Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I'm one of the first invention capitalists. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Capitalists
First
Invention
Related Quotes:
" If people don't find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Important
Doing
People
" Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Wrong
Making Money
Money
" I've been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue. But barbecue's interesting, because it's one of these cult foods like chili, or bouillabaisse. Various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to - there's tremendous traditions; there's secrecy. "
Nathan Myhrvold
People
Food
World
" 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
Powerful
Business
New
" 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. "
Nathan Myhrvold
People
Early
Software
" I think you would find almost anyone who stands up for their patent rights has been called a patent troll. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Find
Think
Up
" Our goal was to show people a vision of food they hadn't seen before. So, I had this idea of... let's cut all these things in half, and show a picture of the food in the pan, in the oven. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Vision
People
Goal
" 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
Level
You
Going
" 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
Intelligence
Go
People
" The techniques of being an Internet visionary are just like those of lower-tech fortunetellers through the ages. A technological visionary must tell people what they want to hear, because your company's stock won't rise if you spout an unpopular vision to analysts. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Internet
You
People
" 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
Slow
Movies
Drops
" Near Marseilles in the south of France, bouillabaisse is a cult food. In Toulouse and Carcassonne, the bean-based stew cassoulet is a cult food. Spain has paella and a number of others. Italy has so many, its cuisine is practically defined by them. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Italy
Number
Food
" If your kitchen smells good, your food lost something. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Smells
Good
Kitchen
" People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped barbecuing astronomers for saying so, turning their spits with human-rights activists instead. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Time
Earth
People
" It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Things
Happen
Boring
" 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
Easy
Always
Tough
" I never was a popular kid in class. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Never
Popular
Kid
" 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
New York
Law
Travel
" One of the things that I love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites. Because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations, and see where they succeeded and where they failed. Use science to, you know, work backwards and say, 'Well, really, what were they thinking?' "
Nathan Myhrvold
Opportunity
Love
Travel
" We should have more invention. "
Nathan Myhrvold
More
Should
Invention
" If I want popularity, I go to a chef's convention. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Popularity
Go
Want
" 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
Technology
Science
Problems
" 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
Place
Funny
Men
" 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
Free
Content
Movies
" If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun! "
Nathan Myhrvold
You
Pretty
Somebody
" 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
Good
You
World
" 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
Race
Enough
Song
" 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
Why
Cooking
Energy
" 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
America
Earth
Checks And Balances
" If you talk about sous-vide, then you have to talk about food safety, and microbiology, and heat. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Then
Food
Heat