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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

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" My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas. And we do that for a couple of reasons. We invent for fun - invention is a lot of fun to do - and we also invent for profit. The two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it isn't fun, you wouldn't have the time to do it. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" Pressure cookers are relatively inexpensive, they're in every kitchen store, your grandma probably had one, but a lot of people don't. A pressure cooker is interesting because by pressurizing the vessel, you're able to cook much hotter than the boiling point of water, and still have water be present. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it... Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" I'm one of the first invention capitalists. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" Mankind is not special by virtue of our address in the universe, or what spins around us, or because life originated here. Slowly, but surely, we've been compelled to renounce the comfort of these beliefs. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" 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

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" 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

" There's no way I'm going to stand up for bad ingredients. We love seasonal ingredients. It's a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" The best value for money in cooking equipment, in my mind, is first a digital scale and digital thermometer. They're both about $20. They help you cook so much more accurately that they're both enormously valuable. "

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. "

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. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

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? "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" There is a one-in-300 chance that Earth will be struck on March 16, 2880, by an asteroid large enough to destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human race. But, on the bright side, Prince could re-release his hit song with the new refrain 'We're gonna party like its twenty-eight seventy-nine.' "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

Checks And Balances

" 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

" Technological 'revolutions' don't really overthrow anything - they simply append a new and dynamic market to that which went before. "

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. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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. "

Nathan Myhrvold