Every serious nuclear accident involves operator error, so you want to eliminate the operator altogether. Nathan Myhrvold More Quotes by Nathan Myhrvold More Quotes From Nathan Myhrvold 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 past thinking 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 erosion nice weather New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster.com, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free? Nathan Myhrvold ebay jobs character 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 hurt people thinking 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 physics space fields 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 numbers book moving I've been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue. But barbecue's interesting, because it's one of these cult foods like chili, or bouillabaisse. Various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to - there's tremendous traditions; there's secrecy. Nathan Myhrvold team people interesting If people don't get paid for their inventions, that's not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren't in a position to take them to the next level. If you don't enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you. Nathan Myhrvold levels rights people If you had a really good - battery, it wouldn't matter that the sun goes down at night and the wind stops blowing sometimes. But at the moment, battery technology is nowhere near good enough to use at utility scale. Nathan Myhrvold technology wind night If people don't find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important. Nathan Myhrvold threatening important people 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 cuisine france numbers I think that there is a role for food to be art; and when food is art, it can have drama, it can have spectacle, it can be theatrical. It can be this amazing experience. Nathan Myhrvold drama art thinking 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 person you want people Age can be wonderful for red wine, but not for spacecraft. Nathan Myhrvold red wine space age We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it. Nathan Myhrvold partial only cookbook world I never was a popular kid in class. Nathan Myhrvold popular never kid class
