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Most decisions are seat-of-the-pants judgments. You can create a rationale for anything. In the end, most decisions are based on intuition and faith.
Nathan Myhrvold
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Nathan Myhrvold
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: January 1
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Computer Scientist
Engineer
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Mathematician
Paleontologist
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Washington
Nathan Paul Myhrvold
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Intuition
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More quotes by Nathan Myhrvold
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
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
It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do.
Nathan Myhrvold
Intellectual Ventures is a company that invests in invention.
Nathan Myhrvold
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
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
If I say I've got two versions of Word - that old one from 1982 that's perfect, with zero defects or the new one that's got all this cool new stuff, but there might be a few bugs in it - people always want the new one. But I wouldn't want them to operate a plane I was on with software that happened to be the latest greatest release!
Nathan Myhrvold
If your kitchen smells good, your food lost something.
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
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
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
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.
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
Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice - or, in other words, make mayonnaise - you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better.
Nathan Myhrvold
My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking.
Nathan Myhrvold
Most visions of extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional extraterrestrials of 'Star Trek' or a hundred other space operas are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men.
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
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
Software is a gas ! It expands to fit the container it is in !
Nathan Myhrvold
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