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" Records were replaced by CDs, and lead type died in favor of computerized fonts. However, each had a 100-year ride of popularity, so you can't feel too bad for them. "
Nathan Myhrvold
You
Ride
Popularity
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" 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
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" Anybody who can afford a box of business cards can afford a Web site. Any company with an 800 number can move its services to the Web for peanuts by comparison. The extreme case of corporate promotion is to strip away all other aspects of your business and sell goods or services via the Net alone, as amazon.com has done with books. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Alone
Business
Cards
" The best value for money in cooking equipment, in my mind, is first a digital scale and digital thermometer. They're both about $20. They help you cook so much more accurately that they're both enormously valuable. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Help
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Value
" Many of the things the slow food people honor were innovations within historical times. Somebody had to be the first European to eat a tomato. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Honor
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" 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
" 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
Elections
Truth
Successful
" 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
Night
Energy
Day
" 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
Control
You
Knowing
" Chefs think about what it's like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Why
Food
Asking
" 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
" 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
Heat
Cook
Food
" 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
Audience
Internet
Reach
" 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
" 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
More
Efficiency
Economy
" 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
Theory
Field
Physics
" 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
" If you talk about sous-vide, then you have to talk about food safety, and microbiology, and heat. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Then
Food
Heat
" 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
" 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
" 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
You
Service
Free
" Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Still
Want
Science
" 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
" 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
New
People
Unknown
" I never was a popular kid in class. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Never
Popular
Kid
" 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
You
See
Plants
" The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Potential
Live
Better
" We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Only
Cookbook
Partial
" 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