We look in... Germany for a superstar. We began with 10,000 people, which applied. From these 10,000, 100 was selected. The jury is unbelievably competent.
Jeff Sachs has the Millennium Villages. He spends $2.5 million in one village. It's an absolutely ridiculous model, because I've said that if you gave me $2.5 million, I can train 100 grandmothers, solar electrify 100 villages - 10,000 houses - and save you 100,000 litres of kerosene.
Most entrepreneurs don't need as many customers as they think. A lot of people think 10 is too few for a sample. But if all 10 refused a product, why is that not enough? If you want 100, 1,000 or a million customers, you first have to get 10.
The 'size' of science has doubled steadily every 15 years. In a century this means a factor of 100. For every single scientific paper or for every single scientist in 1670, there were 100 in 1770, 10,000 in 1870 and 1,000,000 in 1970.
The best customers for us are the ones that present us with a new problem because chances are, if one customer has that problem, 100 more have it, or 1,000, or 10,000. So you start thinking about solution development rather than product development.
I don't really regret anything I've done, even if it's bad. I mean, I have a $100,000 Chopard watch. I don't need a $100,000 watch, but I like it. It's all diamonds. That's a little extreme, but I don't care.
Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable.
By the end of 2001, between 100,000 to 150,000 Algerians had died in the civil war, as well as 120 foreigners. The cost to the economy ran into billions of dollars. And all this in spite of a tough, 120,000-strong army backed by 80,000 police.
The richer people, when they get another $100,000, or another million, or 10 million, don't tend to spend it as much as the poorer people would if they got another $100 or $1,000 or $5,000. All the empirical evidence suggests that the rich tend to consume a lower proportion of income than middle and lower-income people.
The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over.
In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We're only one God away from total agreement.
The air in a man's lungs 10,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived - Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.
Wellness seeks more than the absence of illness; it searches for new levels of excellence. Beyond any disease-free neutral point, wellness dedicates its efforts to our total well-being - in body, mind, and spirit.
If you only have 10 examples of something, it's going to be hard to make deep learning work. If you have 100,000 things you care about, records or whatever, that's the kind of scale where you should really start thinking about these kinds of techniques.
Bigger spreads mean bigger gaps between what buyers pay and sellers receive. For example, a spread of 10 cents a share means that the buyer pays $100 more for 1,000 shares than the seller receives.
I think a colony in space will take much longer than sci fiction writers think. It costs $10,000 to put a pound of anything into near earth orbit. That is your weight in gold. It costs about $100,000 a pound to put you on the moon. And it costs $1,000,000 a pound to put you on Mars.