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Category: Nathan Myhrvold

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.

Life, Happiness, Liberty

Nathan Myhrvold

Elections, for their part, are typically popularity contests rather than measures of candidates’ relative competency or effectiveness. Imagine if scientific truth were determined according to which scientist was most popular. To be successful, scientists would have to be charismatic and attractive – and human knowledge would suffer terribly.

Truth, Successful, Human

Nathan Myhrvold

Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing.

Lobster, Tail, Freeze

Nathan Myhrvold

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.

Culture, Politics, World

Nathan Myhrvold

The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside.

Water, Cooking, You

Nathan Myhrvold

If you talk about sous-vide, then you have to talk about food safety, and microbiology, and heat.

Safety, Heat, You

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.

Kitchen, Think, Why

Nathan Myhrvold

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.

Team, World, People

Nathan Myhrvold

Another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie ‘Contact,’ which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way.

People, Search, You

Nathan Myhrvold

Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef.

Cooking, Chef, Doing

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.

Business, Powerful

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.

Internet, Free, People