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" Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Asteroid
Need
Will
Related Quotes:
" 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
Look
Find
Dirt
" 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
" 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
" 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
Government
Job
Dangerous
" Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Children
Parent
People
" We should have more invention. "
Nathan Myhrvold
More
Should
Invention
" Software-industry battles are fought by highly paid and out-of-shape nerds furiously pounding computer keyboards while they guzzle diet Coke. The stakes aren't very dramatic. Life? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness? Nope, it's about stock options. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Liberty
Life
Battles
" 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
Long
Like
You
" I never was a popular kid in class. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Never
Popular
Kid
" 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
Nobody
Will
Present
" I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it... Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Way
Never
Business
" If I want popularity, I go to a chef's convention. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Popularity
Go
Want
" If your kitchen smells good, your food lost something. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Smells
Good
Kitchen
" 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
" There's no way I'm going to stand up for bad ingredients. We love seasonal ingredients. It's a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Great
Stand Up
People
" 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
Some People
Eat
Good
" 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 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 very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing - in the case of patents, many that own them aren't in a good position to take the next step. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Good
Step
Hard
" I'm one of the first invention capitalists. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Capitalists
First
Invention
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 people don't find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Important
Doing
People
" 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
" Every serious nuclear accident involves operator error, so you want to eliminate the operator altogether. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Accident
Want
Serious
" No CEO ever says, 'Damnit, we need to increase research!' I want to encourage them to do that. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Encourage
Need
Want