Drive: Ideas for sustained work. - Page 7

Editor’s note

Drive

For days when you want encouragement to start, practise or keep going.

DriveHealth

Sardines, salmon, mackerel and other oily fish are rich in EPA and DHA, two long-chain omega-3 fats. The body builds them into its cell membranes, DHA especially in the brain and the retina of the eye, and both help the heart to work normally.

Omega-3 fats are named after their chemistry: the first double bond in their carbon chain is at the third carbon atom counted from the end of the chain, known as the omega end. EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) has 20 carbon atoms and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) has 22. Fish get most of these fats from their food: the fats are made by algae and plankton and build up in the fish that eat them. Plant foods such as flaxseed, chia seeds and walnuts provide a shorter omega-3 called ALA, and the body turns only a small share of it into EPA and DHA. The NHS advises eating at least two portions of fish a week, one of them oily. For people who do not eat fish, oil made from algae is another source of EPA and DHA.

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DriveHealth

Heart-rate variability (HRV) measures how much the time between one heartbeat and the next changes, in milliseconds. It shifts with sleep, training, stress, illness, alcohol and breathing, so a single reading says little on its own.

A healthy heart does not beat like a metronome. The gaps between beats lengthen and shorten all the time, even with each breath: the heart speeds up slightly as you breathe in and slows as you breathe out. These changes are steered by the autonomic nervous system, which runs the body without conscious effort. When its 'rest and digest' branch, the parasympathetic system, is in charge, HRV tends to rise; when the 'fight or flight' branch takes over, it tends to fall. Higher HRV is often linked with good recovery, but it also varies with age, genes and fitness, and it naturally falls as people get older. That is why a trend measured the same way, at the same time of day, tells you more than comparing numbers with someone else.

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DriveTechnology

The early reCAPTCHA, launched in 2007, showed two hard-to-read words. One was already known and checked that you were human; the other came from a scanned old book or newspaper that a computer had failed to read, so millions of people typing it helped digitise printed text.

A CAPTCHA is a small test that computers find hard and people find easy, used to keep automated programs, or bots, out of sign-up forms and comment boxes. The name stands for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'; it was coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University. Von Ahn realised that people were spending millions of hours in total on these puzzles, and reCAPTCHA put that effort to use. Scanned pages were read by optical character recognition (OCR), software that turns pictures of letters into text; words it was unsure of became puzzles, and several people's answers were compared. The system helped digitise The New York Times archive and was then used for Google Books. Google bought reCAPTCHA in 2009, and from 2014 it moved to image puzzles and a simple 'I'm not a robot' box.

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DriveTechnology

By tradition, the first program people write in a new programming language simply makes the computer display 'Hello, world'. The habit comes from Brian Kernighan of Bell Labs, who used the phrase in tutorials in 1972 and 1974 and in The C Programming Language, the 1978 book he wrote with Dennis Ritchie.

The earliest known version is in Kernighan's 1972 tutorial for B, a forerunner of the C language, where it appeared in an example about variables; the example before it printed only 'hi!'. The 1978 book made the phrase famous, and today almost every programming course and language manual starts with a version of it. It survives because it is a quick check that everything works: that the language is installed, that the code can be turned into a program the computer can run, and that the programmer knows how to run it, all before anything harder begins. In Python it takes a single line, while older languages need several. On devices without a screen, such as tiny microcontrollers, the equivalent first test is often making a light blink. Outside computing the phrase was already the catchphrase of the New York radio presenter William B. Williams in the 1950s.

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DriveTechnology

A program can stop working even if nobody changes a line of it, because the computers, operating systems and online services it relies on keep changing. Programmers call this software rot, or bit rot.

The name is a joke: the bits do not really decay, though it can look that way. A classic case is old computer games that used the speed of the processor as their clock, so on faster computers they ran too fast to play. Online features fail when the company switches off its server. Secure websites rely on digital certificates, electronic proofs of identity that have expiry dates, so an old phone or computer that no longer gets updates slowly loses the ability to open them. In March 2021 the older versions of TLS, the security standard that encrypts web connections, were officially retired, cutting off many old browsers. Programs also rely on ready-made building blocks written by others, called libraries; when a library changes or disappears, the program can break. This is why software needs regular maintenance, and why archives run old programs in emulators, which imitate old machines.

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DriveLiterature

Ernest Hemingway's iceberg theory holds that a writer who knows a subject well can leave much of it out, and readers will still feel it. He compared good prose to an iceberg: only one-eighth shows above the water, and the hidden part gives it its weight.

Hemingway set out the idea in Death in the Afternoon (1932), his book on Spanish bullfighting: if a writer truly knows the material, he can omit things and the reader will sense them as strongly as if they had been stated. The habit began early. As a young reporter at the Kansas City Star in 1917, he followed a style sheet that asked for short sentences and plain, vigorous English, and he later trimmed his stories in the same way. A well-known example is 'Hills Like White Elephants' (1927): a couple waiting for a train in Spain argue about an operation that is never named, yet the reader understands what is at stake. The method, also called the theory of omission, shaped much of 20th-century fiction, and Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

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DriveLiterature

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was turned down by about a dozen publishers before Bloomsbury accepted it. It came out in 1997 with a first print run of just 500 hardback copies.

Rowling finished the book in Edinburgh while bringing up her young daughter alone. Her agent, Christopher Little, spent about a year sending it out, and many publishers thought it too long for a children's book at around 90,000 words. At Bloomsbury the editor Barry Cunningham liked it, and the chief executive, Nigel Newton, gave the first chapter to his eight-year-old daughter, Alice, who read it and asked for more. Bloomsbury paid an advance of £2,500 and published the book on 26 June 1997; 300 of the first 500 copies went to libraries. In April 1997, before it was even out in Britain, the American publisher Scholastic bought the US rights for $105,000, a remarkable sum for a children's book. The series became one of the best-selling in history.

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DrivePhilosophy

When Alexander the Great met the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (today's Sinop in Turkey) in Corinth and asked what he could do for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: 'Stand a little out of my sun.'

Diogenes (about 412–323 BC) left Sinope, a Greek city on the Black Sea coast, after a scandal over debased coins, and settled in Athens. He lived by begging, slept in a large storage jar and walked through the market in daylight with a lit lamp, saying he was looking for a human being. He was the best-known Cynic, from the Greek word for 'dog-like', a name that mocked his shameless way of life and that he wore with pride. The meeting with Alexander is told by Plutarch and by Diogenes Laërtius, who wrote about the lives of the philosophers, both centuries later, so its details may have been polished. Plutarch adds that Alexander said: if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes. Sinop honours him with a statue, put up in 2006, showing him with his lamp and a dog.

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DrivePhilosophy

Sartre's phrase “existence precedes essence” means we aren't born with a fixed purpose: we exist first, then make ourselves through what we choose to do.

Sartre (1905–1980) was the leading French philosopher of existentialism, a movement centred on freedom and personal responsibility. He gave the idea its best-known form in a public talk in Paris on 29 October 1945, published in 1946 as Existentialism Is a Humanism. He explained it with a paper knife: its maker has a plan for it before it exists, so its essence, what it is for, comes first. Since Sartre held that there is no God to design human nature, people have no such plan: we first exist, and then define ourselves through our actions. That is why he said we are 'condemned to be free': we cannot avoid choosing, and we answer for what we choose. Sartre later distanced himself from the talk as too simple, and in 1964 he declined the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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DrivePhilosophy

Occam's razor, named after the 14th-century English friar William of Ockham, advises that when two explanations fit the evidence equally well, the one that needs fewer assumptions is the better place to start.

William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) was an English Franciscan friar and one of the leading logicians of the Middle Ages. He used the principle so often and so effectively that it became tied to his name, although he did not invent it: Aristotle had argued something similar. The famous Latin wording, “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”, does not appear in his surviving writings; an Irish friar, John Punch, put it that way in 1639. The “razor” is the image of shaving away assumptions an explanation does not need. The rule is a guide, not a proof, and sometimes the truth really is complicated. Medical students learn a version of it: when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.

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DrivePhilosophy

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, filled private notebooks with Stoic reflections, written in Greek and never meant for publication. We know them today as the Meditations.

Stoicism was a Greek school of philosophy that taught people to focus on what is in their power, their own judgements and actions, and to accept calmly what is not. Marcus had studied it since his youth. He wrote much of the Meditations in the 170s, while leading campaigns against Germanic tribes on the Danube frontier; notes in the text place the first book in the land of the Quadi and the second at Carnuntum, a Roman fort in today's Austria. He gave the work no title. The Greek manuscripts call it Ta eis heauton, “To himself”. The notes survived in Byzantine copies and were first printed in Zurich in 1558 or 1559, and they have since become one of the most widely read books of philosophy.

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DriveHealth

A Finnish study that followed 2,315 middle-aged men for about 20 years found that those who took a sauna four to seven times a week were less likely to die of heart disease, or of any cause, than those who went once a week. It shows a link, not proof that the sauna did it.

The men, aged 42 to 60, joined a long-running heart study in Kuopio, eastern Finland, in the 1980s, and researchers at the University of Eastern Finland published the sauna results in 2015. After allowing for known risk factors such as smoking, blood pressure and cholesterol, men who used the sauna four to seven times a week had a 63% lower risk of sudden cardiac death than once-a-week users. Sessions longer than 19 minutes were also linked to fewer deaths from heart disease. This is an observational study: it records what people already do rather than assigning them a routine, so men who were healthier to begin with may simply have used the sauna more. It also included only men. The sauna is part of everyday life in Finland, and Finnish sauna culture was added to UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in 2020.

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DriveHealth

Cardiorespiratory fitness, how well your heart, lungs and muscles use oxygen during hard exercise, is one of the strongest known predictors of how long people live. It is often measured as VO2 max, the most oxygen the body can use in a minute.

VO2 max is measured on a treadmill or exercise bike while a mask analyses each breath, and is given in millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. An untrained man typically scores about 35 to 40, an untrained woman 27 to 31, and elite endurance athletes can exceed 80. The British physiologist Archibald Hill described the idea in the 1920s. In 2018 Cleveland Clinic researchers reported on 122,007 patients who had done treadmill tests between 1991 and 2014. After allowing for age and other factors, the least fit quarter were about five times as likely to die during the follow-up as the fittest 2 to 3%, and simply being below average carried as much risk as smoking or diabetes. Unlike age, fitness can be raised: regular endurance and interval training increase VO2 max in most people.

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DriveMind

The Zeigarnik effect, named after the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, is the idea that interrupted tasks are remembered better than finished ones. Her 1927 study made it famous, but later research has struggled to repeat the result.

The story goes that the psychologist Kurt Lewin noticed a waiter who remembered every unpaid order in detail but forgot each one the moment the bill was settled. His Lithuanian-born student Bluma Zeigarnik tested the idea: people did a series of small tasks, some of which she interrupted, and afterwards they recalled the interrupted ones better. She published the results in 1927. Later attempts to repeat the experiment gave mixed results, and a 2025 review of the research found no reliable memory advantage. What did hold up was a related finding by her colleague Maria Ovsiankina: people feel a strong urge to go back and finish what they started. A 2011 study by E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that simply making a specific plan for an unfinished goal stopped it intruding on people's thoughts.

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DriveMind

The method of loci (Latin for “places”), also called the memory palace, improves recall by placing items along an imagined, familiar route, so that remembering becomes a walk through space.

Roman writers traced the method to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. According to the story Cicero tells, Simonides left a banquet hall moments before its roof collapsed, and he could identify the crushed guests by remembering where each had sat. Roman orators then used imagined buildings to memorise long speeches. To use it, you pick a place you know well, such as your home, and mentally put a vivid image of each item at a spot along the way; to recall, you walk the same route in your mind. Many competitors in memory championships rely on it. In a 2017 study in the journal Neuron, beginners who practised it for 30 minutes a day over six weeks remembered far more words from 72-word lists, and the gain was still there four months later.

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DriveTechnology

A modern smartphone carries a set of tiny sensors: an accelerometer and a gyroscope that track movement and rotation, a magnetometer that works as a compass, light and proximity sensors, often a barometer, and a satellite receiver that works out where you are.

Most of these sensors are MEMS, micro-electro-mechanical systems: tiny machines etched into silicon chips, with moving parts measured in thousandths of a millimetre. The accelerometer senses how a minute weight on springs shifts as the phone moves, which is how the screen knows when to rotate and how steps are counted. The gyroscope measures turning and helps steady photos and video. The magnetometer detects the Earth's magnetic field so maps can point north. The light sensor adjusts screen brightness, and the proximity sensor turns the screen off when you hold the phone to your ear. A barometer measures air pressure, which reveals how many floors you have climbed. For location, the phone times signals from several satellites and checks them against nearby Wi-Fi networks and phone masts. The first iPhone, in 2007, already had accelerometer, light and proximity sensors; a gyroscope followed in 2010.

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DriveHealth

Grip strength, how hard you can squeeze with one hand, is a good sign of overall health. In a study of nearly 140,000 adults in 17 countries, published in 2015, every 5 kg drop in grip strength went with a 16% higher risk of death over about four years, and grip predicted that risk better than blood pressure.

The study, called PURE (Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology), was published in The Lancet. Researchers measured grip with a Jamar dynamometer, a hand-held device with a dial, in people aged 35 to 70 in high-, middle- and low-income countries, then followed them for a median of four years. Weaker grip was linked with a higher risk of dying from heart disease and from other causes, and with more heart attacks and strokes. Grip is a quick snapshot of overall muscle strength, which tends to fall with illness, inactivity and age, so doctors use it to spot frailty and sarcopenia, the loss of muscle that comes with ageing. It is an association, not proof of cause: the authors called for trials to test whether building strength actually lowers the risk.

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DriveHealth

When you lower a weight or walk downhill, your muscles work while lengthening under load. This is called an eccentric action, and muscles can produce more force this way than when they shorten. It is a valuable part of strength training, but lowering every weight extremely slowly brings no proven extra benefit.

Muscles work in three ways: concentric, when they shorten, as in lifting a weight; eccentric, when they lengthen while resisting, as in lowering it; and isometric, when they hold still. During an eccentric action the links between the muscle proteins actin and myosin are pulled apart by force rather than releasing on their own, and a spring-like protein, titin, adds tension as the fibres stretch, which helps explain the extra force. The same strain causes more of the stiffness felt a day or two after unfamiliar exercise, known as delayed onset muscle soreness, though it eases as the body adapts. Eccentric exercises are also widely used in rehabilitation after injury. On tempo, a 2015 review of eight studies in the journal Sports Medicine found similar muscle growth whether each repetition lasted half a second or eight seconds, while very slow repetitions of more than ten seconds seemed less effective.

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DriveMind

People are more likely to start on a goal just after a date that marks a new beginning, such as a Monday, the first of the month, a birthday or New Year's Day. Psychologists call this the fresh start effect.

The effect was named in a 2014 paper by Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis of the Wharton School in Philadelphia. Looking at real-world records, they found that Google searches for the word 'diet', gym visits and sign-ups on a website where people make formal commitments to their goals all rose after such dates: the start of a week, month, year or term, a birthday or a holiday. Their explanation is that these dates divide time into chapters. Past slips feel as if they belong to an old self, and people step back to look at their lives as a whole. In later experiments by the same team, simply describing a day as the start of a new period, rather than as an ordinary date, made people keener to begin.

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DriveTechnology

'123456' keeps topping lists of the most common passwords. In a 2019 analysis of accounts exposed in data breaches, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre found that 23.2 million of them used exactly that password.

Such lists come from breaches, when criminals steal and publish databases of logins. The NCSC used the Have I Been Pwned collection run by the security researcher Troy Hunt; the next most common choices were '123456789', 'qwerty', 'password' and '1111111'. Simple passwords fall quickly to attackers, who try the most popular ones first. Reused passwords are risky because criminals test leaked email and password pairs on other websites, a technique called credential stuffing. The NCSC recommends joining three random but memorable words, and the US standards body NIST advises length rather than complicated character rules. A password manager, an app that creates and stores a different strong password for every account, means you do not have to remember them.

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DriveMind

The Pygmalion effect is the finding that high expectations from others can lift a person's performance. In a 1960s study, teachers were told that certain pupils, in fact picked at random, were about to blossom; months later the youngest of those pupils had gained more on IQ tests than their classmates.

The study was run by the psychologist Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, a primary school principal in South San Francisco, and published in 1968 as Pygmalion in the Classroom. The name comes from the Greek myth of a sculptor whose statue came to life, and from George Bernard Shaw's play in which a professor transforms a flower seller's speech. The findings were challenged: the psychologist Robert Thorndike found serious flaws in the IQ test, and later studies often failed to repeat the result. A 2005 review of 35 years of research by Lee Jussim and Kent Harber concluded that expectation effects in classrooms are real but usually small, can fade over time and may be stronger for pupils from stigmatised groups. Teachers seem to pass expectations on through warmth, feedback and the chances they give a pupil. The opposite, where low expectations hold people back, is called the Golem effect.

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DrivePhilosophy

If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.

This is passage 17 of the twelfth and last book of the Meditations, the private notebook that the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180) kept in Greek. The word translated 'right' means 'fitting': it belongs to the Stoic idea of kathekon, the appropriate action that a person's reason and role call for in a given situation. So the rule sets two tests: before acting, ask whether the act is fitting; before speaking, ask whether the words are true. Marcus wrote this as the most powerful man in the Roman world, who could have lied or acted unjustly at little risk. In the first book he thanks his teacher, the Stoic Junius Rusticus, for teaching him to write plainly and read carefully, and for sharing his own copy of the Discourses of Epictetus, the former slave whose ideas shaped his own.

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DrivePhilosophy

No man was ever wise by chance.

The line comes from the 76th of Seneca's Moral Letters to Lucilius, a collection of 124 letters he wrote in the last years of his life, after withdrawing from the emperor Nero's court. Lucilius was a younger friend serving as procurator, a senior official, in Sicily. In this letter Seneca, by then an old man, admits he has been attending a philosopher's lectures for several days and shrugs off those who laugh at him: you should keep learning for as long as you are ignorant, which means for as long as you live. Then comes the point: money may arrive of its own accord, and titles and influence may be handed to you, but virtue never falls on anyone by chance. It takes long, steady work. In Latin the sentence is only four words: nulli sapere casu obtigit.

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DrivePhilosophy

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.

The sentence comes from the opening paragraph of Discourse on the Method (1637) by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650). He begins with a joke: good sense is the most fairly shared thing in the world, since no one wishes for more of it than they already have. Then he adds that a good mind is not enough; what matters is applying it well. The book sets out his method in four rules: accept nothing as true unless it is clearly evident, break problems into small parts, move from simple to complex, and check everything for gaps. Descartes, then living in the Netherlands, wrote it in French rather than scholarly Latin so that ordinary readers could follow it. It introduced three scientific essays, one of which laid the ground for the x and y graphs still taught in school. Part Four contains 'I think, therefore I am'.

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