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" 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
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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. "
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Job
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" 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
" 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. "
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Still
Want
Science
" Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Asteroid
Need
Will
" If people don't find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Important
Doing
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 magic words 'on the Internet,' if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Internet
Protect
Magic
" 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
" The whole hardware industry has experienced the phenomenon in which every time computers get cheaper, they appeal to a new set of users; every time they get more powerful, old customers upgrade. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Powerful
Time
Old
" I'm one of the first invention capitalists. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Capitalists
First
Invention
" When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.' "
Nathan Myhrvold
First
People
Think
" 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
" Intellectual Ventures is a company that invests in invention. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Invention
Company
Intellectual
" 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
Science
Doing
Skills
" Pressure cookers are relatively inexpensive, they're in every kitchen store, your grandma probably had one, but a lot of people don't. A pressure cooker is interesting because by pressurizing the vessel, you're able to cook much hotter than the boiling point of water, and still have water be present. "
Nathan Myhrvold
You
Water
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
" 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
" 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 first thing that is not obvious to people is global warming is a less-than-1% effect. It's like being shortchanged at the bank by a penny every dollar. Over a long period of time with lots of transactions, that piles up. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Time
Bank
Long
" 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
" Technological 'revolutions' don't really overthrow anything - they simply append a new and dynamic market to that which went before. "
Nathan Myhrvold
Before
New
Technological
" 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
Products
Sense
Ugly
" 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
" 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
Time
Alone
Universe
" 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
Powerful
Business
New
" 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
" 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
Wine
Process
Results
" 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
" 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
" 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