Meh, if you want to see really great pictures of snowflakes, checkout "The Snowflake: Winter's Secret Beauty." written by Kenneth Libbrecht and photography by Patricia Rasmussen. Libbrecht is chair of the physics department at Caltech and has had a life long passion for snowflakes from his early days in North Dakota. He now studies snowflake formation in his lab. I read it cover to cover and cannot recommend it enough. The book dives into the science of snowflake formation. You can find the book for $4 at Abebooks.
Ken Libbrecht was my undergraduate advisor and I worked in his lab for a couple summers (in fact, growing snowflakes in a tank and measuring their growth rate at different temperatures and humidities - although mine had to be boring perfect hexagons to get accurate measurements).
He's a great guy and a very talented communicator. I would absolutely recommend his book, and his website, http://snowcrystals.com/ , for anyone wanting to see great photos and learn about the science behind them.
This particular 3D blew me away. It's as good or better than any alien spaceship model I've ever seen. And it really shows the complexity of the depth dimension of snowflakes.
Anyone know if someone has implemented procedural generation of 3D snowflakes? After seeing the images and stereograms, I'm thinking that would be an intellectually rewarding project.
Cool, but these seem to all be Z-inverted when I magic eye them. I.e. the lows are high. Btw I have experience making stereograms. Pretty sure it's not "just me. "
Did not realize this was Nathan Myhrvold at first! Although he's moderately controversial for Intellectual Ventures and famous for Microsoft and Modernist Cuisine, I know him best from the massive dinosaur skeleton in his Lake Washington mansion.
While living in Seattle I had a (super, super dumpy) boat and a favorite activity was boating friends by his house to surprise them. A little tricky, but you could clearly see it!
Always a treat, but I believe it was gone in the summer in 2019!
I don't know what to think of this guy. On the one hand, he is the ideal tinkerer, going super deep into subjects like cooking and now photography of snowflakes. He has tons of money, yet he makes it difficult for ordinary people to access his work. The cooking books are thousands of dollars if I'm not mistaken. The snowflakes, you can't see in high res unless you pay for it.
The thing that's confusing to me is that someone who is usually this passionate about something gets joy from sharing it with others freely. This guy seems super greedy.
I clicked this title in order to see hi-res photographs of snowflakes. Instead I got a discussion of patent trolls and a bunch of other stuff that was not hi-res photographs of snowflakes. This was what I was looking for.
The perfect symmetries of snowflakes always struck me as being strange: how do the molecules at one edge of the flake know what their symmetrical partner at other edge is doing? It is interesting to see that the symmetries are not perfect, making it (somewhat) easier to accept.
I don't know Nathan Myhrvold, and I could be wrong, but my impression is that he's a smart guy, trying to be remembered as the modern Leonardo Da Vinci (cuisine, mosquito laser zappers, etc - the widest intellectual curiosity one can imagine), without a decent chance of succeeding.
These endeavors are so bizarre, so "off", so weird and different from each other, that they seem planned and fake to me. Leonardo had genuine curiosity, and no need to show off (except when looking for a job [0]). I feel that Nathan could learn from that.
Goes along with what another poster asked about symmetry.
Two snowflakes right next to each other in the same storm aren’t identical, and there’s no reason to say that they should be. Why would a single flake have symmetry to itself?
Is it just getting down in such a small scale that the molecular bonds of the water can only make so many different angles?
If this caused anyone to be interested in what happens to snowflakes after they fall on the ground, The Snow Grain Photo Library[1] has a library of photos of snow in various states of decomposition and metamorphosis.
What amazes me about Nathan Myhrvold is that he has 850 patents to his name. How is that even possible?
He is 61 years old, and lets say he was working for 40 years.
That a more than 21 patent a year, how much he needs to pay for keeping the patent rights each month?
I guess after 25 years patent expire but still ...
Incredible photos, makes me even more homesick. A few hours now, and I will be taking the train back home for Christmas. Can't wait to see the mountains and the snow!
“photographer Nathan Myhrvold” — wait, he’s also a photographer? Myhrvold is also:
- the former CTO of Microsoft
- a Michelin Star chef
- patent troll / business genius
- a working scientist who has published original, peer-reviewed research in the fields of paleobiology, climate science, and astronomy.
He has to be one of the most remarkable people to have ever lived.
He definitely isn't a Michelin star chef, technically he isn't even a chef. A chef runs a professional kitchen at a profit, he runs a research lab. I'm sure he's an excellent cook but I don't think he's even worked in a restaurant with a michelin star, let alone been the head chef at one.
I stand corrected! He is not a Michelin star chef; however, he does have a culinary diploma from a respected French cooking school and has racked up some significant accomplishments in the world of cooking and baking, not least being his epic series of books called "Modernist Cuisine".
From Wikipedia:
"While working as chief technology officer at Microsoft, Myhrvold took leave to earn his culinary diploma from École de Cuisine La Varenne in France. Myhrvold's early culinary training was as an observer and unpaid apprentice at Rover's, one of Seattle's leading restaurants, with Chef Thierry Rautureau. Myhrvold is the principal author of a culinary text entitled Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, released in March 2011, on the application of scientific research principles and new techniques and technology to cooking. That book, which earned a James Beard Foundation Award for "cookbook of the year" in 2012, was followed by the books Modernist Cuisine at Home, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, and Modernist Bread: The Art and Science, all self-published by Myhrvold and with him as lead author. Myhrvold was part of a team that won first place at the world barbecue championships in Memphis. He has appeared as a guest judge on Top Chef."
I feel a duty to point out the white washing. Nathan made his money on the basis of patent trolling, his firm being the world's largest patent troll.
Journalists never mention the "where does this persom get the money to spend their time on complex cooking books and unique camera rigs". The answer being "he is a billionaire by taxing every one just a little bit". Like a new age king he spends his tax revenue on vanity projects.
Sure none of us pay him much. At most a couple pennies every device. But if you ever wonder why the patent system is so broken: remember his face.
>I feel a duty to point out the white washing. Nathan made his money on the basis of patent trolling,
I feel a duty to point out this "black washing". Nathan made the bulk, if not all, of his fortune at Microsoft. They bought his startup in 1986 for 1.5M in stock. He then went to MS and founded MS research, which has turned out a spectacular amount of good CS research under his leadership.
Here's [1] Nathan's worth in 1999, all from MS, at 650M. MS stock went from around 0.10 in 1986 at the purchase to around $40 in 1999, so pretty much all of Nathan's wealth was in MS stock.
Today Nathan is worth around 800M, which, inflation adjusted back to 1999, is 200M less than where he was in 1999. [3]
Also, Intellectual Ventures is not his - he co-founded it, and now owns around 40%. Also the entire income stream of IV is tiny compared to big patent players at big tech firms. They look to have around a few B in assets, after 20 years of existance. IBM does over 1B a year simply in licensing of it's patent portfolio. Some other big tech firms are similar.
So while it's true he founded Intellectual Ventures, it's not at all true that is where he made his money. At best it gives him a place to play with ideas, but a massive money making machine it is not.
Don't cast aspersions without checking your claims.
It doesn't really matter that IV is not the main source of his (or anyone else's wealth).
Nor is it really a place to "play with ideas", instead, it is a place where ideas go to die--literally. In addition to filing lawsuits and/or collecting fees, they [IV] sells patents to other trolls who then proceed with lawsuits.
It's really appalling that someone so talented would be involved with such a parasitic business. I really can't respect this person at all. He should be called out at every opportunity.
I don’t understand the downvotes. This reply has a lot of factual information (I certainly learned something) and gets everyone closer to the truth which is what’s important at the end of the day.
The original post reads like “a person who got rich through patent trolling is now spending money on cute projects”. The true story is more like “a person who got rich through a startup acquisition and a decade at Microsoft is now investing in patent trolling and spending money on cute projects”. In my mind there’s a big difference.
I'll explain why it's down voted then: everyone knows Nathan used to work at Microsoft but "rich man goes on to make the world much worse to get even more rich" is no better than "man makes the world worse to get rich".
Also note now the down voted post contains only one factual number plus a bunch of speculation all in the interests of deflecting. The post assumes Nathan never sold any stock, then assumes Nathan never spent most of his money, then assumes Forbes somehow knows an accurate valuation of a private company. Then after all these assumptions the post still admits the important bit: Nathan started the world's biggest patent troll and is actively involved in extracting rents.
Note: I do not buy the speculation that MS is the major source of Nathans current wealth. Nor does it change anything or make patent trolling different.
Nathan's founding of Intellectual Ventures caused everyone in the world to get slightly poorer. It is an affront to any inventor or intellectual on this planet. Nathan was militarized a system meant for good into a system of worthless rent extraction. In turn Nathan caused the current patent trolling we see from IBM, that they have more patents does not somehow absolve Nathan, this is the future he says he wanted.
>Note: I do not buy the speculation that MS is the major source of Nathans current wealth.
Any evidence? I just demonstrated he was worth 650M while at MS, and that that amount would be 1B today, yet he's worth 800B.
Are you going to claim he spent that 650, then made the next 800M on IV? If so, provide some proof. Handwaving is not proof.
Hopefully you can provide more evidence than your initial post, which was clearly all speculation without evidence. It's funny you call mine a bunch of speculation, when your statements are quite a bit more speculative.
>Nathan's founding of Intellectual Ventures caused everyone in the world to get slightly poorer.
Well, if you're to be believed, it must have made Nathan and investors richer. Maybe you're not using words in the normal usage when you make such absolute claims.
>In turn Nathan caused the current patent trolling we see from IBM,
Nathan forming a company in 2000 made IBM do patent licensing since it was founded?
That is impressive.
They've licensed patents since nearly their beginning in 1911. IBM's current licensing push started in the late 1980s/early 1990s, well before IV started. They were not just amassing patents for over a century solely to use themselves. They have been in the patent licensing business for decades [1], likely well before any of us were born.
1. You're basing your argument off celebrity net worth which as I wrote above does not convince me.
2. My comment is about Nathans attempt to white wash his dark history in the public eye. A point you are refusing to address as you pass off IV as not that bad.
3. Comparing IV to old IBM is an insult to inventors everywhere.
4. My narrative is that patent trolling steals from everyone and Nathan is a bad man for creating the world's largest patent troll. Please don't attempt to deflect with tabloid speculation about net worth, it isn't relevant even if the tabloid guessed right.
1. You're basing all your claims off your opinions, which should convince even less people, now that it's clear you don't accept decent evidence. As to another source, Myhrvold is likely worth less than 2B, else he'd be on the Forbes 400 for 2020. He isn't. In fact, he's also not on their real-time billionaires list, so he's likely not even worth $1B [2]. He's not on any recent lists, from Forbes or Bloomberg, all the way back to around 2000, so it's highly unlikely he is worth more than the $800M above. It's looking pretty solid your beliefs don't match reality.
I guess you can claim he has mystical money hiding powers, and Forbes is not a decent source of values, and so on, but I prefer to go on what is reasonably demonstrated. Once we start making up things, then we can believe he's worth $0, or 500 trillion, or eats kittens, or any sort of speculation.
While we're on #1, here's [1] a Forbes article on how badly IV has done - I guess you won't accept any of this either since it goes against your beliefs. However, I find Forbes much more trustworthy than a person untethered to demonstrable evidence.
Is there any place that makes you think your claims about his worth or the source of it are are true? A single source with defensible values?
2. I didn't need to address it, since it's opinion. The parts you claim as fact don't line up with published sources of info I can find. You so far post none.
3. As a professional inventor, and having done business with both IBM and IV, I'm guessing your claims are again not based on any experience or solid stats, but unfounded opinions. I've found both to be professional and good businesses to work with. I don't view either as good or evil, which is a silly type of judgment - they're both interested in turning ideas into reality.
As someone who's been around inventors for decades, around law firms representing them, around startups, again I find the rabid hate some have for IV is the same rabid hate others have/had for MSFT, or Apple, or Comcast, or banking, or restaurants, or farming, or pretty much every single company of any size. All such entities have value, which is why they have customers. It's just that somehow people that either misunderstand the issues involved start detaching from reality and believing whatever suits their narrative.
So, given that a significant number of inventors have benefited from both companies, care to define how you concluded a statement about "inventors everywhere"?
4. "Please don't attempt to deflect ..." - you mean "Please don't bother to clarify with facts when I have a narrative I need to be upset with". I was just posting some fairly checkable facts that are opposite what you claim, and since that set you off, I suspect you're not operating on facts. I prefer to get the facts straight before I go on a lynching rampage. Less mistakes that way....
I'm done. You seem wholly uninterested in learning or even looking into reasonable points counter to your solidly formed beliefs.
celebritynetworth is extremely unreliable source of information. Some articles call Mervold a billionaire which more likely. This is a person who had $650M in Microsoft stock. Owns 40% of 800 people corporation [1] and raised $3B capital [2].
Apart from the question about his actual wealth, Intellectual Ventures looks like a business which makes the problems with patents worse.
As a counter I pointed out elsewhere that he is not on Forbes 400, so he's likely worth less than 2.2B, and he's also not on Forbes billionaire list, so he's likely worth under 1B [1].
Which articles are more reliable on net worth than Forbes claim Myhrvold is a billionaire? Do any claim a net worth? I can find none, but you claim some. Please post so we can see.
I also decided to look for a more accurate valuation of IV than wikipedia, since it looks like the data there is sourced quite some time ago. Dunn and Bradstreet, who I'd value much more than Wikipedia to assess companies lists IV as 500 employess and 100M annual revenue [2]. For a tech company, if this is the employee count and revenue, then it is not very profitable, so it's quite possible the entire company is not worth billions.
This is 40% of the per employee revenue for google, 25% of MSFT, 12% of Facebook, 8% of Netflix, 30% of twitter, etc. If these are the numbers, this is not a very profitable company at all for tech.
At any rate, places like DnB and Forbes, who have people tasked to work on this stuff, people with experience and contacts to do such work about as reliably as any public source, I think they are more likely accurate than the speculation in this thread.
I don’t care where he made most of his money. I can what he is doing NOW. Patent trolling is sickening and I wish they would simply kill software patents entirely. He is a patent troll so fuck this guy. Also fuck all the other patent trolls, but this guy is a patent troll.
I feel like this comment really captures the zeitgeist of (and my least favorite part of) this community: worshiping the wealthy.
No matter what awful things a tech person does, if that person is a multimillionaire (and male) then I can count on some HN user to defend that parasite with moving goalposts and whataboutisms.
"Over the years, [Elon Musk] cultivated a media persona that was “part playboy, part space cowboy,” Vance writes. [...] Musk sells himself as a singular mover of mountains and does not like to share credit for his success. At SpaceX, in particular, the engineers “flew into a collective rage every time they caught Musk in the press claiming to have designed the Falcon rocket more or less by himself [...] In fact, Musk depends heavily on people with more technical expertise in rockets and cars, more experience with aeronautics and energy, and perhaps more social grace in managing an organization. Those who survive under Musk tend to be workhorses willing to forgo public acclaim.” [1]
“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.” [2]
There's a big difference between someone like Myhrvold and Musk. Both made their fortunes by being great business leaders who were able to take big risks, rely on the expertise of others, and probably use cult-of-personality tactics. Both probably have big personality redflags.
But Myhrvold used his initial fortune to co-found a patent troll corporation.
Musk used his initial fortune to accelerate the adoption of sustainable human transport, solar power, battery storage, and space exploration.
Does it not seem obvious why some would be willing to accept Musk's faults? Would you rather have Satan help move us 10-20 years closer to saving the earth or tell Satan to fuck off cause he's a dick and let the earth be closer to death?
> Does it not seem obvious why some would be willing to accept Musk's faults?
No, not when you consider that our current trade secret laws (under various global intellectual property systems and agreements), which Musk's Tesla and SpaceX and other tech corporations use, are devastatingly blocking innovation. In contrast, the patent system does, by design, support innovation (although not well) — more on that below. Our current trade secret laws, and the corporate lobbyists who had a big hand in shaping them, are to blame for creating today's monopolies, including Tesla (an example of a Tesla monopoly is described below: Maxwell's dry electrode battery design).
"Hiding inventions as trade secrets acts to protect multinational corporations [...] This is the reason that huge multinationals lobby so hard for strong trade secret laws and weak patent laws. This is clearly shown in Musk’s low valuation of his patents and high valuation of trade secrets."
This is the full picture:
"In 2014, Elon Musk made Tesla’s patents available for anyone to use for free, stating that “technology leadership is not defined by patents.” Earlier this month, Musk announced again that he had released all of Tesla’s patents, promising the company “will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. [...] Musk believes patents only serve “to stifle progress” and that by releasing his patents he can help get progress moving again—and that progress will somehow win the fight against climate change.
But do patents stifle progress, and will releasing patents really have this result?"
[...]
"Patents are a trade with a government. The inventor agrees to disclose the invention to the public in exchange for a limited exclusive right to the invention. No one else can make, use, sell or import the invention without the inventor’s permission. The public interest is served because the invention is publicly disclosed, so anyone can improve the invention and patent that advancement. And anyone can design around it and patent that invention. If the invention has commercial value, no doubt many people will jump in and do one or both."
This is the key part:
"Musk clearly does not value how patents promote progress. But he does value trade secrets. Tesla is known for keeping a tight lid on its trade secrets. They protect these trade secrets as far as the law will allow them [2], including suing employees and the rest of the industry.
Tesla recently acquired battery manufacturer Maxwell Technologies’ company for $218 million to learn its trade secrets for dry electrode batteries. Obviously, Musk values trade secrets, and he must believe that they do not stifle progress, or he would have released them to the public as well.
However, trade secrets do not promote the progress of innovation. Trade secrets stifle progress.
A trade secret, by definition, is a secret. Secrets are only known to the holder of the secret, so no one else knows how the invention works. Since no one else knows how the invention works, nobody else can improve it like Singer improved Howe’s sewing machine by inventing a straight pull cloth feed. Not only can no one improve it, but no one can combine it with something new like Howe did in inventing the lock-stitch."
"[W]hen an invention could be patented, keeping it as a trade secret denies the public knowledge of how the invention works, which in turn denies the public the ability to improve, combine, or invent around the invention. This secrecy slows the progress of innovation, and therefore harms the public.
Trade secrets have become the preferred invention protection choice of many tech multinationals. Many of these companies have huge numbers of customers with thin products that run on or behind internet browsers. Most inventions in these fields can be hidden behind the browser, buried in the bowels of a datacenter, encrypted in code, or embedded in a chip and thus easily protected by trade secrets.
[...]
Hiding inventions as trade secrets acts to protect these huge multinational corporations [...] This is the reason that huge multinationals lobby so hard for strong trade secret laws and weak patent laws. This is clearly shown in Musk’s low valuation of his patents and high valuation of trade secrets.
If Musk truly wants to promote progress, thereby saving the world from climate change, he would patent his inventions and protect his patents jealously, and he would release his trade secrets for everyone to use freely—especially the trade secrets he just acquired for dry electrode batteries." [1]
The ipwatchdog website has a full example to illustrate the above points (the sewing machine), which I haven't copied, so I recommend you read the full article if you're interested.
I agree with you and wanted to back up these arguments with outside sources and arguments that I personally find compelling and meaningful. I can see that maybe the intention for my post was unclear from my just dropping two quotes.
I would argue that he made his money at Microsoft. He made me money after that via intellectual ventures, but it was mainly his tenure at Microsoft that allowed home to spend his time on complex cooking books...
It seems less "waging a personal vendetta against the person's hobbies" and more "acknowledging that this is an amoral human being who is perpetuating a broken system for personal gain."
That is kind of interesting cognitive dissonance for me.
Cannot be mad at the guy because he is spending that money on making pictures of snowflakes not on hookers and coke.
On the other hand that is quite true in terms of perpetuating a broken system. Well might be that he just takes advantage of a broken system but he did not bribe politicians and did other shady stuff.
Morality play, much? People are nuanced, not just "moral vs amoral"...
Intellectual Ventures exploits the market for inventions and patents, buying patents from companies and inventors under the assumption the patents will be more valuable in the future. (...) Startup companies spun out of IV, including Kymeta, Echodyne, and TerraPower, have developed commercial products from IV's inventions. Through its Global Good unit, which Myhrvold founded in collaboration with Bill Gates, IV has also invented and produced commercial products, such as improved vaccine coolers and milking cans, aimed at low-income markets in Africa and Asia.
The company's business practices have caused controversy, however, with some deprecating the firm as a patent troll. Myhrvold has publicly defended his firm's practices, arguing that they foster innovation by serving as a marketplace for intellectual property. He has noted that many of the largest companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Apple, and Facebook, have also bought large patent portfolios and used litigation to protect them, but he has criticized them as focusing too much on creating "tools or toys for rich people."
Myhrvold is vice chairman of TerraPower, a spin-out of Intellectual Ventures that is developing a new kind of nuclear reactor, known as a traveling-wave reactor, that is designed to be safer, cheaper, and cleaner than current nuclear power plants.
You should read up on how the practice of "patent trolling" actually works. You will quickly find it's profoundly toxic to innovation, creativity, and progress. It's antithetical to almost everyone's values save for extremely greedy people and their lawyers.
Whether the patent is "trivial" or not doesn't even matter to these people. All that matters for them is that they can extract money.
Patent trolls make money by doing (very) lose pattern matching between what you do and the patent they hold, and then they demand an amount that they expect you to compare to the legal costs of arguing your point rather than the utility of the idea. It is a "gotcha" business model that is rightly reviled; the victims don't "choose" to use a patent, but rather the assertion of use is used as leverage by Myrvohld's company, and is expensive to defend regardless of merit. Therefore it is in their interest to assert every patent against every entity with any assets to take.
It is very unfortunate that the justice system is so broken as to make this a viable business model. There are cases of stealing, but there are far more cases of businesses doing normal things and receiving claims out-of-the-blue that they have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to defend.
The difference is when the patents are ridiculous or, to a layman, obvious. Take commenting on the internet; imagine that HN had to pay an x amount for each comment posted, because someone patented (and I'm sure someone HAS patented) the combination of a text input box and a submit button. Imagine YOU had to pay for that privilege.
There's a few good stories out there; google for patent troll in combination with newegg or cloudflare.
> how he can push the boundaries in so many fields.
He is, pretty much, a parasite hiding behind a ton of hype and useless fluff, like snowflake pictures.
First he made tons of money as a patent troll.
To hide his dirty business he fascinated journalists with a machine he created to kill mosquitoes with lasers to fight malaria and yellow fever. No journalist bothered to realize that malaria infested places rarely have electricity to run that machine.
Then he wrote a U$ 600 book (Modernist Cuisine) on how to make over-pretensious risottos and steaks using over-expensive equipment and chemistry. No serious cook follows any recipe in that book anymore.
Now his next trick to show off is snowflake pictures.
Yep, the man surely has both the know-how and the money to put up an irrelevant and pretentious show-off.
He may be a scumbag patent troll, but Modernist Cuisine was a hugely important work in the food world. The techniques and recipes in it are most certainly used all the time in professional kitchens. It's a 600 dollar book for restaurants that are charging 250 pre fixes. Alot of the equiptment used in it are super common these days, immersion circulators, combi ovens, vacuum sealers etc.
