Nathan Myhrvold quotes - page 2

Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock. (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. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
Intellectual Ventures is a company that invests in invention. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
Nuclear energy is a baseload - meaning it's power that you can run any time you want, day or night - and carbon-free. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
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. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
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. View quote
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. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
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)
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? View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
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. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less! View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
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. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
Nobody wants a prediction that the future will be more or less like the present, even if that is, statistically speaking, an excellent prediction. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
The first thing that is not obvious to people is global warming is a less-than-1% effect. It's like being shortchanged at the bank by a penny every dollar. Over a long period of time with lots of transactions, that piles up. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
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? View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
It's very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing - in the case of patents, many that own them aren't in a good position to take the next step. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
If you talk about sous-vide, then you have to talk about food safety, and microbiology, and heat. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
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)
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. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
When I was about nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And I went to the library and got this whole pile of books. I'd love to say it all turned out great. It didn't. But, sort of, from that point on, whenever there was serious cooking at home, I was the one who did it. View quote
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. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold
My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking. View quote
Nathan Myhrvold