Nathan Myhrvold Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

• 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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• 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 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.

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• 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

  Home, Epic, Watches

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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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• 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

  People, Innovation, Historical

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• Microsoft, Apple, Facebook all bought huge patent portfolios to further their strategic game. They're doing what I'm doing!

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Games, Apples, Patents

  "Nathan Myhrvold's Patent Investing Returns Are Still Lousy" by Nathan Vardi, www.forbes.com. June 19, 2012.

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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

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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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• 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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• 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

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• The world has shown that if you provide capital and expertise to an area that is starved for capital and expertise, really good things will happen.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  World, Good Things, Expertise

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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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• 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

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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

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• Our goal was to show people a vision of food they hadn't seen before. So, I had this idea of... let's cut all these things in half, and show a picture of the food in the pan, in the oven.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Cutting, Ideas, People

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• People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped barbecuing astronomers for saying so, turning their spits with human-rights activists instead.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Religious, Rights, People

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• People who grow up in a region doubtless have a better cultural awareness of their own cuisine, but it's also true that a lot of locals go to McDonald's, Applebee's and the like.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Growing Up, Mcdonalds, People

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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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• The way Moore's Law occurs in computing is really unprecedented in other walks of life. If the Boeing 747 obeyed Moore's Law, it would travel a million miles an hour, it would be shrunken down in size, and a trip to New York would cost about five dollars. Those enormous changes just aren't part of our everyday experience.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  New York, Law, Everyday

  "The Physicist". Interview with Stewart Brand, www.wired.com. September 1, 2005.

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• 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

  Powerful, Computer, Appeals

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

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