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.”

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

“If you have two steaks, one that's an inch thick, one that's 2 inches thick, how much longer does the thicker one need to cook? It's four times as long. It goes roughly like the square. How come cookbooks don't tell you that?”

“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.”

“If you want to do interesting software, you have to have a bunch of people do it, because the amount of software that one person can do isn't that interesting.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun!”

“The prize for ultimate inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that our 'leaders' are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on Earth.”

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

“Three things about water affect almost all of cooking. First are the hydrogen bonds, which is why it has an incredibly high boiling point. Another is that it's a polar molecule, so that it dissolves a lot of things, and there are things that won't mix with it. And then there's how much energy it takes to heat water.”

“Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid.”

“My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking.”

“Anybody who can afford a box of business cards can afford a Web site. Any company with an 800 number can move its services to the Web for peanuts by comparison. The extreme case of corporate promotion is to strip away all other aspects of your business and sell goods or services via the Net alone, as amazon.com has done with books.”

“It's impossible that we're alone in the universe. Every time we think we're more special than others, we're proven wrong.”

“Life has not been boring for me.”

“People who grow up in a region doubtless have a better cultural awareness of their own cuisine, but it's also true that a lot of locals go to McDonald's, Applebee's and the like.”

“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.”

“We collectively have a special place in our heart for the manned space flight program - Apollo nostalgia is one element, but that is only part of it. American culture worships explorers - look at the fame of Lewis and Clark, for example. The American people want to think of themselves as supporting exploration.”

“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.”