www.wired.com. September 1, 1995.

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• I've been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue. But barbecue's interesting, because it's one of these cult foods like chili, or bouillabaisse. Various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to - there's tremendous traditions; there's secrecy.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Team, Interesting, People

  17 Copy quote

• I have a very pragmatic approach to diets. Ones you can't stick to don't do you any good. Some people say, 'Just eat half of what's on your plate,' but I can't do that!

  Nathan Myhrvold

  People, Sticks, Half

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• 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

  Real, People, Random Things

  12 Copy quote

• Anybody who can afford a box of business cards can afford a Web site. Any company with an 800 number can move its services to the Web for peanuts by comparison. The extreme case of corporate promotion is to strip away all other aspects of your business and sell goods or services via the Net alone, as amazon.com has done with books.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Book, Moving, Numbers

  5 Copy quote

• A blowtorch is a wonderful thing. You can get one of those for about 25 bucks at Home Depot. And there's a ton of things that you can use a blowtorch for, in browning a steak or touching up the browning of a chicken or making creme brulee.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Home, Touching, Use

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• Most visions of extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional extraterrestrials of 'Star Trek' or a hundred other space operas are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Running, Stars, Men

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• Movies such as 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Front Page' portrayed an era when driven newspapermen would do anything to get a story. The U.K.'s rough-and-tumble Fleet Street remains something of a throwback to that era, as demonstrated by the recent phone-hacking scandal - which led to the demise of yet another century-old paper, the 'News of the World.'

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Phones, Stories, Demise

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• 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.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Impact, Race, Risk

  "We're All Gonna Die!" by Gregg Easterbrook, www.wired.com. July 1, 2003.

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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.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Strong, Use, Rationale

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• In politics, religion and other areas of culture, people disagree on the worth of competing ideas. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that can determine in a robust way which ideas match the real world, and which ones can be ruled out. So conflicting ideologies persist indefinitely.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Real, Ideas, People

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• Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Children, Years, People

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