Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Among modern occupations, only cult leaders and TV weathermen rival the technological visionary's ability to retain credibility despite all evidence to the contrary.
I have a very pragmatic approach to diets. Ones you can't stick to don't do you any good. Some people say, 'Just eat half of what's on your plate,' but I can't do that!
I think that there is a role for food to be art; and when food is art, it can have drama, it can have spectacle, it can be theatrical. It can be this amazing experience.
The ever-growing size of software applications is what makes Moore's Law possible: 'If we hadn't brought your computer to its knees, why would you go out and buy a new one?'
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.
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.
Researchers who examined the voting records of wine judges found that 90 percent of the time they give inconsistent ratings to a particular wine when they judge it on multiple occasions.
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.
The whole hardware industry has experienced the phenomenon in which every time computers get cheaper, they appeal to a new set of users; every time they get more powerful, old customers upgrade.
Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less!
I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it... Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business.
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?'
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.
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.
Some article called me the most feared man in Silicon Valley. Good Lord! Why? My teenage boys got a kick out of it: 'Dad, how could this be true? You're not even the most feared person in this house.'
Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel. So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It's the reactor of your dreams.
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.
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.
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 best value for money in cooking equipment, in my mind, is first a digital scale and digital thermometer. They're both about $20. They help you cook so much more accurately that they're both enormously valuable.
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.
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.
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.
The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better.
There's a limit to how much you can deploy renewables, like wind or solar. People will talk about getting up to 30 percent of America's power from renewables, but you can't get to 100 percent because of their unreliability.
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.
There's no way I'm going to stand up for bad ingredients. We love seasonal ingredients. It's a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique.
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?
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.
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.
The new revolution in cooking can be viewed in two ways. One is that you can take any traditional food and apply modern techniques. The other approach is to create food that is quite different than anything that has existed before.
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.
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.
A blowtorch is a wonderful thing. You can get one of those for about 25 bucks at Home Depot. And there's a ton of things that you can use a blowtorch for, in browning a steak or touching up the browning of a chicken or making creme brulee.
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.
Near Marseilles in the south of France, bouillabaisse is a cult food. In Toulouse and Carcassonne, the bean-based stew cassoulet is a cult food. Spain has paella and a number of others. Italy has so many, its cuisine is practically defined by them.
If people don't get paid for their inventions, that's not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren't in a position to take them to the next level. If you don't enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Computing has gone from something tiny and specialized to something that affects every walk of life. It doesn't make sense anymore to think of it as just one discipline. I expect to see separate departments of user interface, for example, to start emerging at universities.