Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The intensity of the Super Bowl is one-of-a-kind. An NBA finals is best-of-seven. But the Super Bowl, one game, winner-take-all. The intensity is off the charts.
I grew up watching games with my father at Washington Husky Stadium. When I moved out to Seattle, I had a friend who would take me to Seahawks games in the 1980s.
Recording studios are interesting; a lot of people say - and I agree - that you should have a lot of wood in a recording studio. It gets a kind of a sweeter sound.
One of the things I've come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It's not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.
I think few people in their lifetime have the chance to be involved in something like the creation of Microsoft - that's always going to be something I'm known for.
If it hadn't been for our Traf-O-Data venture, and if it hadn't been for all that time spent on UW computers, you could argue that Microsoft might not have happened.
Computers are really, basically, computing elements and a lot of memory. They are pretty easy to understand, as compared to the brain, which was designed by evolution.
The definition of the good life is doing creative things, whether making music, trying to figure out how to do a particular piece of code, or putting together investments.
There are so many intricacies to our brain that won't be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don't operate in isolation.
There are people out there who don't see value in intellectual property, and so they're always going to have a problem if there are lawsuits involving intellectual property.
A big part of the success of Microsoft was that every year, the chips our software ran on got faster and cheaper. They doubled in capability every 18 months under Moore's law.
There was a time when the government cut off funding to SETI, basically, and I thought it was something that should continue, and it was a very interesting scientific question.
I just try to stuff my brain with everything that I can read on what is going on in science at a very high level, and sometimes I see connections of what might need to be done.
I have to admit, between the Seahawks games and the Blazer games and playoffs games, we're talking about close to 100 games a year, so I don't really follow other sports a lot.
The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.
Part of life has to be about enjoying life and having different experiences, especially if you're with friends and you're on an adventure on a boat or a submarine - it's a lot of fun.
You could tell three things about Bill Gates pretty quickly. He was really smart. He was really competitive; he wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent.
Art fairs bring attention to up and coming artists and some amazing new works. They are a way to connect everyone with what's happening at the cutting edge of art, both new and historic.
As someone who was basically a software engineer for many years, I became fascinated with how the brain functions and is put together and works in such a different fashion than computers do.
I think it's going to be great if people can buy a ticket to fly up and see black sky and the stars. I'd like to do it myself-but probably after it has flown a serious number of times first!
Once you become an owner of a team, you get so much more into the sport and you can't help it. So I really love NFL football now to the degree of following it much more than I did previously.
Objectively speaking, Traf-O-Data was a failure as a company. Right as our business started to pick up, states began to provide their own traffic-counting services to local governments for free.
Human beings are fragile things, and for the period of time it takes to get them to Mars and back, you have dangerous radiation from the sun and the galaxy. We have to think about issues like that.
For the most part, the best opportunities now lie where your competitors have yet to establish themselves, not where they're already entrenched. Microsoft is struggling to adapt to that new reality.
As quickly as it started, our business model evaporated. But while Traf-O-Data was technically a business failure, the understanding of microprocessors we absorbed was crucial to our future success.
Once you own a team for as many years as I have, and you root for that team for that period of time, you've got rooting for the Blazers in your blood, and the Sonics are one of our arch-competitors.
I would go in the university stacks and pull out books like 'Jane's Fighting Aircraft of World War II' when I was 12 or something, and I'd spend hours reading about the engines in some of those planes.
The human brain works in, so far, mysterious and wondrous ways that are completely different than the ways that computers calculate. Things like appetite or emotion, how do those function in the brain?
While I sign off on trades or free agents, I've rarely overruled my basketball people's decisions. But I'm not shy about steering the discussion or pushing deeper if something doesn't make sense to me.
I got a taste when I was in Kenya a while ago of what medical care was in rural Africa. I was in a town of about 10,000 people, and a shipping container with a rusty microscope was their medical clinic.
In the first eight or so years at Microsoft, we were always chained to our terminals, and after I got sick the first time, I decided that I was going to be more adventurous and explore more of the world.
I am very excited to be supporting one of the world's most visionary efforts to seek basic answers to some of the fundamental question about our universe and what other civilisations may exist elsewhere.
If you think about making a difference in the community, my family has always had a strong interest in the arts. I'm always interested in finding ways to innovate... It's a blend; it's not a point focus.
I just try to find things that either need to be done, should be done, or where I can make a difference in a significant way. And the things I've been able to participate in have been very, very exciting.
I think if you look at, for instance, what the Seahawks - what we did winning the Super Bowl, that was with a very young team. So you have to blend the experience with young players and develop those as well.
In the university library my father helped lead, as the Associate Director of Libraries from '60 to '82, I spent hours and hours as a kid devouring piles of books so I could follow the latest advances in science.
Some people are great at the pure mathematical things - like Bill Gates, he's great at math things. He loves to do puzzles. Me, I like to look at an overall landscape and try to figure out, how do you solve a problem?
Some people are motivated by a need for recognition, some by money, and some by a broad social goal. I start from a different place: from the love of ideas and the urge to put them into motion and see where they might lead.
In Portland, I am more involved in the details of trade discussions because I've been around that sport longer and can watch tape and can give some input to the drafting process. In football, not at all. It's so specialized.
With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven't thought about before. A lot of times, I'm asking myself - 'This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn't been done?
That would be such a life-changing thing, for us all to know that there are other beings out there who we could potentially communicate with, or maybe we are listening to a signal that they transmitted hundreds of millennia ago.
With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven't thought about before. A lot of times, I'm asking myself - 'This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn't been done?'
No one knows the complete function of sleep. Is it to reset the brain or give it more of a rest period? Is it for cleaning the brain of all the garbage protein? For me, talking about these things as a non-biologist is fascinating.
The computer is a very regular structure. It's very uniform. It's got a bunch of memory, and it's got a little element that computes bits of memory and combines them with each other and puts them back somewhere. It's a very simple thing.
Traditionally, Seattle has been a great sports town and great football town. What the Huskies have achieved over the years has been pretty amazing. That's how I got my first taste of football - when I went with my father to Husky Stadium.
Some of my first memories are waiting for my father to finish his day at work in the University of Washington library and come out and jump in the car with my mom and myself, and we'd be sitting there reading books, and then we'd go home.
General managers - I like to talk about the 'golden gut': general managers that not only can have a sense for the players that are going to perform beyond what people expect and get team chemistry right, but they also have to be able to make trades.
I'm trying to do some things with my brain institute to understand more about the impact of concussion on brain tissue, because we have some scientists over there who are really good at looking at brain tissue and the effects of things on brain tissue.
Nobody really knows what it would take to create something that is self-aware or has a personality. I guess I could imagine a day when perhaps, if we can understand how it works in the human brain, which is unbelievably complicated, it could be possible.
I remember having pizza at Shakey's in Vancouver, Washington in 1973 and talking about the fact that eventually, everyone is going to be online and have access to newspapers and stuff, and wouldn't people be willing to pay for information on a computer terminal.