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Intellectual Ventures is a company that invests in invention.

Nathan Myhrvold

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Nathan Myhrvold
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: January 1
Author
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Mathematician
Paleontologist
Photographer
Seattle
Washington
Nathan Paul Myhrvold
Invention
Intellectual
Company
Invests
Ventures
Venture

More quotes by Nathan Myhrvold

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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
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Most estimates of the mortality risk posed by asteroid impacts put it at about the same risk as flying in a commercial airliner. However, you have to remember that this is like the entire human race riding the plane - it is one of the few risks that really could wipe us all out.
Nathan Myhrvold
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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
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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.
Nathan Myhrvold
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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
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If you take a scotch whiskey and distill out the alcohol, what is left has an amazing taste to it and can be used as a flavoring for a dessert.
Nathan Myhrvold
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If you talk about sous-vide, then you have to talk about food safety, and microbiology, and heat.
Nathan Myhrvold
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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
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Movies such as 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Front Page' portrayed an era when driven newspapermen would do anything to get a story. The U.K.'s rough-and-tumble Fleet Street remains something of a throwback to that era, as demonstrated by the recent phone-hacking scandal - which led to the demise of yet another century-old paper, the 'News of the World.'
Nathan Myhrvold
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If people don't find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important.
Nathan Myhrvold
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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
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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
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We're more familiar with what economists call an English auction - prices start low and rise as people bid. However, there is also the Dutch auction, where prices start high and go lower until somebody bites. Movies are sold to the audience via a very slow Dutch auction, where each phase between price drops can last weeks or months.
Nathan Myhrvold
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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
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When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'
Nathan Myhrvold
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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
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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
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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
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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
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There is a one-in-300 chance that Earth will be struck on March 16, 2880, by an asteroid large enough to destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human race. But, on the bright side, Prince could re-release his hit song with the new refrain 'We're gonna party like its twenty-eight seventy-nine.'
Nathan Myhrvold