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 More Quotes by Nathan Myhrvold More Quotes From Nathan Myhrvold Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing. Nathan Myhrvold freeze tails lobster The magic words 'on the Internet,' if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny. Nathan Myhrvold internet magic normal The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside. Nathan Myhrvold physics cooking water 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 expertise good-things world 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 vision age people 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 tin lines black 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 democracy government evil The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it. Nathan Myhrvold girl boys ideas 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 dollars long people The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better. Nathan Myhrvold get-better depressing technology The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? Nathan Myhrvold ivf dna religious Computing has gone from something tiny and specialized to something that affects every walk of life. It doesn't make sense anymore to think of it as just one discipline. I expect to see separate departments of user interface, for example, to start emerging at universities. Nathan Myhrvold tiny discipline thinking 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 cooking odds people Suppose that 'Unsolved Mysteries' called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people - like the lost identical twin, only younger than you. Nathan Myhrvold news long people The way Moore's Law occurs in computing is really unprecedented in other walks of life. If the Boeing 747 obeyed Moore's Law, it would travel a million miles an hour, it would be shrunken down in size, and a trip to New York would cost about five dollars. Those enormous changes just aren't part of our everyday experience. Nathan Myhrvold everyday new-york law 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 appeals computer powerful When I was about nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And I went to the library and got this whole pile of books. I'd love to say it all turned out great. It didn't. But, sort of, from that point on, whenever there was serious cooking at home, I was the one who did it. Nathan Myhrvold mother home book 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 kitchen wine years With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations? Nathan Myhrvold grandmother past ideas Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented - putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine. Nathan Myhrvold technology moon men
