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All Quotes by author - Nathan Myhrvold

" 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. "

" Age can be wonderful for red wine, but not for spacecraft. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Chefs think about what it's like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works. "

" 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! "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" 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. "

" Every serious nuclear accident involves operator error, so you want to eliminate the operator altogether. "

" For relatively modest amounts of sulfur dioxide injected into the atmosphere, you could easily cool Earth by 1% or more, if you want. "

" 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! "

" If I want popularity, I go to a chef's convention. "

" If people don't find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important. "

" 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. "

" If we could create invention capitalism, that would be a helluva legacy, that would be a helluva thing to do... We could actually turbocharge the rate at which the world invents things. "

" 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. "

" If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun! "

" 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? "

" If your kitchen smells good, your food lost something. "

" If you talk about sous-vide, then you have to talk about food safety, and microbiology, and heat. "

" If you want to do interesting software, you have to have a bunch of people do it, because the amount of software that one person can do isn't that interesting. "

" 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! "

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