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

Nathan Myhrvold

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" Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that's what it is. It's horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don't get any erosion, and you don't see any dinosaurs. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for. "

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. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways. "

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. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" We should have more invention. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" Why pay a fee for Internet content when a million free sites are just a click away? There's no incentive until people are too addicted to the Net to turn off their computers, yet are bored with what's available. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" 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. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" Micropayments are great if you use them for a product or service with certain properties. It must be one where you can get away with usage-based pricing, and where there is a strong rationale for making it cheap, yet not free. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

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

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. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented - putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" 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

" 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