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" It's impossible that we're alone in the universe. Every time we think we're more special than others, we're proven wrong. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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" 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

" I think you would find almost anyone who stands up for their patent rights has been called a patent troll. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" The simplest fix for better grilling is to line the inside of your barbecue with tin foil. It dramatically affects how evenly the heat is distributed. That crusty black hibachi or Weber grill is doing your food no favors. "

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

" 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

" 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

" What you do on a dinosaur expedition is you hike and look at the ground. You find bones sticking out of the dirt and, once you see something, you dig. "

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

" 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

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" Politicians don't like to face unpleasant realities. In truth, nobody does, but as individuals, we have no choice; if we neglect to plan ahead, we are held accountable. Fail to meet your responsibilities at work, and you get fired. Ignore your car's gas gauge, and you get stranded. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

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

" 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

" No CEO ever says, 'Damnit, we need to increase research!' I want to encourage them to do that. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

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

" The Internet is the ultimate vanity-publishing medium, and therefore, the ultimate place for those of us who like to watch. The Internet can reach an audience at lower cost than any medium before it. "

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

" 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. "

Nathan Myhrvold