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

Nathan Myhrvold

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" 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

" 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

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

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

" Three things about water affect almost all of cooking. First are the hydrogen bonds, which is why it has an incredibly high boiling point. Another is that it's a polar molecule, so that it dissolves a lot of things, and there are things that won't mix with it. And then there's how much energy it takes to heat water. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" One of the problems with posing a 'bold new plan' is that you can't just extrapolate from previous plans. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" I never was a popular kid in class. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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. "

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. "

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

" When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.' "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" 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

" 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

" There's a limit to how much you can deploy renewables, like wind or solar. People will talk about getting up to 30 percent of America's power from renewables, but you can't get to 100 percent because of their unreliability. "

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

" 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

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" 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! "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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