Weekly Sparks: 2025-03
Bits of Inspiration to Wind Down Your Week (#4)
This Week’s Sparks
A curated selection of the week’s most striking quotes.
“This is often how scientific progress happens: slowly, methodically and around the clock.”
— Amy Harder, Link
“In 2024, AI contributed both to Nobel Prize–winning chemistry breakthroughs and a mountain of cheaply made content that few people asked for but that nonetheless flooded the internet.”
— James O’Donnell
“Having Barcelona become a crucial regional outpost for offensive cybersecurity companies puts the spyware problem squarely on the doorstep of Europe.”
— Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, Link
“We can only make our most significant contributions when we act from our strengths.”
— Jono Hey, Link
“Failure is the constant companion of innovation.”
— Svyatoslav Biryulin, Link
“Science absolutely requires skepticism to progress. But to have skepticism about any particular scientific result, you must first understand how skepticism functions in science. That means having a deep knowledge of the science you are aiming your skepticism toward. That is not what’s happening now in the age of social media science denial, along with computational propaganda and the other “at scale” information (or misinformation) distribution systems. And this is the real paradox at the heart of science denial. It’s the tools developed by science that make it possible.”
— Adam Frank, Link
“You will always be yourself, in different forms, because the history of the world is the history of the ancient tangled, unnameable, and unthinkable thing that endures and transforms, the truest part of what you feel you are, which no one can unravel. Listen to it, in silence.”
— Riccardo Dal Ferro, Link
“Changes in America are never gradual; they resemble a pendulum: first, there’s a strong swing in one direction, then an equally strong swing in the opposite. Each time, something from the previous phase remains, and so progress is made through momentum, dramatic shifts, abrupt movements, and subsequent adjustments.”
— Francesco Costa
Timeless Sparks
Profound ideas and reflections from history’s greatest minds to bring depth and perspective to your week.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
— Teddy Roosevelt
“If I know anything, it’s that I never learned anything while I was talking”
— Robert Downey Jr.
Big Questions
Thought-provoking questions to explore life, the universe, and everything.
What parts of yourself feel tangled and unnameable, and how might they reveal the truest essence of who you are?
When have you felt the pendulum of change swing within you, leaving behind something that shaped your growth?
What strengths do you instinctively rely on, and how do they guide the contributions you make to the world?
Make the most of it! Until next time, S.
