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" One of the problems with posing a 'bold new plan' is that you can't just extrapolate from previous plans. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Bold
Plan
Plans
Related Quotes:
" Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel. So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It's the reactor of your dreams. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Your Dreams
Powerful
Important
" Microsoft, Apple, Facebook all bought huge patent portfolios to further their strategic game. They're doing what I'm doing! "
Nathan Myhrvold
Microsoft
Facebook
Doing
" If your kitchen smells good, your food lost something. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Smells
Good
Kitchen
" 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
Limit
America
You
" 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
Great
Victory
War
" 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
" 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
Computers
Free
Internet
" 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
" I'm one of the first invention capitalists. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Capitalists
First
Invention
" 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
Copy
Early
Research
" 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
" 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
Interesting
You
Want
" 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
Doing
Black
Better
" 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
Without
Resources
Power
" In politics, religion and other areas of culture, people disagree on the worth of competing ideas. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that can determine in a robust way which ideas match the real world, and which ones can be ruled out. So conflicting ideologies persist indefinitely. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Politics
People
Culture
" Age can be wonderful for red wine, but not for spacecraft. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Wonderful
Age
Red
" 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
People
You
News
" 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
" The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? "
Nathan Myhrvold
Principle
Law
Difference
" 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
" 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
Fun
You
Enough
" I never was a popular kid in class. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Never
Popular
Kid
" One of the greatest things that Apple and Jobs were very good at doing was daring to do the very different thing. It's what I did with my cookbook, frankly. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Different
Greatest
Good
" When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.' "
Nathan Myhrvold
First
People
Think
" 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
" Some article called me the most feared man in Silicon Valley. Good Lord! Why? My teenage boys got a kick out of it: 'Dad, how could this be true? You're not even the most feared person in this house.' "
Nathan Myhrvold
Be True
Good
Man
" 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
" It's really hard to compete with Apple on pure coolness, and if you do, you're probably going to use some of the things they pioneered. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Going
Pure
You
" 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
" 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
Always
Cool
Want