In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.

Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways.

When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'

If I say I've got two versions of Word - that old one from 1982 that's perfect, with zero defects; or the new one that's got all this cool new stuff, but there might be a few bugs in it - people always want the new one. But I wouldn't want them to operate a plane I was on with software that happened to be the latest greatest release!

Anybody who can afford a box of business cards can afford a Web site. Any company with an 800 number can move its services to the Web for peanuts by comparison. The extreme case of corporate promotion is to strip away all other aspects of your business and sell goods or services via the Net alone, as amazon.com has done with books.

Many of the things the slow food people honor were innovations within historical times. Somebody had to be the first European to eat a tomato.

If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun!