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Nathan Myhrvold Live Q&A
Last week we announced that co-founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold, had agreed to do a live Q&A. Earlier today we posted a few of his answers, but now's your chance to hear it directly from him. Mr. Myhrvold will be answering your questions below until 12:30 PDT. Please keep it to one question per post so everyone gets a chance.
Update: 04/03 19:41 GMT by S : 12:30pm PDT has come and gone, and Mr. Myhrvold has to move on. Thanks for the answers! Here's a link to his user page if you'd just like to read his responses.
In your responses earlier today, you said, "The patent office has had funding issues. In recent years Congress has raided the patent office fees and taken them to spend elsewhere rather than let them be used to improve the patent office."
How do you think additional funding could be best spent? A friend of mine is a patent lawyer for a private firm, and he tells me they have a massive advantage over the USPTO workers because they're highly specialized and they work for companies who can afford to hire talent. Would boosting USPTO salaries help? Do they need better infrastructure?
Mr. Myhrvold:
I have some thoughts on your patent activities, but a) it's complex, and b) probably nothing you haven't heard before or that would suddenly make you repent and start your life over ;)
So instead, I'd like to hear about cooking. I enjoy cooking, but I realize I'm a duffer, and keep finding small improvements from random sources (YouTube, relatives, friends, books) of the "why didn't I think of that?" variety. Is there any advice that you think the average non-cook should hear based on your non-conventional approach?
I think what you mean is that I wrote a paper many years ago (1997?) that showed through computer modeling that sauropod dinosaurs (i.e. apatosaurus) could whip their tails and crack them like bullwhips. The crack is actually a sonic boom! So they were the first creatures to break the sound barrier (not Chuck Yeager). The paper has been pretty widely accepted in the paleontology community. I have been meaning to build a physical model (not full scale) to test it empirically, but have been busy with other tihngs, including other dinosaur projects.
Well, it turns out that there were horse sized birds at many points in the past - particularly the elephant bird of madagascar, the moa of new zealand and the "terror birds" which lived in ancient south america. Also, ancient (several millions years ago) horses were pretty small - some probably did have goose-sized ponies.... They were mean, so I would much rather face duck sized horses.
For every Neo there is an Agent Smith???
THis is a problem for our justice system in general, inculding patents. Even in criminal matters things like DNA testimony and other scientific evidence can be hard to understand. Patents is even worse because iti s about high tech areas. The way this is handled at present is via expert witnesses that try to explain the techology in terms that he judge and jury can relate to. It does not always work. Here is a odd but true thing - you cannot be a patent attorney without having an engineering or science degree, but that isn't applied to the judge or jury. So, I agree that this is a challenge. In some other areas of the law where things are complex - like taxes or bankruptcy there are special courts with judges that do have expertise in the area. That was disucssed during the recent patent reform debate in congress - but it did not make it in the bill.
We have several geoengineering ideas that we have invented and filed patents on. The patents are making their way through the system, and some have issued. However we only filed for the patents so that we *might* have some say in how this technology is used. THe big issue for geoengineering is that there is virtually no research funding. I would not want to deploy any system without doing lots of reseach, but so far this is not an area that has been funded by the government. Menawhile essentially zero progress has been made toward making sufficient cuts in CO2 emission. So current course and speed we will have a climate problem. Climate scientists differ as to whether that problem will be serious in 5 years, 20 or 100 years but it will occur. I think that society will procrastinate until things get bad, and at that point geoengineering will be the only way to prevent serious enviornmental damage. But we'll see...
According to your wikipedia page you like nature photography. Have you ever considered embracing your inner Thoreau and giving it all up to live a simpler life in the woods?
Metamaterials is one area that we are into very deeply that I think will have huge application. Look it up - it is very cool.
It turns out that copyright law covers code, but it does NOT cover a recipe! If you write a cookbook, the actual text is covered by copyright but the proportions of the ingredients and steps are not covered if you put them in different words. Patents do apply to food, but only for things that are really novel. Dippin' dots ice cream is covered by a patent. Kind of a sick story - the guy who invented it worked in a plant that froze bull semen in liquid nitrogen - it made little balls, so he tried ice cream. Turns out it tastes better....