Nathan Myhrvold Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• 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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• Intellectual Ventures is a company that invests in invention.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Intellectual, Venture, Invention

  "Trolling a 'patent troll' with ... trolls" by Helen A.S. Popkin and Helen A.S. Popkin, www.today.com. November 24, 2011.

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• Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Patents, Investing, Making Money

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• My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Careers, Cooking, Microsoft

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• We're more familiar with what economists call an English auction - prices start low and rise as people bid. However, there is also the Dutch auction, where prices start high and go lower until somebody bites. Movies are sold to the audience via a very slow Dutch auction, where each phase between price drops can last weeks or months.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  People, Auctions, Phases

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• 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.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  America, Leader, Balance

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• Regardless of how it's done, transaction costs will continue to plummet as computers get more powerful. Low transaction costs are a wonderful thing if you're in the transaction business. They're wonderful for consumers too, making it cheaper and easier to buy things and creating new things to buy.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Powerful, Creating, Cost

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• Researchers who examined the voting records of wine judges found that 90 percent of the time they give inconsistent ratings to a particular wine when they judge it on multiple occasions.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Wine, Judging, Giving

  "How to Decant Wine with a Blender" by Nathan Myhrvold, www.bloomberg.com. September 23, 2011.

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• 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

  Pursuit Of Happiness, Dramatic Life, Nerd

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• 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?'

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Government, May, Input

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• 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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• The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not?

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Religious, Ivf, Dna

  "Human Clones: Why Not?" by Nathan Myhrvold, www.slate.com. March 14, 1997.

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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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• 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

  Long, Heat, Program

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• Don't let the secret recipe die with the inventor.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Secret, Recipes, Inventor

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• By burning nuclear waste as fuel, we believe we can power the United States cleanly for hundreds of years without ever touching new resources.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Believe, Years, Touching

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• The NeXT purchase is too little too late. The Apple of the past was an innovative company that used software and hardware technology together to redefine the way people experienced computing. That Apple is already dead. Very adroit moves might be able to save the brand name. A company with the letters A-P-P-L-E in its name might survive, but it won't be the Apple of yore.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Moving, Past, Technology

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• Among modern occupations, only cult leaders and TV weathermen rival the technological visionary's ability to retain credibility despite all evidence to the contrary.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Leader, Visionaries, Occupation

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• Elections, for their part, are typically popularity contests rather than measures of candidates' relative competency or effectiveness. Imagine if scientific truth were determined according to which scientist was most popular. To be successful, scientists would have to be charismatic and attractive - and human knowledge would suffer terribly.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Successful, Effectiveness, Suffering

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• Risk is the sort of word that is easy to discuss upfront but tough to handle when it comes time to pay the piper. There will always be some who wimp out and second-guess when the pain hits, but that is a childish reaction.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Pain, Risk, Wimps

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• Nuclear energy is a baseload - meaning it's power that you can run any time you want, day or night - and carbon-free.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Running, Night, Energy

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• 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.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Math, Degrees, Chef

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• Computing has gone from something tiny and specialized to something that affects every walk of life. It doesn't make sense anymore to think of it as just one discipline. I expect to see separate departments of user interface, for example, to start emerging at universities.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Thinking, Discipline, Tiny

  "Lifestreams" by Steve G.Steinberg, www.wired.com. February 01, 1997.

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• Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Discipline, Want, Debate

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