The simplest fix for better grilling is to line the inside of your barbecue with tin foil. It dramatically affects how evenly the heat is distributed. That crusty black hibachi or Weber grill is doing your food no favors.
— Nathan Myhrvold
Life has not been boring for me.
People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped barbecuing astronomers for saying so, turning their spits with human-rights activists instead.
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.
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.
Records were replaced by CDs, and lead type died in favor of computerized fonts. However, each had a 100-year ride of popularity, so you can't feel too bad for them.
Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors.
The magic words 'on the Internet,' if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny.
Suppose that 'Unsolved Mysteries' called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people - like the lost identical twin, only younger than you.
It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do.
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.
Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented - putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine.
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.
My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking.
One of the greatest things that Apple and Jobs were very good at doing was daring to do the very different thing. It's what I did with my cookbook, frankly.
If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun!
Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that's what it is. It's horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don't get any erosion, and you don't see any dinosaurs.
It's impossible that we're alone in the universe. Every time we think we're more special than others, we're proven wrong.
Mankind is not special by virtue of our address in the universe, or what spins around us, or because life originated here. Slowly, but surely, we've been compelled to renounce the comfort of these beliefs.
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.
The Internet is the ultimate vanity-publishing medium, and therefore, the ultimate place for those of us who like to watch. The Internet can reach an audience at lower cost than any medium before it.
An efficient government is dangerous in the hands of the wrong man. Sadly, the right sort of man never seems interested in the job.
Technological 'revolutions' don't really overthrow anything - they simply append a new and dynamic market to that which went before.
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.
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.
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.
The techniques of being an Internet visionary are just like those of lower-tech fortunetellers through the ages. A technological visionary must tell people what they want to hear, because your company's stock won't rise if you spout an unpopular vision to analysts.
Age can be wonderful for red wine, but not for spacecraft.
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.
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.'
Every serious nuclear accident involves operator error, so you want to eliminate the operator altogether.
If we could create invention capitalism, that would be a helluva legacy, that would be a helluva thing to do... We could actually turbocharge the rate at which the world invents things.
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.
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.
By burning nuclear waste as fuel, we believe we can power the United States cleanly for hundreds of years without ever touching new resources.
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.
We pay for content that we like, and we like the content we pay for. It's a lot more satisfying to pay $7.50 for Steven Spielberg's next epic than it is to watch my home movies for free. Even for me.
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.
Efficiency in government is a more elusive concept than efficiency in the private economy, which may be measured relatively easily as output per units of input. What is the government's 'output?'
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.
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.
A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA.
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?
Nobody wants a prediction that the future will be more or less like the present, even if that is, statistically speaking, an excellent prediction.
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.
Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid.
One of the problems with posing a 'bold new plan' is that you can't just extrapolate from previous plans.
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.
Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways.
When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'
