PyCon US 2024 has been and gone. It was mostly lovely, and huge thanks to the team of volunteers who made it happen.

I was privileged to help plan the web assembly summit with my buddies Brett and Fabio. We paid close attention to cultivating a space where folks could meet, learn and build the connections needed to grow our nascent WASM community. I enjoyed paying attention to the three excellent talks about PyScript given by my friends, Jeff Glass, Valerio Maggio and Łukasz Langa. Their conference contributions (and many ad hoc conversations in the corridor) proved PyScript retains its buzz in the community. It was wonderful to pay close attention to the many dear friends I only ever see at PyCon US... a diverse circle of coders, kindred spirits and collaborators from all over the world.

Clearly, paying attention was my primary pastime at PyCon.

To what we pay attention is important. How we pay attention is equally consequential but often unconscious. Considering why we pay attention is perhaps most significant ~ an engaging, poignant and sadly neglected opportunity for self-examination.

Paying attention to paying attention is worthy of paying attention.

I must admit to mixed feelings when I consider the way some of my programming peers pay attention to the world. Put another way, there have always been aspects of the Python community that I have found deeply uncomfortable. Without wishing to tarnish the good stuff at PyCon, here's what makes me pause for thought...

Despite welcome community representation, the exhibitor's hall at PyCon is mostly full of companies vying for attention with banal booths hosting transactional "brand engagement" via bland talking points. Tired marketing slogans bore attendees with infantile newspeak ordering us to "grow", "unleash" or "innovate" with over-inflated (yet soon forgotten) products. The exhibitors' scanning of conference badges is a QR-based game of cat and mouse. The prize? Yet more email spam. Unsurprisingly, attendees have to be lured into this space with the promise of lunch.

Happily, most conversations at PyCon are friendly and nourishing, but some turn into a sort of performative alpha-geek / silverback coding-gorilla display of programming buzzword bingo for the tech bro / brogrammer crowd. A less performative but equally problematic sort of conversation involves a trite and blinkered obsession with quantitative measurement of often-suspect or dull metrics to prove a qualitative point (and thus attention is misdirected).

Alas, the predominant mythology at PyCon US is (unsurprisingly) US centric and dominated by Silicon Valley, Big Tech and Hacker News startup culture with a surveillance capitalist bent. In this culture euphemisms and doublespeak, such as "get to know your users" or "deliver value faster", misdirect attention from often sinister and manipulative uses of technology: the intention behind the examples I've just given being a more efficient pollution of our world with insidious adverts. (Remember folks, always use an ad blocker with your browser).

My discomfort comes from the unquestioning and uncritical attention towards, and tacit normalisation of such exploitative and banal aspects of coding culture. The emperor has no clothes: this is not "progress" and "growth" into a "brave new world", but a one dimensional, thoughtlessly performative and (small C) conservative and conformist outlook that places technology over humanity for the dumb sake of profit. The vapid products this cultural cesspit spews into the world suck all the creativity, depth and joy from life.

Woe betide criticism of such a culture, or you'll be labelled a neo-Luddite.

To be clear, I'm not against technology (no shit Sherlock, it's actually fucking useful!). Rather, I'm against shallow, stupid and stunted ways of paying attention to tech and coding. I believe we can (and must!) do better than this sorry state of affairs. As programmers we can shine a light on such things in the hope we explore and encourage alternative ways to pay attention, express ourselves, empower folks and carefully enlarge the world through creative, evocative and joyful technology.

All this probably explains why, for me, the most interesting and stimulating aspects of PyCon were the opportunities to be away from PyCon. They jarringly contrasted with the conference in the way they emphasised how to pay attention to the world.

The first of such contrasts was a trip to the Andy Warhol museum with my friend Naomi.

Prior to my visit, I had only limited encounters with the work of Warhol: the "15 minutes of fame" quote, garish quartets of Marilyn Monroe prints, Campbell's soup cans, and 80s-era photos of a vacant looking eccentric with blonde hair and glasses. Yet the Warhol museum captured and stimulated my attention. I especially enjoyed sharing this time with Naomi, who is always such a playful presence with a large dollop of thoughtfulness thrown in for good measure (more on this soon).

My impression of Warhol is of a man who found himself in an adverse world, then dared to make a space for himself by subverting the familiar. His subversions are funny, ironic, goading, engaging and assertive in a way that also feels (to me) disconnected and slightly bored with our manufactured world. Thus, he directs our freshly subverted attention to the familiar and we experience a dislocated "huh?!" moment of reflection or revelation.

For instance, he called his studio The Factory - presumably because it was an assembly line for his art as well as a conveyor belt of visiting celebrities. He published a book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and back again), ghostwritten by someone else using recordings of Warhol as source material. Explicit homoerotic portraits drawn with a black ballpoint pen announce his overt homosexuality... drawn at a time of discrimination and prejudice against the LGBT+ community. The film Taylor Mead's Ass is a glorious 76 minutes of actor Taylor Mead's naked backside capriciously capering around as a celluloid riposte to a film critic who complained he was bored of films containing Mead's ass (it's a silent film, and I wondered out loud to Naomi about the possibility of adding comedy sound effects). The playfully manufactured and entirely unnatural Silver Clouds (shown above) are plastic silver "pillows" filled with a careful mix of helium and air - just like kids' party balloons. Naomi and I spent an entertaining time bopping and booping them about the room and I, as a tuba player, couldn't resist vigorously blowing underneath one of the pillows in a respiratory busting and ultimately futile game of keepie-uppie. We were told by one of the staff that the pillows regularly escape, especially in the presence of children (young or old). Of course, the museum also contained versions of the iconic Warhol pieces, yet did so with sympathy to the unfolding story as one explored the space. There was no "oh look, gotta catch a photo of the Mona Lisa" or "lemme take a selfie with these Van Gough Sunflowers" moment during our tour... although I suspect Warhol would have sabotaged such contemporary theatrics, given half a chance.

Naomi and I discussed how we couldn't really imagine such provocative playfulness at PyCon, nor any pointed subversions during the conference talks. I was left in a thoughtful (i.e. grumpy) mood about our contemporary culture contaminated by social media. Thanks to such exploitative technology, folks don't have 15 minutes of fame, but an eternity of prompted performative obscurity. If everyone is doing "famous", then nobody is famous and we're all just sacrificing ourselves to assessment by algorithms.

Of course, Warhol has an angle on this.

One of the floors of the museum contains installations playing some of the many screen tests he shot in the mid-60's. I found myself asking "who's looking at who?" and then I wondered about how individuals choose (or perhaps have no choice over) how to present themselves. The personal branding, self obsessed "influencers", and manipulative gaze of social media in contemporary culture came to mind. Are you famous if you're on film or filmed if you're already famous? Warhol was playing with the notion of "famous" long before coders thoughtlessly brought YouTube, Twitter and Facebook into the world as an exercise in exploiting our collective narcissism for the sake of shareholder value.

And then we saw it: a create your own screen test room just off the main gallery space.

"I will if you will", I said to Naomi. She gamely took a seat and kicked off the immortalization of four minutes of awkward "so now what do I do?" exasperated looks into a fake film camera making faux whirring noises. As I sat during my session, I counted in my head, listened to Colonel Bogey with my inner ear, and tried very hard to ignore the various passers-by (to varying degrees of success). Ultimately, for four minutes I'd become another exhibit... a delightful subversion of what it is to visit a museum. Bravo to the curators for such an ironic trick. At the end, you're emailed a link to your screen test... and I've embedded mine below. I bagsy this as a four minute quota from my promised fifteen minutes of fame. I hope to make better use of my remaining eleven minutes.

Here's the thing, I appear to be paying attention to you, as you pay attention to me, but I'm not actually there! Perhaps Warhol would have appreciated adding such a non-attentive video to an article about attention.

Another joyful contrast to PyCon was dinner with my buddy Andrew Smith and his partner Jan, along with Naomi, Guido and Eric... all of whom (like me) encountered Andrew as he was writing his latest book, The Devil in the Stack. The distinct lack of technical conversation was a breath of fresh air, and Andrew and Jan were energetic and entertaining hosts.

In the week before PyCon and during PyCon itself I found myself reacting to the conference with poetry (or, more accurately, doggerel). Feeling motivated by the playfulness of the Warhol museum visit, and because an opportunity arose during the meal, I was able to share some of these verses of varying quality with such literary friends(!). I'm re-sharing them here so I can feel they've somehow "escaped" into the world, and can take on a life of their own... or simply pass into bewildered obscurity.

The first is a limerick about Guido. I've changed it from the version I read out at the meal, since he explained that some Dutch I'd originally included didn't quite make sense in the way I had hoped.

I was prompted by chatting with Guido at 2023's PyCon. I noticed he had covered his name on his conference badge with a post-it note saying, "no selfies". Guido is, of course, the inventor of Python.

No Selfies

Said Guido, a programmer Dutch,
“I really hate selfies. As such:
  I might be your hero,
  But to me it means zero.
Please leave me in peace, thanks so much”.

“But Guido you're really a saint,
When meeting you I feel quite faint.
  I want to shake hands,
  Rise above all the fans,
Be your best buddy without restraint”.

“Oh God! Please just make it stop!
These programmers really must drop,
  The deluge of thanks,
  Autographs and cranks,
'Else PyCon, for me, is a flop”.

I'm proud to say, everyone at dinner was politely bemused!

I didn't share this next poem at the dinner because it was still relatively incomplete at the time.

Ode to a Data Scientist

This has 97 words, 12 lines and 3 verses,
Rhymes A-A-B-B in a scheme that traverses,
Through four lines per stanza, in compound time,
A measurable quantity expressed as a rhyme.

No doubt such patterns and figures reveal,
Aspects of things that stats un-conceal.
Yet these numeric collisions of aggregate stuff,
Are a diminished perspective that is not enough.

The observable facts such as these do not show,
Or reveal the subjective world that we know.
For beyond such detachment and detail we wend,
Through a universe to live in, embrace and transcend.

This is my plea for a more nuanced, expressive and felt view of the world.

Truth be told, I don't see myself as a programmer. In my mind's eye I'm a musician who just happens to use code as their medium (reflect on Charles Ives's famous question, "my god, what has sound got to do with music?"). If you were to cut me open, only my little toe would contain code, my uncoordinated left foot would perhaps encompass my interest in philosophy, and my sprained ankle would be my educational efforts. The rest would just be music.

I was in a puckish and annoyed mood when I wrote this final poem. I simply wanted to poke fun at the barren world view of the tech bros.

The Plural Noun for Tech Bros

A herd of tech bros circle together,
  bleating about the Pythonic weather.

Don't be the sheep cut off from the mass,
  unable to pass,
  as someone,
  with something,
  interesting
  to
  say...

Their mental masturbation ejaculates
  ever-fruitless discourse:

Repackaged reportage from Hacker News,
  Performative patronising technical reviews,
Name dropping semi-famous nerds,
  An infinite garbage of computer-y words.
Detached and empty with no spark of life.
  The real world ignored, to cut off its strife.
So clever they lack the intelligence to know,
  We are vital and luminous souls who grow
Through connections and feelings and deep self revealings,
  But their work fills the world with VC funded dealings.
Squeezing huge profits through inhumane code,
  We're exploitable data points, with privacy to erode.

What do we call such a desperate crew?
A wank of tech bros, that'll do.

It felt good... nope... it felt great to read out such silliness to friends ~ paying attention to coding culture with my creative, playful and expressive side while gleefully ignoring the performative moralising and tone policing that often goes on in the (Victorian) Python community. We desperately need writers, poets, artists, dancers, sculptors, actors, architects, comedians and musicians in the world of coding, if only to save us from the currently brain dead coding culture. Programming is an art, so please come join in... we're not all thoughtlessly tone deaf like Elon, charismatically challenged like Zuck or so easily forgettable like those dudes, whose names escape me, that run Google.

The final contrast with PyCon was a trip out of town with my friends Dave, Katrina, Martin and Josh. We went to see Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural masterpiece, Falling Water.

The photographs I took while on the excellent guided tour should, I hope, speak for themselves. Take your time browsing through them.

Thanks to the visit I'm reading a recent biography of Frank Lloyd Wright called Plagued by Fire by Paul Hendrickson. It's a quirky book about a deeply complicated man.

Frank Lloyd Wright was a surly, manipulative narcissist and his life was full of dramatic twists and turns. He founded an influential studio and school for architects, was a major figure in the Prairie School of architectural design, and (perhaps thanks to the way Falling Water captured the public's imagination) had more than 400 commissions in the final three decades of his life (he passed away at the age of 91).

Most paradoxically, given his arrogant, self-mythologising and dissonant nature, he promoted an architectural philosophy called organic architecture that aimed to bring about harmony between human habitation and the natural world. In his view, buildings should be at home in nature and grow "out of the ground and into the light". Not only did organic architecture work with the natural conditions of a site, but the process of design, construction, living and maintaining was integral to the outlook, like stages in the life of a living organism. Because of this dynamic outlook, Lloyd Wright believed that "no organic building can ever be 'finished'" since it should respond to its changing environment and needs of its occupants. He also emphasised the importance of integrity - that a building should be "integral to site, integral to environment and integral to the life of the inhabitants". Falling Water is often cited as a classic example of this philosophy, articulated in his book The Natural House.

My response to Falling Water was reflective: attentively being in the place to assimilate and appreciate its presence, along with my own presence within it. In the same way a live performance of music may create a time and place for encountering certain feelings or attitudes, so this building had a psychological impact on those who explored its rooms, transitions and placement within nature.

As Joe, our mature yet sprightly guide, showed us around the property he brought our attention to hidden details while telling the story of the life of the house. He skilfully illustrated aspects of Lloyd Wright's philosophy. For example, the notion of "destruction of the box" was mentioned several times: the rooms were varying in shape, often open and flowed into each other. Joe brought our attention to details relating to the fixtures, furniture, windows, bathrooms, materials, lighting, the aural experience of the waterfall and accessibility to the stream, sun and trees in the surrounding area. Everything about this building was done consciously, with care and through a process of attending to the way the parts "organically" cohered and emerged into a whole.

While chatting with the ever-thoughtful Martin, we both commented on how this attitude to building structures was very different to the usual way we build software. We agreed (to paraphrase our conversation) that coders, "thoughtlessly bung features together and then A/B test the hell out of it". To me this attitude feels closer to Le Corbusier's famous claim that, "a house is a machine for living in". It's a contrasting outlook to Frank Lloyd Wright, and pays attention to design for functionality, optimization and efficiency. But I want to ask: who decides function, what needs optimising and how optimisation takes place? I suspect most would point to the god-like architect. Sadly, like the disempowerment of using products created in the current coding culture, folks who inhabit such buildings don't get much of a say, nor are they encouraged to change such "efficient" buildings to their actual needs.

I quite like the sound of "organic software", although I'm unsure what it might be. Right now it's a rough sketch in my head of an attitude or way of paying attention to the creative act of writing code. Perhaps that's the nub of it: organic software empowers folks to pay attention, change and control the code in their digital life so it reflects their unique and precious presence in the world.

I can't help but wonder that a whole is never the same as the sum of its parts, be that a building, a piece of music or even software. Rather, there are simply different ways to pay attention to the world, and by focusing on the whole or parts thereof, each illuminates the other depending on the sort of attention we pay to it. The world is independent of us, yet how we pay attention to the world reveals the world to us in a certain sort of way. Such creative attention, as I have mentioned before, is a potent and fluid process of encountering, understanding and expressing. We discern the universe and also change the universe through our discerning and reacting. How we choose to pay attention (for it is certainly a choice), is a significant creative and moral act: it both makes and enlarges the world.

An inevitable musical metaphor illustrates what I mean. As a performer I could just play in a mechanical-yet-very-accurate manner, only paying attention to the formal and technical aspects of a piece. Yet this is clearly a diminished performance because of the absence of attention to expression, feeling or "ensemble" (the connection with other performers and the audience), those aspects of performance that fall under the realm of musicianship. The former attention to musical technique is only worthwhile if the latter attention to musicianship is present. To be a good musician you need to bring to bear many different ways of paying attention, each of which contributes to a new unique entity containing and combining all these integrated aspects.

We pay attention in this creative manner because it gives us an enlarged, affirmative and stimulating way to participate in and transform the universe. Put bluntly, it brings meaning to life.

As I said at the beginning...

To what we pay attention is important. How we pay attention is equally consequential but often unconscious. Considering why we pay attention is perhaps most significant ~ an engaging, poignant and sadly neglected opportunity for self-examination.

I sincerely hope we all find a way to pay attention in a more compassionate, creative and magnified manner.

Especially if you're a programmer. ;-)

Allegory (noun) : the expression, by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions, of truths or generalizations about human existence.

---

Everyone knows the Python programming language was invented by Charles Darwin and first revealed to the world in his 1859 magnum opus, On the Origin of Programming by Means of Natural Indentation, or the Preservation of Favoured Algorithms in the Struggle for Resources.

As has been copiously documented elsewhere, while Darwin suffered ridicule and hostility from the Victorian establishment, a community of supporters emerged to help Python reform its reputation as a programming language, achieve widespread acceptance, and eventually become a core part of our modern computing stack.

This group of unnamed community organisers were responsible for some of the first Python programming conventions and exhibitions. They eventually instigated the Royal Society of Python (RSP) whose first patron was the Prince of Wales. Even today, the post-nominals FRSP (fellow of the Royal Society of Python) are widely established as a much sought after recognition of professional success.

Of course, the earliest Python programmers were exclusively gentleman amateurs ~ men with the education and financial means to pursue an interest in computing, for the love of it rather than for financial gain. They often met to informally discuss their work in the coffee houses and gentlemen's clubs of London. Such activity soon led to the formation of The Pythian Club in 1863 (the forerunner of the Royal Society of Python) and the publication of technical papers, written by club members and published in its journal, The Pythian Exposition Pamphlet (PEP).

Much innovative and creative energy was shared in those early years. While some of this activity addressed uniquely Victorian technology and cultural norms, we still use a remarkable amount of code from this era. Furthermore, a recognisably Pythonic approach and aesthetic, familiar to programmers of today, emerged at this time.

Because of cultural norms rather than by design, the early Pythian Club was an exclusively male space. However, as Python became more widely known, women ventured into this traditionally male world. The Pythians, as they came to be called, hoped to promote the widespread popularity and adoption of Python, so eventually welcomed women. By 1879 up to 5% of their members were female. Unfortunately, women often found themselves on the receiving end of the tacit mysogyny, sexism and male chauvinism of the time. Similarly, ingrained institutional racism and cultural prejudices also meant those from a non-European background were often excluded, patronised or subjected to onerous membership requirements.

In response, and because measuring things always reveals the right answer, concerned Pythians collected data and published tables and charts to show how their ranks were growing according to the sex, age, social background or nationality of the participants.

Complementary to such data led practices, and born of a desire to improve the moral fibre, deportment and behaviour of Pythians, the first of innumerable versions of a code of conduct was published.

Finally, a group of teachers, school inspectors and orphanage directors worked together with the Pythians to tackle the problems of dangerous child labour practices, youth delinquency and sub-normal computing literacy in the general population. An act of parliament, championed by Lord Russell in 1876, forced all children to learn about computation with the aid of an abacus, slide rule and clockwork calculating machine called a micro:contraption:for:computing:splendid:results. Patronage of the Prince of Wales and a royal charter soon followed and the Pythian Club became the Royal Society of Python, whose offices one can still find on John Adam street, adjacent to the Adelphi, just off the Strand in London.

Enthused with successes, the Royal Society of Python organised schools for the fortification of logical, algorithmic, inquiry and learning (the origin of the phrase, "to flail around"), and organised a curriculum of rote learning and regular examinations to ensure young people were equipped for, and knew their place in the growth of the British Empire.

Such practices, codes of conduct and educational efforts were widely adopted.

Yet there were dark clouds on the horizon and such developments caused consternation among two groups:

1. Artistic free spirits, those of a melancholic disposition, anarchists, and trade unionists, who inevitably railed against the formal rules, regulations and processes imposed from on high.
2. Traditionalists, progressives and everyone in between, who simply disagreed with whatever was the current code of conduct (until it was replaced with their own version).

Into this mix came further considerations: a desire that financial endowments from the Royal Society of Python be made to the deserving poor with the right sort of upstanding constitution, rather than to the afore mentioned artistic types, the morally corrupt, and bothersome foreigners barging in on the society's coding crusade for the spread of civilized indentation.

Some senior members of the Royal Society of Python, the very people who organised such selective grant giving efforts, preached the virtues of kindness and charity to assemblies of the Python community. Thus, they ensured their political manoeuvers appeared ostensibly benign.

The situation became ugly as such members vied for power and resources within the Royal Society of Python. Manipulative machinations, plots, gossip, self promotion and factionalism ran rife. The Royal Society of Python was no longer a friendly society of shared fellowship in the craft of coding. Those suspected of straying from the conventional straight and narrow path were swiftly condemned in the letters page of the London Times and subtly ostracised.

Furthermore, industrialists from the north of England, seeing how lucrative Python based produce could be, sponsored or employed senior members of the society to advance their interests and ensure profits remained secure. They even exerted shadowy influence within the Royal Society of Python so competitors were excluded or disadvantaged (most notoriously, a director of a Python-using pie making company from Cambridgeshire undermined the award of the society's annual medal to a competitor and ensured yet another was excluded from fully participating in society activities).

The fun, adventure and imaginative spark of Python's early days disappeared and was replaced by the puritanical promotion of stifling, trite and standardised frameworks and processes for many aspects of Python coding (from type hinting and source control to the writing of documentation). With the encouragement of their paymaster industrialists, some members of the society used their influence and control to deliberately spread (insipid yet so-called) exemplary standards of upstanding engineering practice that benefited the business interests of their sponsor or employer. Alas, Python was widely used to create mass market, derivative, lifeless and banal software in a race to the bottom of the coding barrel.

(Urban myth tells us that a bug-ridden Python script driving a lace making loom got into an infinite loop, and thus the Nottingham lace industry was born with a (literal) stack overflow of frilly collars, doilies, curtains, knickers and drapes.)

Such sharp practices, political posturing and vapid design inevitably caused a backlash.

Famously Oscar Wilde quipped, "Python's not the serpent that tempted Eve", in a text penned while incarcerated at Reading Gaol. William Morris lamented the poor quality and blandness of Pythonic creations in his famous lecture of 1884, "How We Might Code" (further explored in his later novel, "Code from Nowhere"). A certain Mohandas Ghandi, an Indian student studying Python at University College London in the late 1880s, went on to found the swadeshi movement: a reaction to the reliance on products produced by industrialised coding, and whose aim was self-sufficient hand-made khodi (code). Meanwhile huge offence was caused by Emmeline Pankhurst who dared to suggest women were as equally skilled as men at writing Python code. Outside Britain and her dominions, the use of generative AI written in Python was pioneered by Austro-Germanic composers such as Anton Bruckner ("how else was he able to create so many hour-long symphonies that all sound the same, with such regularity and in such a short space of time?" asked George Bernard Shaw).

Inevitably, at the dawn of the 20th century, disgruntled Python coders broke away from the troubled Royal Society of Python and formed small coding cooperatives, guilds and workshops under the auspices of the emerging Code and Crafts movement founded by Morris.

The influence of these reformers is still felt today: our more enlightened and expressive approach to writing software, with its focus on human beings over computers, authentic expression in the digital realm over simulated emulation of the real world, and empowering creativity through code over data driven automation, is thanks largely to the radical, risky and revolutionary (for the time) work of such rebels.

Python therefore became both part of the British establishment and a haven for unbound creative expression.

This dichotomy is best illustrated by Queen Victoria's reaction to learning of the release of Python 3 support for the SDL library (she was able to return to the development of her Bram Stoker inspired vampire slaying game, an entry for PyWeek (1898) written with PyGame).

:-)

As they say in the movies, this blog post was "inspired" by real events.

However, any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental, and any implication that members of the Python community have a sense of humour, creative spark or moral conscience about the influence of technology on society should not be inferred.

Two weeks after turning 18, I arrived in London to study for a music degree at the Royal College of Music.

It was an awakening.

In those first months in London, as I began to fathom my situation, I realised two things: I wouldn't become a professional musician and making sense of the universe is a deeply challenging, subtle yet rewarding experience. Imperceptibly, an awareness kindled within me: music, like all art, is a potent and fluid process of encountering, understanding and expressing. It's how we discern our dynamic and diverse universe yet, at the same time, change and enlarge it through our creative contributions and collaborations. It is, I believe, the most important and rewarding activity we can do, both singularly as individuals and collectively shared with others.

Upon graduating, I needed a broader context in which to make sense of things, so I embarked on a philosophy degree. It was an exciting time... I had just met Mary and I was acquiring a sense of the historic philosophical terrain while working out where I found myself on the philosophical map.

A turning point was my first encounter with ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who has remained a constant philosophical companion throughout my life. This blog post briefly explores why Heraclitus resonates so much with me.

Not much is known about Heraclitus, but what is probably true about him can be said in a paragraph of four sentences.

Heraclitus, son of Bloson (or Heracon), was born and lived in Ephesus - a Greek city on the west coast of modern day Turkey. He was a member of an aristocratic family and gave up his hereditary right of "kingship" to his brother. His acme (ancient Greek for "prime" - usually regarded as around the age of 40) was considered by Apollodorus to have been the 69th Olympiad (504–501 BC), and he probably died approximately thirty years later. He wrote a single philosophical work, well known in antiquity but now lost, that may have been titled "On Nature", a copy of which he placed as a votive deposit in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

That's it!

However, many spurious claims have been made about Heraclitus; the main source being Diogenes Laertius's book Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, written in the 3rd century CE, around 700 years after Heraclitus flourished. Diogenes is a problematic figure because he's a mixture of unreliable and highly speculative gossip columnist, uncritical historical biographer and scatter-gun reporter of "facts" (often lacking context, evidence or relevance).

His account of Heraclitus is a corker of a hatchet job, worthy of any British red top tabloid.

According to Diogenes, Heraclitus was an autodidact who claimed to know everything, regarded everyone else as a moron (with a few notable exceptions), and preferred to play games with children than engage with his fellow citizens. Because of his unpopularity and misanthropic nature he was forced to leave Ephesus and live on a vegetarian diet, alone in the mountains. Eventually he fell victim to dropsy and returned to Ephesus where he sought treatment from the town's doctors by posing them riddles. Unable to make sense of the riddles, the doctors failed to cure him. Heraclitus took matters into his own hands and decided to cover himself in bovine faeces in the hope the warmth of the fresh dung would dry out his dropsy. This failed and he died at the age of seventy, after which his "bullshit" encrusted body was devoured by a pack of dogs.

Yet Diogenes also reports that Socrates, no less, was a puckish fan:

They say that Euripides, giving him [Socrates] a work of Heraclitus to read, asked him what he thought of it, and he replied: "The part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it".

(A Delian diver fishes for pearls.)

This is a good illustration of Heraclitus's reputation in antiquity as obscure, cryptic and difficult to fathom. Aristotle complained about Heraclitus's ambiguous punctuation and style in his Rhetoric (a treatise in the technique of argument), and Aristotle's student Theophrastus reported Heraclitus's book was disjointed and unfinished, attributing this to Heraclitus's melancholic nature (resulting in Heraclitus's epithet "the weeping philosopher").

But Aristotle missed a subtle aspect of Heraclitus's technique of argument (in his own work on the technique of argument!). Heraclitus's enigmatic style is not a result of grammatical failings nor foggy thinking. He knew what he wanted to say, and how he wanted to say it. His prose is often a subtle embodiment of his philosophy. In fact, Heraclitus hints at this when he says,

The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither declares nor conceals, but shows by sign. (B93)

Similarly, Heraclitus's writing neither declares nor conceals, but shows by sign. His enigmatic writing style forces his readers to actively engage in the analysis, comprehension and literary appreciation of his words, as a vehicle to demonstrate his wider philosophical point. To me this is more akin to poetry, perhaps because Heraclitus was one of the first Greek prose writers - until that time, most Greek writing had been poetry - and the basic conventions of prose writing had not yet been established.

This first direct quote from Heraclitus about the Delphic oracle provides an opportunity to explain the nature and organisation of the fragments that have survived.

All that remains of Heraclitus's work are a small group of around 130 quotations, paraphrases and aphorisms found in the works of later authors (such as Aristotle's quote from Heraclitus in his work on rhetoric). We have no idea how most of these fragments relate to each other, nor where they appear in the original book.

This is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it is impossible to tell how Heraclitus organised his book's philosophical narrative, how it was thematically arranged or discern the structure of its exposition or the subsequent development of ideas. While I believe there is strong evidence Heraclitus had a cogent and coherent structure to the book, what that was has been lost. Therefore, arranging the fragments is a deeply troublesome undertaking. To organise and interpret them according to the themes found therein may help to capture the coherence of thought behind the work, but risks speculation, educated guesswork and interpretation reflecting the background, interests and prejudices of the curator. The alternative, and most common practice, is to recognise the shortcomings of such an approach and present them in an alternative fashion. This was how Hermann Diels compiled all the extant works of ancient Greek philosophers in a book called Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics). In this Diels–Kranz [DK] numbering system the fragments are mostly arranged according to the alphabetical order of the names of the sources from which the fragments were taken. For instance fragments found in the works of Aristotle come before those quoted in Diogenes. This has become the standard, and the identifier B93 is the DK number for the fragment quoted above.

On the other hand, the fractured provenance of the fragments is an opportunity to honour Heraclitus's desire that we actively engage with his words and ideas. Put simply, we need to pay close attention and work out for ourselves our own interpretation and arrangement of the themes and ideas. For me, it matters not that our view of the remaining fragments will be different to what Heraclitus originally intended, yet it is of the utmost importance that we engage with and are stimulated by the thoughts found therein.

Heraclitus says as much:

Upon those who step into the same stream ever different waters flow. (B12)

The person who loves wisdom must be a good inquirer into a great many things. (B35)

In reading Heraclitus, I like to think we're undertaking a sort of philosophical cut-up technique (découpé). Or perhaps we are using a more contemporary Internet-age share/remix/reuse process, as championed by the Creative Commons. My point is that [re]assembling Heraclitus's work is a fundamental aspect of encountering and comprehending it. It's a very unconventional yet valuable philosophical situation, and that's something to welcome!

Fragment B12, quoted above, is usually paraphrased into English as "one cannot step into the same river twice", and is one of Heraclitus's best known aphorisms. It is also a good example of the various linguistic quirks of Heraclitus that make translation of the fragments a challenge.

There are broadly three aspects of translation that inform our understanding of the fragments.

It is important to be aware of the philological aspects of Heraclitus's writing: his place in the history and development of ancient Greek, that he wrote in the Ionian dialect and that his prose style was perhaps deliberately aphoristic and even oracular in tone at a point in time when such a prose style of writing was not yet established nor refined to have widely understood conventions and characteristics.

The semantic context of Heraclitus's writing is often fascinating and (as Aristotle pointed out) sometimes frustrating. Heraclitus is deliberately ambiguous yet careful in his choice of words, and a full understanding of a fragment often depends upon recognising the sophisticated multi-layered significance in the terminology Heraclitus employs (often as a way to embody the concept[s] he is exploring or describing). Part of the fun in reading Heraclitus is to uncover the colourful, intriguing and often revealing interplay of such subtle linguistic layers.

Heraclitus's style of writing often contains puns, wordplay, neologisms, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and other compositional techniques more commonly associated with poetry rather than prose. As has been mentioned, Heraclitus was an early writer of ancient Greek prose so existing and well established poetic techniques that would become absent in later forms of prose still find their way into Heraclitus's writing. I find this aspect of Heraclitus's style very engaging and appealing.

Returning to fragment B12, "one cannot step into the same river twice", while mostly accurate in the broad sense of what the fragment is literally saying, misses the more subtle aspects of the language employed. For instance, the original ancient Greek is pronounced in such a way that the sentence onomatopoeically babbles like a river, while the grammar makes it ambiguous if the river or the person stepping into it have changed. This grammatical twist demonstrates a subtle philosophical point: the fragment can be read in different ways (one cannot step into the same sentence twice!), and thus the meaning is changed as one reads the sentence one way or the other. It (literally) illustrates the changing nature of re-encountering changed things — precisely the concept the fragment is exploring. For me, this is but one example of Heraclitus's engaging, playful and sophisticated literary style.

These points are beautifully explored in this short audio extract from an episode on Heraclitus from the magnificent BBC radio series, In Our Time. I hope you especially pay attention to the babbling pronunciation of the fragment.

There are many English translations of Heraclitus. They range from the literal side-by-side with the ancient Greek (Loeb), or the poetic (Guy Davenport) to the academic (Charles H.Khan) and the literary (Dennis Sweet). Each reveals a different aspect of Heraclitus's writing and reading numerous translations (as I have done) is itself a stimulating exploration of how others have [re]assembled, [re]interpreted and [re]presented Heraclitus's words and philosophy. It feels to me like listening to different musicians performing contrasting interpretations of a composer's work.

Remember the sentence that so annoyed Aristotle? Here's the original Greek and how each of the afore mentioned translations render it - along with any translator's notes relating to the sentence. It's the famous first line of the first fragment which, we can be reasonably confident, opened Heraclitus's book. It introduces the important concept of logos:

τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον· (Original)

And of this account (logos) that is—always—humans are uncomprehending, both before they hear it and once they have first heard it. (Loeb)

The Logos is eternal
but men have not heard it
and men have heard it and not understood. (Davenport)

Although this account holds forever, men ever fail to comprehend, both before hearing it and once they have heard. (Khan)

account: logos, saying, speech, discourse, statement, report; account, explanation, reason, principle; esteem, reputation; collection, enumeration, ratio, proportion; logos is translated 'account' here (twice) and also in III, XXVII, LX and LXII; it is rendered 'report' in XXXV, XXXVI and CI; 'amount' in XXXIX.

holds forever: text is ambiguous between 'this account is forever, is eternal' and 'this account is true (but men ever fail to comprehend)'.

Of this eternally existing^[1]logos people lack understanding, both before and after they hear the primary thing^[2]. (Sweet)

1 I follow Diels and Zeller (after Clement, Hippolytus, and Amelius) in putting ἀεὶ with ἐόντος, contra Reinhardt, Snell, Gigon, and Kirk, who connect it with ἀξύνετοι. This seems to be a more natural grammatical construction and is more consistent with Heraclitus's doctrine of the eternity of the logos. Cf fr. 30.

2 Since τὸ πρῶτον contains an article and is in the accusative case, it is treated here as the object of ἀκοῦσαι and ἀκούσαντες. This interpretation implies the fundamental nature of the logos rather than simply indicating the first hearing of the idea (contra Kirk [1962], p.33).

For what it's worth, in this blog post I use Dennis Sweet's translations into English because he attempts to retain the flavour of the original Greek, while rendering the fragments into coherent English that carefully acknowledge the inherent playful poetic style and multiple layers of meaning. I'm also very fond of Davenport's poetic rendering of the fragments, although these very much reflect his personal aesthetic and interpretation, and may not appeal to scholars or "purists" (like the Jacques Loussier Trio performing Bach to Jazz afficionados or fans of historically informed performance).

Given such context and back story, I can finally begin to explain my personal impressions of Heraclitus's philosophical themes. These are offered as a record of my own encounter with Heraclitus's work, and certainly shouldn't be treated as learned or scholarly. What do I know? I'm just a humble tuba player.

Heraclitus's philosophical project is to explore an apparent paradox: the unity of the universe in the face of apparent diversity and change, and core to this account is the eternal λόγος (logos).

Logos had many related meanings over time, and Heraclitus plays on this richness of meaning. In the context of ancient Greek it originally meant "selecting" or "picking out". The meaning shifted to "reckon", "measure" and "proportion". Further refinement of its usage led to it meaning "thought", "reason", as well as "formula", "law" and "plan". It also had connotations around speaking, via a common etymological root with the ancient Greek verb λέγω (lego, "to speak"). So logos can also mean a spoken word, a statement, account, discourse or report. It is also the source for our modern English word, "logic".

Heraclitus uses it to mean three broad concepts: the order (unity) underlying a universe of diversity and change, the capacity of a person to discern and make sense of such a situation (although very few people exercise this talent), and our ability to communicate our thoughts about such things with others. Each is a different facet of the eternal logos.

Put in a more personal (and musical) manner, the eternal logos consists of three aspects: the singularly unified universe full of diversity and change that we encounter, our cultivated and refined mental faculties through which we understand the universe, and our skill at expressing our shared feelings about, experiences and understanding of the universe with one another.

In Heraclitus's own words:

Listening not to me but rather to the logos it is wise to agree^[46] that all things are one. (B50)

46 A play upon the words logos and homologein = to agree.

Seizures^[11] —wholes and non-wholes, being combined and differentiated, in accord and dissonant: unity is from everything and from everything is unity. (B10)

11 sullapsies (συλλάψιες)—following Marcovich, Kirk, etc., contra Diels' συνάψιες. I have translated this word in its archaic sense, which gives the notion of physical seizure or grasping. Snell, Kirk, Marcovich, and Bollack-Wismann employ later senses ('Zusammensetzungen', 'things taken together', 'connections', and 'assemblages', respectively) in their translations. All of these terms suggest a putting together and unification of diverse things. Cf. the discussion of harmonia.

Thinking is common to all. (B113)

For since everything comes to be according to this logos, they are like ignorant people when experiencing such words^[3] and actions as I expound—when I describe each according to its nature^[4], indicating how it is. (B1 - second sentence.)

3 epeon (ἐπέων)—also suggests oracular advice.

4 kata phusin (κατὰ φύσιν) = according to its constitution.

The notions of commonality and universality are attributes that facilitate the eternal logos. Sharing aspects both in common and universally, explains how different things are able to correspond and coordinate with each other. Such ordering relates to all things, and can be discerned, understood and communicated by those rare persons who explore and engage with the eternal logos.

Clearly Heraclitus was prickly when trying to acknowledge that not everyone recognises, values or is capable of such philosophical explorations. He explains that "the many are worthless and good people are few" (in fragment B104), and is unflattering about his fellow citizens:

The Ephesians deserve, from the young men to the old, to be hanged, and to leave the city to the beardless youths, since they cast out Hermodorus, their best man, saying, 'let no one be the best among us: if he is, let him be so elsewhere and among others'. (B121)

But could this be because "nature tends to hide itself" (fragment B123) or because most people, "know neither how to listen nor how to speak" (fragment B19)?

Sadly, things don't look good for most people because,

Learning many things^[38] does not teach good sense^[39]; for it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and also Xenophanes and Hecataeus. (B40)

38 polymathie (πολυμαθίη)—a cognate with mathontes (fr. 17) and mathesis (fr. 55) = learning. This term (i.e., polymath) was probably coined by Heraclitus.

39 noon (νόον) = mindfulness, understanding. Cf. frs. 104, 114.

Clearly if the learning of intellectual Titans like Hesiod and Pythagoras et al, doesn't result in understanding, what chance do mere mortals have? Perhaps it's just a case of luck since "one's character is one's divine fortune" (fragment 119)? Clearly a good metaphor is needed to illuminate the nature of the logos to the ignorant hoi polloi. This is precisely what Heraclitus does when he poetically plays with "fire".

Early Greek philosophers were traditionally interested in discerning the "arche" — the first principle or element from which everything else can be derived. For instance, Thales claimed water was the arche, while Anaximander said it was "the infinite", and Anaximenes considered it air.

It is often claimed that Heraclitus believed fire was the arche. In one sense it is true, because Heraclitus uses fire to symbolise the logos (his own underlying principle from which everything else follows), but in another sense it is false because I don't think Heraclitus thought everything was (literally) derived from fire - although some appear to believe this the case. I suspect, given the playful and poetic personality of Heraclitus, he's using a metaphor.

Fire is actually a very good metaphor for logos. Fire represents change because it transforms the burning things. Yet fire is also unchanging alongside change, it retains its unity through time (so the flame flickering at the top of a candle at the start of the evening is the same flame as that at the end of the evening). Fire is also dry - an important property that Heraclitus uses to indicate an enlightened person (who has a dry soul). This is also perhaps why Diogenes claimed Heraclitus died of dropsy (he had a wet soul that he tried to dry out with bullshit). Significantly, fire is created through friction (opposition and strife), such as when striking flints or rubbing sticks together. As we shall see, opposition and strife are important aspects of Heraclitus's account of the eternal logos.

Fire, having come upon them, will distinguish^[66] and seize all things. (B66)

66 krinei (κρινεῖ) = separate, pick out, choose, decide, judge

It is delight or^[74] death for souls to become moist. (B77)

74 I follow Diels and Marcovich in reading ἢ (contra Kahn's μἡ), since it lends itself more readily to the two senses of a 'moist soul' which Heraclitus intends. On the one hand, a moist soul is said to be found in the person who is drunk or ignorant (confused by appearances). On the other hand, when the ignorant person dies, that person's moist soul disintegrates and unites with water in an endless cycle of elemental change.

Change, in a universe of unity (i.e. all things are one), is caused by conflict and strife between opposites interacting via the common and universal. Change emerges in both the external and internal worlds. The external universe is in a state of constant flux through conflict, but a person's understanding, perspective and way of paying attention can also change. The logos is how we encounter, understand and express this state of affairs.

What is in opposition is in agreement, and the most beautiful harmony comes out of things in conflict (and all happens^[10] according to strife). (B8)

10 ginesthai (γίνεσθαι) = is born

Cold things get warm; warm cools off; moist dries up; parched is wetted. (B126)

(Human opinions are children's playthings^[71].) (B70)

71 athurmata (ἀθύρματα) = toys, delights, joys.

The way up and down is one and the same. (B60)

This resonates with my musical side: discord resolves to consonance, contrasting themes somehow fit together, differences within musical elements (loud/soft, fast/slow, high/low etc.) engage attention. Yet the piece is a musical integration of such contrasts, and the manner in which such contrasts unfold and interact through time gives the piece its unity. Furthermore, one's perception of a piece changes upon repeated performances as new details are revealed, the strange becomes familiar or a new perspective is acquired because of the ongoing enlargement of one's lived experience.

By recognizing the interdependence and fitting together of things in opposition we glimpse a yet more fundamental and hidden unity. Heraclitus claims the unity of opposites is essential for the existence of the different things in opposition, for their mutual dependency unifies them.

Disease makes health sweet and good; hunger satiety, weariness repose. (B111)

Furthermore, some things only exist because they arise from the strife of mixing or fitting together of different opposing parts, that would otherwise separate from each other.

(Even the potion^[116] separates unless stirred). (B125)

116 kukeon (κυκεὼν) — a drink mentioned in the Iliad (XI 637 ff.), which was composed of wine, barley-meal, and grated cheese.

(Kukeon apparently behaved much like a modern-day vinaigrette.)

Heraclitus uses the word ἁρμονίη (harmony) to mean a sort of concordant, satisfying and purposeful fitting together. The most beautiful harmony comes about when things are in conflict: as in music, a dissonance makes the harmony beautiful, in contrast to the bland aural goop of continuous consonance. Only by becoming conscious of the hidden harmony in the universe — change through an unending process of the fitting together of conflict, opposition and strife — can one comprehend the paradox that the apparently disjointed and diverse appearance of things is actually a unified whole - the eternal logos.

The hidden harmony is superior^[53] to the visible. (B54)

53 kreitton (κρείττων) = stronger, more desirable.

How does one become conscious of such hidden logos-related things?

As we have seen, Heraclitus believed most people don't develop such awareness. Instead they act as if isolated, asleep or ignorant.

But although the logos is common, most people live as though they possess a private purpose^[7]. (B2 - second sentence)

7 phronesis (φρόνησις)—Alternative definitions of this word, such as 'to strive', 'to decide' and 'to intend', suggest "knowledge related to action." See Jaeger, p.460

For those awake there is one common world; but for those sleeping each deserts into a private world. (B89)

Those listening without understanding are like the deaf. The saying bears witness to them: absent while being present. (B34)

Nor did he believe learning and study help with the acquisition of such a rarefied and enlightened point of view.

Most people do not comprehend^[16] however they encounter such things, nor do they understand what they learn; they believe only themselves. (B17)

16 ou gar phroneousi (οὐ γὰρ φρονέουσι)—see footnote 7.

Rather, he preferred direct experience (over academic learning) and deep self reflection as complementary ways to perceive the eternal logos.

Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears. (B101a)

I searched for myself. (B101)

To be of sound mind^[107] is the greatest excellence and wisdom; to speak and act with truth, detecting things according to their nature^[108]. (B112)

107 sophronein (σωφρονεῖν) = to be temperate, discreet, to show self-control. This is a cognate with phronesis.

108 phusin (φύσιν) = natural qualities, constitution, condition.

All people are able to know themselves and to learn self-control^[112]. (B116)

112 sophronein (σωφρονεῖν)—cf. footnote 107.

The soul is a law that increases its own power. (B115)

When learning by listening to another (fragment 17), one often does not hear (comprehend) what they are saying. Rather, a direct encounter with the universe, through one's own eyes or because of one's own efforts, is preferable (fragments 101a and 101). When paired with a sound mind and disciplined soul (fragments 112 and 116) one understands the true nature of things. This is a self-transformative virtuous circle (fragment 115) that becomes more effective with more practise (like learning a musical instrument!). Direct experience and self-reflection — an immediate, lived and first-hand appreciation of the eternal logos — is how to encounter, understand, express and ultimately transcend the paradox of the unity of the universe in the face of apparent diversity and change.

Heraclitus is a challenging philosopher: his writing forces us to engage in the self-reflection needed to make sense of our direct experience of the universe. In fact, we should work things out for ourselves and not rely on the teachings of others, perhaps explaining why he neither declares nor conceals, but shows by sign. Heraclitus points the way but expects us to make sense of the universe ourselves: a deeply challenging, subtle yet rewarding experience that appeals to very few. The ambiguous poetry of his words, the fragmentary and fractured organisation of his thoughts, and the playfully demonstrative crafting of his aphorisms ensures Heraclitus is a perennially intriguing, stimulating and relevant philosopher to those who are tuned in and receptive to his peculiar yet profound and transfiguring exploration of the universe.

For upon those who read the same words, thoughts and aphorisms, ever different reflections and responses will flow.

One can never step into the same Heraclitus twice. :-)

Last week I visited CERN with my youngest (16yo) son, William.

Our road to CERN started in the summer at EuroPython. Will volunteered at the conference registration desk and checked in Phil Elson. Noticing Phil's conference badge (indicating he worked at CERN), physics-mad Will started asking Phil all sorts of questions.

Further physics conversations ensued between Will and (the ever patient) Phil over the course of the conference. In the end Phil suggested we just come visit CERN and Will could explore to his heart's content. Furthermore, since I had presented a talk about PyScript at the conference, Phil mentioned colleagues at CERN who'd be interested in learning more about the project and who may possibly have uses for the work I'm currently doing. A plan was hatched for a "dad and son" adventure to CERN so Will could soak up the physics and I could present and meet with fellow coders.

Thank you to Phil, Jo and their children for putting us up during our visit to CERN. Staying at chez Elson was, in itself, worth the trip. Both Will and I had lots of fun with the Elson children, be that reading stories together or helping with dressing up.

The photograph of the "#I💙CERN" sign, at the beginning of this post, was taken outside the brand new education centre on the day we arrived at CERN.

As a former teacher, and someone still passionate about engineering education and pedagogy, this brand new facility was great fun to explore. The curators have put together an excellent set of displays, videos and interactive props along with a comprehensive timetable of lectures, classes and workshops.

This is how to engage folks with science, technology and engineering. Bravo!

Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN when he invented the World Wide Web (through which you are reading this blog post). I was delighted to find a small display in the exhibition space explaining his work and the origin story of the web, along with the computer used to develop the very first web server.

The next day started at 8am with a visit to the ATLAS detector. The CERN facilities were off for maintenance and upgrades, so we were able to get to places not normally open to visitors like us.

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and most powerful particle collider. It is 27 kilometres in circumference and buried around 100 metres below the French and Swiss countryside. Put very simply, its job is to smash protons together so physicists can analyse the resulting subatomic particle "debris" and learn more about the structure of the subatomic world and the laws governing it.

The collisions happen at several points in the LHC and it is at such points that particle detectors, like ATLAS, are found.

This being the first visit of the day to CERN facilities, the journey to the device left quite a theatrical impression. We had to don hard hats (making us all look like the Lego mini-figures on the model in the reception area), watch as our guide used a retina scanner to access the facility (very Hollywood), and travel 100 meters below the surface in a lift. We emerged into a labyrinth of tunnels adjacent to rooms containing racks of computers and other equipment needed to run the experiment.

Finally we got to the cavern containing ATLAS.

Photos of ATLAS don't do it justice: it is so overwhelmingly HUGE that your whole field of vision is filled with the device (it is seven stories tall). Imagine constructing a large multi-story car park filled to the brim with intricate electronics, in a ship-in-a-bottle manner but 100 metres underground. What a feat of planning, engineering and construction!

ATLAS is made up of layers, each of which detects different sorts of subatomic particles - hence the circular arrangement of equipment centred on the particle beam.

Each collision creates terabytes of data, most of which is processed as close to the device as possible and thrown away. Only those aspects of the data that are of interest get to make it to the data centres on the surface and then to a global network of computers crunching and analysing the results (the World Wide Web was invented specifically so scientists could share such data).

Once the mind boggling scale of the device had been processed, as well as its extraordinary engineering explained, William took the opportunity to ask the physicists on hand all the questions about all the things. I have to admit, I had no idea what they were talking about... I am a classically trained musician with a background in academic philosophy who earns a living as a software engineer, and so their conversation was well beyond my level of subject matter knowledge.

Here's the thing, not for the first time I observed folks recognise in Will a fellow physics enthusiast. Then they would open up about their passion for their work and scientific interests. This was a privilege and joy to behold, and Will was in his element. He really appreciated their time and patience.

Between technical meetings in the morning and a presentation about PyScript in the afternoon, we saw many other parts of the CERN facilities. The highlight for me being a visit to CMS, another titanic machine and feat of engineering 100 meters below the surface.

The CMS device is, like ATLAS, a sub-atomic particle detector but at the antipode of the LHC to ATLAS.

As I understand it, CMS and ATLAS essentially do the same thing but were designed by independent teams so the resulting devices differ in their capabilities and the details of their engineering. They complement each other because the results from one device check and confirm the results of the other, thus giving scientists greater confidence in the data coming from the detected collisions in each device.

There is, of course, a friendly rivalry between the two teams and I quipped to our CMS guide, Benjamin, that it felt like CMS and ATLAS are to physicists as vi and EMACS are to computer programmers. To which Benjamin shot back, "I'm a vi user". This was yet another hint at the renaissance man/woman aspects of many of the hugely talented folks working at CERN. Through the course of our tour, not only did Benjamin reveal his background in Physics (by fielding yet more questions from Will, of increasing incomprehensibility to me) but touched upon the various engineering aspects of the CMS device as well as sojourns into materials science, computing hardware and "big data". Bravo Benjamin, this was an entertaining virtuoso performance of passion for the project.

Once again, the scale of the device was overwhelming.

The service tunnels and shafts underground were perhaps more accessible to see at CMS than at ATLAS, and these additional aspects of the life of the project gave yet another dimension of the overwhelming scale of what goes on at CERN. We were, in a sense, able to see the neck of the bottle through which the 14000 tonne CMS "ship" had been built.

It is while in the presence of such devices that one ponders how such things are maintained and improved, who designs them, and what resources are needed to make things work. It is then that one realises that CERN isn't just about science, it's also a sort of creative cultural experiment consisting of a huge number of people spread all over the world, collaborating to help us comprehend what the universe is and how the universe behaves.

However, such activity doesn't just happen at the titanic scale of ATLAS and CMS.

The protons that are accelerated and smashed together have to come from somewhere, and while visiting another CERN facility we found the source: a red bottle containing hydrogen.

If that looks like a thermos flask containing a nice hot cup of tea (hat tip), you're not wrong. Such mundane looking yet essential objects were another aspect of CERN that reminded me that any large engineering effort contains an abundance of seemingly boring yet rather important bits and bobs randomly attached to other stuff.

Another aspect of any complicated engineering effort is the inevitable use of hand written warnings hastily taped to a button, panel or (in the following case) valve:

In a similar vein, the LHC needs an "off" switch - a delightfully understated device found on the desk of an operator in the LHC control room. This is used when things don't go to plan.

When pressed the LHC isn't actually switched off... rather a dump of the beam occurs, where the protons, travelling at near the speed of light, get redirected in a spiral fashion to around 30 meters of material that act as a cushion to absorb the beam (to spectacularly over-simplify what really goes on).

CERN also has a sense of humour.

When I asked a guide what went on at a rather nondescript area on a schematic map of CERN labelled "north facility", they replied, with a twinkle in their eye, that it was where they manufactured all the black holes. Another scientist pointed at a door and exclaimed with glee that it was where they keep all the secret alien technology (but they'd have to kill me if they told me more).

Clearly such tomfoolery is a complete nightmare for CERN's PR and media department.

Thanks to the World Wide Web, not only can theoretical physicists share information, but conspiracy theorists can share their own unhinged, one-sandwich-short-of-a-picnic misinformation about what the universe is and how the universe behaves. This includes many Men In Black style assertions about CERN ~ such as the possible manufacture of world-ending black holes.

Rest assured, the most dodgy things I observed at CERN were an interesting looking risotto in restaurant 1, a desire to number buildings in chronological order of construction (something with which even Postman Pat would struggle), and a large number of champaign bottles in the CERN control room (clearly these folks know how to party).

Actually, if you look carefully at the bottles you'll notice that each is labelled with the name of a successfully completed experiment. Apparently it is traditional to send an appropriately decorated bottle of bubbly to the CERN operations team as a token of thanks for their considerable expertise and work running the LHC.

That there is a CERN operations team, whose job it is to "drive" the LHC for everyone else, is a reminder that CERN is not just full of physicists. There is so much complementary work going on. Remember, the reason I was at CERN was to talk about PyScript: CERN makes use of, and are interested in, all sorts of computing technology, a huge variety of engineering, and ever more creative ways in which to explain and share what on earth is going on to the rest of the world.

A wonderful example of such a complementary discipline at work at CERN was demonstrated during our visit to the robotics facility.

How do you service the LHC when it is functioning?

You don't send people down there!

Instead, you use robots!

This was our final visit at CERN, on the morning of our return home. What should have been a 45 minute quick guided tour extended to about an hour and a half of enthusiastic explanation and demonstration.

The robotics lab have mock-ups of all the different sorts of area at CERN in which the robots work, so they are able to test them and rehearse "situations". The robots range from repurposed bomb disposal robots trundling around on tank tracks, to robots that hang from the monorail attached to the ceiling of the tunnel in which the LHC is housed.

It was fascinating to learn how the robotics team take off-the-shelf parts and modify, adapt and re-purpose them with bespoke "stuff" to help them do their maintenance work.

For example, we were shown an electric drill you could have purchased from any conventional DIY store, that had been dismantled, reconfigured and reassembled to work while connected to a robot arm in the sometimes limited space in which such devices are needed.

How else are you going to unscrew nuts and bolts with a robot?

Well, it turns out you could use a Luke Skywalker like robotic hand.

When I enquired about its capabilities I was told it had many degrees of movement in all the joints one finds in a human hand. I wondered out loud if anyone had ever tried to play the piano with it, to which our host gave me a raised eyebrow and a thoughtful, "hmmm... that would be interesting".

Of course, there are your common "service droid" type robots that trundle around on wheels with a camera and arm attached to them. Even these are intricate and substantial bits of kit.

Both Will and I had a great time at CERN. A large part of the reason being Phil, Jo and their family's hospitality. As we were leaving for the airport Phil mentioned a film, called Particle Fever, that tells the story of how the folks at CERN confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson. On our return home Will and I watched it... and if you're looking for a film about particle physics, this is NOT it. Rather, it tells a great story and places CERN, and the work done there, into context.

At one point in the film, a physicist gives a presentation about the LHC (at a moment in time just prior to when it was first switched on) and fields a question from the audience. They are asked, "but what value is the work at CERN? (and by the way, I'm an economist)". The physicist giving the presentation is brutally honest and admits that he has no idea and the damn thing may not work.

This moment resonated with me.

It's not uncommon for folks to doubt the value of endeavours close to my heart such as classical music or philosophy. So hearing a physicist asked such a question made me think, "huh... so it happens to you folks too...".

I feel sad, disappointed and frustrated when I encounter people who can't imagine a world where economic value is not the only valuable outcome.

We don't make music, ponder philosophy nor try to comprehend the universe because such activities create economic value. We do them because they make life worth living, enlarge our world and connect us to something beyond ourselves. Any economic value is merely a welcome fortuitous side-effect. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman claimed that he didn't do physics to change the world or discover some grand unifying theory of everything, but just for the pleasure of finding things out.

Bravo CERN, it was a pleasure to find things out about the work you all do. I sincerely hope to return soon (with Will - he'd never forgive me if I left him at home).

One of the stand-out collaborations of my career has been with my buddy Damien George. He's the creator of MicroPython ~ a lean and efficient implementation of the Python programming language optimised to run in constrained environments. When Damien created MicroPython I think he imagined "constrained environments" to mean microcontrollers - the small single chip computers beloved of embedded systems engineers, Internet of Things enthusiasts and the Maker community.

Little did he realise that MicroPython was an amazing fit for another computing context: the browser.

The browser is an interesting space in which to work because of its unique combinations of constraints.

Firstly, everything needed to view a web page needs to be delivered over the network. So, the smaller the asset to be delivered can be, the better. MicroPython, when compressed for delivery to the browser is only around 170k in size - smaller than most images you find on most websites.

Secondly, the browser is perhaps the world's most battle tested sand boxed computing environment. By this I mean that web browsers encounter all sorts of interesting, nefarious, ill-performing, badly written and otherwise shonky code. Such code should be constrained into a virtual sandbox, so it can't do any damage to the user's wider system. Because of the recent development of web assembly (shortened to WASM ~ a sort of virtual microprocessor working in the browser), code written in C can be compiled to run in the browser. MicroPython is written in C and Damien and his collaborators have worked together to create a port for web assembly.

Third and finally, the browser makes available to the developer of websites a JavaScript object called globalThis, through which all the other objects, functions and data structures needed to access the capabilities of the browser are made available. By constraining developers to a single means of interacting with the browser, there is only one way to go about making things happen. MicroPython compiled to WASM has access to the full capabilities of the sandboxed browser thanks to some of Damien's recent work on a foreign function interface (FFI) that interacts with the JavaScript based APIs and capabilities defined by globalThis.

Given this context, what does MicroPython allow you to do?

From within MicroPython running in the browser, one simply imports the js module (short for JavaScript). It's an object in MicroPython that acts as a proxy for globalThis in the browser. It makes interacting with the browser from MicroPython an absolute joy. It's worth pointing out that Damien's work is based upon the js work done as part of the Pyodide project (a version of the CPython interpreter for the browser), so no matter the version of Python you use in the browser, you access the browser's capabilities in exactly the same way.

But recently, there was a problem.

I was due to give a talk about PyScript (a platform for taking MicroPython and Pyodide and making them easy to use in the browser) at EuroPython and I was putting together code examples of ever increasing complexity to present as part of my talk. But I kept hitting strange errors when using MicroPython. My colleague and web-guru Andrea managed to isolate the problem but had been unable to work out why it was happening. Put simply, somewhere in MicroPython's FFI, at that point where JavaScript and MicroPython were interacting, unwanted JavaScript objects were unexpectedly leaking into the MicroPython world thus causing things to crash. Think of it as a JavaScript shaped spanner in the MicroPython works.

This wasn't a good situation to find oneself in, a few days before presenting at one of the Python world's largest and most prestigious conferences.

Damien and I decided to debug the problem, and we recorded ourselves doing so because Andrea wasn't available at the time of our call. We figured that if he could watch our debugging session, he might spot something we hadn't and suggest a fix.

In any case, what followed was a lot of fun, and the video of the debugging session is embedded below.

There are some things you need to know before you watch the video:

• Both Damien and I know JavaScript to a sufficient level to be "dangerous". We can get stuff done, but we're not guru level like Andrea.
• Damien is an expert in C (the language used to implement MicroPython) and clearly knows his way around the MicroPython codebase including the FFI that kept crashing. I am familiar enough with C to be able to read it, but not very experienced at writing it, and I certainly don't know anything about the MicroPython internals, including the FFI.
• We were using a collaboration technique called pair programming: where one developer (Damien) is the "pilot" with the other developer (me) acting as "co-pilot". As you'll see in the video, Damien was sharing his screen so I could see what he was looking at and he'd often describe things, processes or problems to me, only for me to confirm them, explain them back or ask questions as a way to help maintain focus. As the one most ignorant of the language and code-base, I was in a good position to play the beginner to Damien's expert, and ask for clarifications.
• Our debugging involved taking very careful steps to investigate and change the code so the problem was (happily) eventually revealed, tested and fixed. As the Chinese proverb explains: when crossing a river, it's best to do so slowly and by feeling with one's toes.
• Both of us were having a lot of fun in different ways. Damien was clearly fascinated by delving into the problem. I was enjoying Damien's virtuosic debugging performance, and found out some fun stuff as we went along.

So grab your popcorn, and enjoy the show: