Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

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Nathan Myhrvold

Profession : Businessman

Birth : August 3, 1959

In politics, religion and other areas of culture, people disagree on the worth of competing ideas. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that can determine in a robust way which ideas match the real world, and which ones can be ruled out. So conflicting ideologies persist indefinitely.

Nathan Myhrvold

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

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

Why pay a fee for Internet content when a million free sites are just a click away? There's no incentive until people are too addicted to the Net to turn off their computers, yet are bored with what's available.

Nathan Myhrvold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Researchers who examined the voting records of wine judges found that 90 percent of the time they give inconsistent ratings to a particular wine when they judge it on multiple occasions.

Nathan Myhrvold

Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock.

Nathan Myhrvold

The dilemma for early 21st century journalism is this: Who will pay for the news?

Nathan Myhrvold

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

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

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

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