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" 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

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" 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

" Most estimates of the mortality risk posed by asteroid impacts put it at about the same risk as flying in a commercial airliner. However, you have to remember that this is like the entire human race riding the plane - it is one of the few risks that really could wipe us all out. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA. "

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

" If you have two steaks, one that's an inch thick, one that's 2 inches thick, how much longer does the thicker one need to cook? It's four times as long. It goes roughly like the square. How come cookbooks don't tell you that? "

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

" 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

" Being a visionary is a new profession, but it is really just a variant on fortunetelling, which may be the world's oldest. And its marketing appeal is similar - people will pay for reassurance about the unknown. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" I have a very pragmatic approach to diets. Ones you can't stick to don't do you any good. Some people say, 'Just eat half of what's on your plate,' but I can't do that! "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" Nobody wants a prediction that the future will be more or less like the present, even if that is, statistically speaking, an excellent prediction. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" We collectively have a special place in our heart for the manned space flight program - Apollo nostalgia is one element, but that is only part of it. American culture worships explorers - look at the fame of Lewis and Clark, for example. The American people want to think of themselves as supporting exploration. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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