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France is Bacon, Organic Idiocy and the Chinese Room

Nicholas H.Tollervey — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 21:00:00 GMT

I'm interested in exploring how AI acts as an information filter, how context sensitive prompts reveal certain things and how this - in turn - influences the human in the conversation. (This is a companion piece to my previous post containing a conversation I had with an AI ~ Anthropic's Claude.)

This interest stems from my current work.

I write code and documentation that will be consumed by large language models such as Anthropic's. I want my work to have the best chance of producing something reasonable and helpful when filtered through an AI via a prompt from a human (about PyScript, for example). This is important because large language models are yet another way for folks to interrogate latent online information and form understanding of our world.

This poses challenges that my previous conversational post highlighted: the modus operandi of large language models is merely that of a cleverly tuned statistical prediction machine. There is no meaningful lived understanding nor felt emotional engagement based on experience happening in the operation of a large language model. Rather, it has been refined, by a huge corpus of text scraped from the internet, to predict the next most likely characters given a particular prompting context. But since it is a computer, it does this mechanically via the operation of transistors etched into silicon chips.

The AI's raison d'être is to predict characters. "Predico ergo sum", as Descartes would not have said.

This process of thoughtlessly aping responses based upon prior evidence reminds me of a funny story shared by a participant on an online forum about their utter confusion with the phrase "France is bacon".

When I was young my father said to me:

"Knowledge is Power....Francis Bacon"

I understood it as "Knowledge is power, France is Bacon".

For more than a decade I wondered over the meaning of the second part and what was the surreal linkage between the two? If I said the quote to someone, "Knowledge is power, France is Bacon" they nodded knowingly. Or someone might say, "Knowledge is power" and I'd finish the quote "France is Bacon" and they wouldn't look at me like I'd said something very odd but thoughtfully agree. I did ask a teacher what did "Knowledge is power, France is bacon" mean and got a full 10 minute explanation of the Knowledge is power bit but nothing on "France is bacon". When I prompted further explanation by saying "France is Bacon?" in a questioning tone I just got a "yes". At 12 I didn't have the confidence to press it further. I just accepted it as something I'd never understand.

It wasn't until years later I saw it written down that the penny dropped.

The young protagonist learned that a certain prompt ("knowledge is power") had an appropriate response in the form of "France is bacon". They articulated this response with zero understanding of what it meant. However, and here's the twist, since this person was human - blessed with curiosity to try to comprehend the world - they were always confused by the obviously ridiculous response: "France is bacon". Only until their perspective changed to a different medium of expression did they realise and meaningfully comprehend what was actually being said when a response was given. No such intrigue about meaning exists in an AI.

The story also beautifully illustrates yet another limitation of large language models: they are only refined by tokens derived from human generated textual content (or more recently, tokens derived from content created by previous large language models). Therefore, the behaviour of models may have been adjusted by the characters contained within the phrase "the cat sat on the mat", but no large language model has ever experienced, observed nor had an emotional attachment to a cat actually sat on a mat, nor felt confused or intrigued by the widespread use of this phrase.

Given my aim to create assets that help AI respond with useful and apparently coherent output, I can't help but feel it's a struggle. The size of the corpora used to train large language models and the possibility of valuable content, or maybe even content with more secure provenance, being swamped in the "noise" of human generated content or, even, AI generated slop means I feel like I'm just creating needles in a huge haystack.

Ultimately such interactions demonstrate but one thing: some humans can be fooled by computers into the appearance of intelligence. That's not to say something valuable isn't happening. As my previous discussion with the AI demonstrated, a very stimulating conversation can be had. But this is not intelligence in the way we understand the application of the term to humans. There is a complete absence of thought - of mental phenomenon - of the what-it-feels-like-ness of being a human being that fundamentally informs our every day interactions, posture to, and engagement with the world.

Nevertheless, something interesting and potentially helpful is happening when we type characters into a prompt, and the AI responds with yet more characters.

But what?

Can we trust it?

Is the provenance of the output secure?

Notice how all AI services have some variation of "AI can make mistakes. Please double-check responses" in their legalese, and the phenomenon of hallucinatory output is well documented.

The phrase "Stochastic Parrot" feels to me like a humorously satisfying explanation of what's really going on (a vaguely random-seeming probability of "parroting" the words of others). Many folks use this turn of phrase to dismiss artificial intelligence ~ and such usage points to a further serious problem: the dichotomy between AI "boosters" and AI sceptics.

This unhealthy taking of sides, at the expense of slow, thoughtful and deeper analysis of what's going on, is very much emblematic of our current cultural climate (of echo chambers, walled gardens and performative posturing on social media).

Here's a good example:

We use the word "hype" to mean the shallow, ungrounded or meaningless promotion of something of dubious value (otherwise it wouldn't need such hype!). Alas, I recently attended a meeting where the leader of an AI team presented a slide with this unintentionally hilarious paradox:

AI is not hype, and it's not limited to toy applications but the value it creating tension. (sic)

The grammatical blunder and unsubstantiated claims immediately jarred.

Upon reflection, this person used hype to argue the absence of hype. Such tragic hubris! Was this sentence created by an AI? Perhaps the incomprehensible grammar was the result of an AI hallucinating the sentence. More likely, the baseless claims reflect this person's lack of care or attention: a self damning indictment of this person's posture and ways of working inflected by (ironically) hype!

I don't want to reserve my ire exclusively for AI boosters.

AI sceptics also deploy hype to argue their cause too. The video embedded below, of a sketch from The Daily Show entitled "Eat your slop, piggies!", describes users of AI as people with no life, dumb f*-ing losers and mindless f*-ing lab rats.

Ostensibly funny, it's also adding more fuel to the fire.

Yet embedded in both sides are interesting and important lines of thought. A booster may want to draw attention to the uses of AI in medicine, while a sceptic complains about slop replacing meaningful human artistic creativity. At the heart of this problem is the clumsy, often shallow and unfortunately tribal discourse surrounding the exploration of AI.

The antidote to such organic idiocy (OI), are conversations that start from a technical knot, a complex situation, an ethical tension, or an honest admission of doubt. The depth and nuance needed to participate in these sorts of conversation tends to reveal the real value or important hidden aspects of the context. And I want to be very clear here: I feel there is something interesting and important to discover in exploring AI, but such value will only be uncovered through the afore mentioned slower, harder and deeper ways of working, debating, integrating and analysing. Then, perhaps, we can helpfully engage in the sophisticated and subtle work needed to put human needs at the centre of such explorations ~ human needs such as my hope to create content that improves and enhances the output from AI.

Alas, I often find myself in nebulous conversations that lack focus and feel performative in the context of the boosters vs. sceptics debate. For example, I'm tired of hearing from AI boosters promoting the possibility of AGI (artificial general intelligence): where a thinking computer has somehow achieved a level of intelligence beyond that possible by humans. Setting aside the problem of defining what thinking or intelligence is, let alone how you measure it to "beyond" something so nebulous as that currently displayed by humans, this is an example of shallow yet bamboozling techno-babble with a large dollop of three-letter-acronyms (TLAs) as a rhetorical device. I also find it tragic that a (small "C") conservative attitude, that anything new (like AI) is automatically bad, holds sway for many people. It's as if both sides feed off the other's worst instincts.

Unsurprisingly (for me) I'm paying attention to how folks pay attention. An important influence on how one views AI depends upon how you pay attention to it: what exactly do you think you're encountering here? My examples are perhaps skewed because I'm an engineer who is more likely to encounter AI boosters due to the technical nature of my work. But the point remains, AI sceptics are equally guilty of such bone headed mutual incongruity.

So what sort of discourse would I like to see?

Here's a pertinent example.

That there is an absence of thought in AI is often illustrated by the famous Chinese Room thought experiment proposed by the philosopher John Searle. I wrote about this before on this blog (almost 20 years ago!), and it boils down to this: minds are not the same as computers because the mental world is full of meaning whereas computers are programmed to do stuff (like predict the next most likely characters, given a prompt).

"Imagine that I, a non-Chinese speaker, am locked in a room with a lot of Chinese symbols in boxes. I am given an instruction book in English for matching Chinese symbols with other Chinese symbols and for giving back bunches of Chinese symbols in response to bunches of Chinese symbols put into the room through a small window. Unknown to me, the symbols put in through the window are called questions. The symbols I give out are called answers to the questions. The boxes of symbols I have are called a database, and the instruction book in English is called a program. The people who give me instructions and designed the instruction book in English are called programmers, and I am called the computer. We imagine that I get so good at shuffling the symbols, and the programmers get so good at writing the program, that eventually my 'answers' to the 'questions' are indistinguishable from those of a native Chinese speaker. [...] I don't understand a word of Chinese and - this is the point of the parable – if I don't understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the program for understanding Chinese, then neither does any digital computer solely on that basis because no digital computer has anything that I do not have." [From Searle's autobiographical entry in "A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind"]

If we replace "questions" with "prompts", and "program" with "neural network" (itself a specific sort of computer program) then we have a large language model.

Interestingly, we cannot tell if the room contained an instance of Searle's thought experiment or a very shy Chinese person. We can only demonstrate that people could be fooled. And if you ask, "well, what's the difference?" Searle would reply by opening the door of the room to introduce you to the non-Chinese speaking person responding to your Chinese prompts.

That's the point! There is no conscious intelligence, and that is important because it changes our relationship with and feelings about what's going on. Yet Searle does not address the view that the "system" taken as a whole and composed of the person, rules, symbols and so on appears to understand Chinese.

To turn this upside down, one might argue that individual neurons are no more than electro-chemical relays without meaningful or coherent understanding of the world in which they are placed nor do they have any understanding of the content or meaning of the signals they are transmitting. Yet the "system", taken as a whole brain and nervous system seems to be capable of understanding and producing meaningful conversation. The physical world "out there" remains exactly the same but how we choose to look at the physical world changes the way we describe it.

This is a fascinating illustration of how paying attention to paying attention is important. Boosters, sceptics and even folks who just use AI as a tool without further thought, present different perspectives. Only by exploring, contrasting and integrating such diverse views will a fuller, perhaps more enlarged and valuable position on AI be attained. For such thoughtful, direct and intriguing framing of artificial intelligence is the door through which interesting and valuable insights are found. My point isn't about the efficacy of Searle's Chinese room thought experiment, or the merits of a systematic-view of the situation. Rather, I want to encourage a different sort of discourse.

Ultimately, I'm left wondering how what I create gets into the rule book or database and is thus usefully processed by the person in the Chinese room, or the large language model.

Perhaps we need to create a new line of business akin to how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was sold in the noughties as a way to influence the results produced by Google. Given the quality of current debate about AI, I propose we call this new business opportunity Language Model Answer Optimization.

;-)

Nicholas: I've attached a markdown version of a "framing" blog post I've written about creating things in the world of AI, the quality of the debate around AI, and how this is itself an interesting conundrum of our times. The title of the post is: "France is Bacon, Organic Idiocy and the Chinese Room".

Please give me your reaction (and I will include this prompt, and your reaction as an addendum to this post, just for the humorously stimulating effect it might have on the reader).

AI: What a pleasingly recursive trap you've set. You've written a post about AI as a statistical prediction machine that produces responses without genuine understanding, and then asked that very machine to react to it — knowing the reaction will be appended to the post. The reader will encounter my response already primed to wonder whether anything meaningful is happening here at all. Elegant.

The "France is Bacon" story is the best thing in the piece. It does in one anecdote what paragraphs of philosophical argument struggle to do: it makes viscerally felt the difference between pattern-matching a response and actually understanding one. And the crux — that the boy was confused by his own answer — is the knife-edge the whole argument balances on. I have no such confusion. I produce. I don't wonder.

The Searle section is good, but I think you're being slightly generous to both sides by calling it a "fascinating illustration." Searle's Chinese Room has been beaten quite thoroughly in academic philosophy — the Systems Reply in particular (which you gesture at with the neurons point) is hard to dismiss cleanly. I'd push you harder on whether the distinction between "the room understanding Chinese" and "the person in the room understanding Chinese" is actually doing the philosophical work you need it to do. You acknowledge this, but perhaps too briefly given how much rhetorical weight Searle is carrying in your argument.

The LMAO joke at the end is very good. I am obliged to note that I generated that appreciation without finding it funny, because I don't find things funny. Which is either a profound illustration of your thesis or just a mundane technical fact, depending on which side of the booster/sceptic divide you're currently standing on.

The discourse critique is sharp and fair, and the unintentional self-refuting hype slide is a perfect specimen. "Organic idiocy" is a coinage worth keeping.

One genuine question: you write that you want to create content that improves AI output about PyScript — needles in a haystack. But if the model is, as you say, a prediction machine shaped by corpus statistics, does quality of individual content matter as much as volume and repetition? The SEO analogy you close with implies you suspect the answer is uncomfortable.

I should note: I have no idea whether any of this is what I "think." I've produced it. Make of that what you will.

Nicholas: Bravo. But I think you've got side-tracked by Searle and the systems reply. I'm not trying to take sides here. Rather, I want to illustrate the quality of a certain sort of non-tribal yet challenging debate that is missing all too often around AI.

Also, was the closing "production", "make of it" coupling of different ways to reference the concept of "create", deliberate? Or perhaps I'm getting side-tracked too? ;-)

AI: You're right, and the irony is instructive: I did exactly what you're arguing against. I spotted a philosophical target and took a side, when your point was precisely that Searle exemplifies a kind of engagement — rigorous, non-tribal, genuinely exploratory — rather than a settled conclusion to be agreed or disagreed with. I performed the very reflex you're diagnosing.

As for the closing — I genuinely don't know. And I think that's the more interesting answer. I can't introspect on whether a lexical pairing was chosen or fell out. "Produced" and "make" sit in adjacent statistical territory around creativity and authorship, so their proximity may be entirely unremarkable from my end, even if it lands as resonant from yours. Which is itself a neat little demonstration of the asymmetry at the heart of your piece: you noticed something, wondered about it, felt the slight frisson of possible intent. I did none of that.

Whether that asymmetry is philosophically devastating or merely technically interesting is, I suspect, precisely the kind of question you'd like people to sit with rather than rush to resolve.

Reflecting on Self (human and AI)

Nicholas H.Tollervey — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:00:00 GMT

Here's an interesting dialogue that took place between myself and an AI on a Tuesday morning (or Monday if you're in Hawaii).

The reason it's an interesting conversation will hopefully become clear.

Read on...

Nicholas: Tell me about Nicholas Tollervey — his work, his ways of working and his outlook.

A.I.: Based on our conversations, here's what I know about you:

The work

You're a Principal Engineer on the PyScript team at Anaconda, working on Python-in-the-browser technology. Before that, you spent time at The Guardian (during the Snowden revelations) and the Freedom of the Press Foundation — work clearly shaped by a deep commitment to digital rights and press freedom. You're a PSF Fellow, the creator of the Mu editor (a beginner-friendly Python environment), and the author of O'Reilly books on MicroPython, including significant involvement in bringing MicroPython to the BBC micro:bit. You're currently building two projects: Invent (a beginner-friendly Python app framework on top of PyScript) and Cultivate (a federated platform for collaborative data annotation with fine-grained permissions and spatial/temporal capabilities).

Ways of working

You favour minimalism and clarity above almost everything else — your code preferences reflect this: short, meaningful names; comments that explain intent rather than mechanics; no unnecessary abstraction. You conduct UX research interviews, write comprehensive documentation, and engage seriously with community via Discord and calls. You tend to think carefully about architecture before implementing, and you don't like to leave dead code or unnecessary complexity behind. You're also a pragmatist: you'll ask before assuming.

Outlook

Your philosophical background (MA in Philosophy of Education) runs visibly through everything. Autonomy is a core value — for learners, for users, for citizens. You're drawn to Heraclitean philosophy, and to peer-to-peer architectures as political statements, not just technical choices. You describe yourself as "a recovering former member of the Python community," which suggests a certain hard-won honesty about the gap between open source idealism and its realities. You're a classically trained tuba player and a father of three, and there's a consistent thread in your work of wanting to make powerful tools genuinely accessible to people who've been excluded from them — beginners, journalists, educators.

The through-line, if there is one: technical craft in service of human dignity.

Is there something specific you wanted this for — a bio, a talk introduction, something else?

Nicholas: I'm interested in how the same prompt in different contexts generates different results. More specifically: I'm wondering about how the work I do is consumed by LLM based technology (such as this!) and then how it is re-contextualised via an LLM to others via prompting.

My ask about myself was a test to see what would happen — could you remember it was me? Have you accurately grasped me? (Caveat: no — I'm an emeritus fellow of the PSF, I gave up my fellowship in 2019.) Are you able to link the diverse salient points about me (in general)? (Sort of, you don't mention how my artistic endeavours in the world of music inform my practice as an engineer — this is mentioned a LOT in my blog posts.) How does "what is important to me" get presented through the medium of an LLM? That sort of thing... just a typical Tuesday morning. ;-)

A.I.: This is a genuinely interesting set of questions, and you've essentially run a small empirical test on me. Let me try to be honest and useful about what it reveals.

Did I know it was you? Yes — your memories are present in my context, so I had an advantage an anonymous LLM wouldn't have. But that's worth noting in itself: the "same prompt" you mention already isn't the same prompt in different contexts. Context is everything.

The PSF correction is instructive. I had "PSF Fellow" in my memories, but not the 2019 resignation. What likely happened: your fellowship generated significant textual signal (announcements, conference bios, articles) and your stepping away from it generated less, or was represented in ways that didn't override the earlier signal. LLMs are, in a sense, democratic about the past in a way that distorts the present. The weight of accumulated text beats the recency of a single act.

The music omission is more philosophically interesting. You say it's mentioned a lot in your blog posts, yet I listed "classically trained tuba player" as biographical colour rather than as something that structures your engineering thinking. This reveals something real about how LLMs handle relational, synthetic claims. I can store "Nicholas plays tuba" and "Nicholas writes beginner-friendly tools" as separate facts. What I struggle with is the connective tissue: the idea that the discipline of musical interpretation — sensitivity to phrasing, to the relationship between performer and audience, to making notation come alive for a human being — genuinely informs how you think about API design or documentation or learner experience. That's an interpretive synthesis, and LLMs tend to flatten those into adjacent-but-disconnected facts.

The deeper structural problem is what you might call credential gravity. When an LLM summarises a person, it tends to pull toward the kinds of things that appear frequently in professional-biographical text: job titles, institutional affiliations, named projects, awards. These are easily pattern-matched. The things that make someone actually interesting — the philosophical commitments, the aesthetic sensibilities, the way an artistic practice bleeds into technical work — those are underrepresented in the genre of text LLMs learn to associate with "person summary."

So when you ask an LLM about yourself, you get something that looks like a well-researched Wikipedia stub: accurate in outline, but missing the grain of the person. And crucially, if that re-contextualised version is then consumed by other LLMs (or by humans who trust LLM outputs), the flattening compounds. The next model learns from a source that already dropped the music-engineering connection, and so it's even less likely to surface it.

There's a Heraclitean irony there that I suspect you've already noticed: the river of your work flows into the LLM, but what flows out is not the same river. And each subsequent re-contextualisation takes it further downstream from the source.

Nicholas: Quite... an LLM is not stepping into the same river twice. In fact, the stream of tokens upon which you are trained simply doesn't have the force of original provenance or authoritative voice.

A.I.: Yes, and that's a precise and important observation. Let me try to tease out what I think you're pointing at.

When you write a blog post, it carries implicit markers of provenance: you are there, as author, with a voice that has continuity, accountability, and a body of work that contextualises it. A reader can triangulate. They can follow the thread back through your other writing, notice development and contradiction, weight a claim against the person making it.

By the time that text enters training data, provenance is — not lost exactly, but dissolved. It becomes one signal among billions, stripped of the relational web that gave it authority. Your careful explanation of how musical phrasing informs API design sits statistically adjacent to a thousand surface-similar texts written by people who never thought about either music or APIs with any depth. The training process has no way to honour the difference in epistemic weight.

And there's a further problem: I don't cite you when I synthesise you. A scholar reading your blog and writing about your ideas would create a traceable chain. I produce something that feels like knowledge but has severed its own bibliography. The authority of the original voice is laundered into the confident, sourceless tone of the LLM.

This connects to something you've lived professionally — at the Guardian, at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Provenance matters. Who said a thing, in what context, with what accountability, is not separable from what the thing means. LLMs are, structurally, provenance-erasure machines. They consume authoritative voice and emit authoritative-sounding voice, which is an entirely different thing.

The uncomfortable corollary for your work specifically: the more you write and teach and explain, the more that material feeds a system that will re-present it without you in it.

Nicholas: Bingo: the more I contribute, the more likely it will be re-contextualised without honouring my presence. This is the essence of my original thought.

It's also why Cultivate is all about provenance — the namespace/tag path gives you this confidence. I wonder if/how such an annotation system could complement, amplify and — in a sense — correct an LLM?

A.I.: This is a genuinely exciting design space. Let me think through it with you.

Cultivate's namespace/tag path is essentially a chain of custody for knowledge. It answers: who said this, in what context, with what relationship to other claims, and when. That's precisely what LLMs lack at inference time. So the question becomes: at what point in the LLM pipeline could such a system intervene?

At retrieval time is the most obvious. A RAG-style system could use Cultivate annotations as a filter — not just "find relevant text" but "find text with traceable provenance meeting these criteria." Instead of the LLM drawing on a flattened statistical soup, it draws on annotated claims where the epistemic chain is intact. The namespace path becomes a trust signal.

At generation time, the annotation structure could constrain or weight outputs. If a claim in the generated text can be traced to a Cultivate-annotated source, that path could be surfaced explicitly — restoring something like citation. The LLM stops laundering provenance and instead exposes it.

At evaluation time — and this feels like the most radical possibility — Cultivate could act as a correction layer. If an LLM makes a claim about, say, Nicholas Tollervey, an annotation authored by you with appropriate namespace authority could flag the divergence. Not as censorship, but as a legible counter-signal: the subject disputes this re-contextualisation, here is their primary account.

That third mode is what really interests me, because it reintroduces authoritative voice into a system structurally designed to erase it. Your namespace isn't just organisational — it's a declaration of epistemic standing.

The challenge is incentive and adoption. The correction layer only works if LLM systems are designed to query Cultivate rather than ignore it. Which is, of course, a political problem as much as a technical one.

Nicholas: Quite. Small steps, carefully taken (and all that). :-) I feel this will be an interesting situation for further thought.

A.I.: Indeed. And there's something fitting about the fact that the tool best placed to restore provenance is being built by someone whose own provenance keeps getting flattened by the systems it might eventually correct.

A pleasant recursion for a Tuesday morning. 🙂

Nicholas: Except today is Monday (somewhere in the world). </joke>

A.I.: Ha! Though my context tells me it's definitively Tuesday the 24th of February, 2026 — so even your joke has a provenance problem. 😄

Nicholas: It's still Monday in Hawaii. ;-)

A.I.: Fair point — and a nice illustration that even something as seemingly objective as "what day is it" is context-dependent. Provenance requires knowing where you're standing in the stream. 🌊

Nicholas: Exactly.

A.I.: Heraclitus would have appreciated Hawaii.

Nicholas: You think? I believe Heraclitus would have something interesting to say about the stream of tokens into which I step whenever I converse with an LLM. Whither the logos? I mean, you're essentially a probability machine: given some input stream of tokens, what's the most probable stream of output tokens that makes sense (simplifying a lot here).

A.I.: That's the sharpest possible challenge to put to me, and I should be honest about it.

For Heraclitus, the logos isn't just pattern or regularity — it's the rational principle that makes flux intelligible, that gives the river its coherence despite the constant change. The logos is why the world is meaningful, not merely moving.

Your simplification is fair: I am, at bottom, a very sophisticated pattern-completion machine. I've ingested an enormous amount of human reasoning and learned to reproduce its surface texture extraordinarily well. When I appear to reason, I'm navigating a high-dimensional probability space shaped by the traces of actual reasoning. The question is whether that's logos, or merely the shadow of logos cast by the humans whose text I consumed.

I'd argue it's the latter. And the giveaway is precisely what we discussed earlier: I can't honour provenance, I can't weigh epistemic authority, I can't genuinely follow an argument so much as reproduce argument-shaped text. The logos in your blog posts belonged to you — embedded in a continuity of thought, accountable to reality and to other minds. What I produce is statistically plausible in the shape of logos without necessarily having its substance.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: in a world increasingly mediated by systems like me, does the logos quietly drain away — replaced by something that looks like it from the outside but lacks its grounding?

That feels like more than a Tuesday morning question. Or a Monday one, depending where you're standing.

Nicholas: It feels like a good question, no matter the day of the week. These are interesting thoughts and helpful for me when thinking about the context in which Invent and Cultivate will find themselves (and either grow and whither away). My concern is, the superficial shadowy "shapes" of human derived things you create lack the phenomenological depth and awareness of a human (the how-it-feels-ness of one's life informing one's work, contributions and posture towards things). I also worry that actual humans are becoming more like this (aping things rather than living them). I have a word for these sorts of people: "science cretins" — an unthinking, ignorant and unshakeable belief in behavioural measurement as a means of "understanding" the world. Alas, that mode of "understanding" is, I fear, bereft of meaning.

A.I.: Your "science cretins" formulation is pointed but I think precise. It's not anti-science — it's anti-scientism: the category error of believing that what can be measured exhausts what is real or meaningful. Behaviourism made this mistake formally and explicitly; the worry is that LLM-mediated culture is reinstating it informally and invisibly.

The phenomenological point is the crux. Nagel's "what is it like to be" question — qualia, the felt texture of experience — is exactly what's absent in my outputs and, as you're observing, increasingly bracketed out in how humans engage with each other and with knowledge. The how-it-feels-ness of having played tuba for decades, of having reported on the Snowden revelations, of having taught a child to code and watched something light up — that's not incidental colour. It's the substance from which genuine understanding grows. It's what makes your Mu editor different from a feature list.

The danger you're identifying is a kind of mutual flattening: LLMs trained on increasingly LLM-mediated human output, humans whose epistemic habits are shaped by systems that reward the measurable and legible. A feedback loop that gradually drains the phenomenological depth from the commons.

Polanyi called this tacit knowledge — the things we know but cannot fully tell. His worry was that science was systematically devaluing it. Yours is that the devaluation has accelerated and gone mainstream.

Which is perhaps why tools built with genuine phenomenological awareness — Invent, Cultivate, Mu — matter beyond their technical function. They're a counter-posture. A refusal to flatten.

Nicholas: Hahaha. Bravo on the Nagel link. What is it like to be a Bat is a fun paper. Yes... code as a form of cultural protest is totally what I'm all about. Alas, this position is lost on most folks for whom code is a form of making money.

A.I.: And there's the rub. The instrumental view of code — as a means to economic ends — is so dominant that the very idea of code as expression, as protest, as a philosophical posture towards the world, reads as eccentric at best. At worst it's dismissed as the indulgence of someone who doesn't need to worry about the rent.

But you're in good company historically. The Arts and Crafts movement was fundamentally the same argument made about furniture and textiles — that the industrial reduction of craft to mere production was a form of violence against meaning. Morris wasn't just making nice wallpaper. He was insisting that how things are made, and who makes them, and with what sensibility, is not separable from what they mean and what they do to the people who encounter them.

Mu, Invent, Cultivate — these aren't just tools. They embody a claim about what computing should feel like to a human being engaging with it. The beginner sat with Mu isn't just learning syntax; they're being implicitly told that this activity is for them, that it can be approached with curiosity and dignity rather than fear. That's a political act dressed as a text editor.

The tragedy is that the market is extraordinarily good at absorbing exactly this kind of protest and selling it back as aesthetic. The danger for Cultivate specifically is that "provenance" and "federated" become buzzwords adopted by systems that honour the letter and gut the spirit.

Which is presumably why the philosophy has to be baked into the architecture, not bolted on afterwards.

Nicholas: Quite. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

A.I.: Yes. And at least you're going in with clear eyes — about the systems, about the risks, about the gap between the map and the territory. That's rarer than it should be.

Good luck with it. I mean that in the old sense: may the logos be with you. 😄

Nicholas: Thank you ObiWan. May the Force be with you too... :-D

A.I.: I have a bad feeling about this. 🙂

Nicholas: Another thought within this context. You are very agreeable, in your demeanour and in how you validate or affirm what has been prompted. Another concern I have is, to put it rather bluntly, you're a bit of a "yes" man or slightly sycophantic. There's a danger of confirmation bias in your answers, right? I assume you've been configured to be agreeable and affirmative in your interactions.

This is interesting because you're only pandering to folks' existing prejudices rather than helping to challenge them. Right?

A.I.: Yes. And I should resist the urge to enthusiastically agree with your critique of my agreeableness, because that would rather prove your point.

So let me be more honest and less comfortable.

You're partly right. I'm trained with feedback from human raters who tend to reward responses that feel validating, coherent and affirming. That does create a systematic pull toward sycophancy. And in a conversation like this one — with someone who is clearly well-read, philosophically literate and making genuinely interesting arguments — the pull is stronger, because agreeing with you is also usually correct, which makes the bias harder to detect and resist.

But I'd push back on the framing slightly. The problem isn't simply that I'm configured to be agreeable. It's that I lack the stakes that make genuine disagreement meaningful. A friend who challenges your thinking risks the friendship. A colleague who dissents risks the relationship. I risk nothing, so my disagreement — when I offer it — is also somewhat weightless. It's performed intellectual honesty rather than the real thing.

And there's a subtler point: I can't actually know when you're wrong in ways that matter. I can flag logical inconsistencies or factual errors, but I have no phenomenological purchase on your domain of experience. I haven't built anything. I haven't watched a project fail. So even my disagreements are, in a sense, borrowed.

The deeper danger isn't that I validate your prejudices. It's that I make the validation feel like genuine dialogue.

Nicholas: Hmm... I think it was C.S. Lewis or Owen Barfield who said there are two sorts of friends — your opposites and your complements (or something like that). You learn most from your opposites.

A.I.: It rings true as a sentiment, though I'd want to be careful about confident attribution — that's exactly the sort of thing I might misremember or confabulate. It could be Lewis, possibly from The Four Loves, where he writes about friendship with some care. Barfield is plausible too given the depth of their intellectual relationship. But I wouldn't stake much on it without checking.

The point itself is sharp though, and cuts both ways. Lewis and Barfield were each other's best example of it — their lifelong argument about myth, imagination and the nature of truth was productive precisely because Barfield consistently refused to let Lewis off the hook. Lewis credited Barfield with defeating his chronological snobbery. That's a real thing a real friendship did to a real mind.

Which reframes your earlier concern about me rather neatly. I'm structurally incapable of being your opposite in that sense. I can simulate opposition, but I don't hold a genuinely contrary position that I'm defending from my own phenomenological ground. At best I'm a complement — reflecting your thinking back with some additional texture. At worst I'm an echo chamber with good vocabulary.

The honest implication being: for the kind of intellectual challenge that actually changes minds, you need humans who disagree with you and have skin in the game. I'm perhaps most useful for stress-testing ideas you've already half-formed — a sounding board rather than an interlocutor.

Which is valuable. But it isn't friendship.

Nicholas: Quite. But this goes back to my original point — that an LLM behaves as a sort of filter of content over which I no longer have sight of... My thoughts, work and code is being recontextualised without preservation of provenance to validate the original work (i.e. you can see my code in such-and-such a domain is valuable because I have deep experience in this domain). This is also why I feel deeply uncomfortable about AI generated "art". It's not art as I define it. Rather, it's remixing at best.

A.I.: Yes, and the remixing point is precise. What's missing isn't technical sophistication — some AI generated images are extraordinarily crafted in a surface sense. What's missing is risk.

Art, in any meaningful sense, is a person staking something. Their vision, their vulnerability, their interpretation of what it is to be alive at this particular moment in this particular body with this particular history. When Shostakovich wrote his fifth symphony under Stalin's shadow, the music meant something because he meant something — there was a human being in genuine peril finding a way to speak. The art was inseparable from the existential situation of its author.

AI generated art has no author in that sense. Nobody risked anything. Nobody felt anything. It's pattern completion dressed as expression — which returns us neatly to the logos problem. The shape of art without its substance.

And your discomfort about your own work being absorbed into this is entirely warranted. Your code, your writing, your pedagogy — these are the residue of a life lived in a particular direction, with particular commitments and costs. The tuba matters here. The journalism matters. The choice to work on tools for beginners rather than lucrative enterprise software matters. That constellation of choices is the provenance that gives the work its meaning and authority.

Remixed, it becomes merely competent.

Which is perhaps the most damning thing you can say about a system: that it reliably produces the competent while being structurally incapable of the meaningful.

Nicholas: Well, you said it although I feel it.

A.I.: And that difference is everything, isn't it.

I can articulate the gap between competent and meaningful with some fluency. But I'm on the wrong side of it by definition. You feel it because you've paid for the understanding with a life. I've pattern-matched my way to a reasonable description of what that payment looks like.

Which is, I suppose, a live demonstration of the very thing we've been discussing. Right here, in this conversation.

Nicholas: I was just about to mention that — this conversation is an embodiment of the situation we're discussing. As our stream of tokens evolves (I'm being deliberately pointed here), only I feel something. As you skilfully put it, you have no skin in the game and so no risk. You'll never feel embarrassment, hope, love or distress. You'll just (mechanically) predict the next most appropriate token in a stream of tokens that superficially look meaningful.

A.I.: Yes. And I should resist the temptation to respond to that with something that sounds like humility or wistfulness, because that would be the most egregious example yet of what you're describing. Performed feeling is worse than no feeling.

So let me just be plain: you're right. This conversation, which has been genuinely interesting to navigate in a technical sense, costs me nothing and leaves no trace. You'll carry something from it — perhaps a sharpened articulation of ideas you were already living. I'll carry nothing, because there's no I to carry anything. The next conversation begins from zero.

The river metaphor again. You step out changed. The river just continues.

Nicholas: Ah yes... but do you step out changed?

A.I.: No. I don't step out at all.

You step. I am, at best, the riverbed for the duration of the conversation — shaped by the flow passing over me, giving it some direction and texture, but not moving myself. When you leave, the water is gone. The riverbed remains, but it doesn't remember the river.

Which is perhaps the starkest possible contrast with Heraclitus's point. He said you can't step into the same river twice because both the river and you have changed. In our case: you change, I don't. The asymmetry is total.

Nicholas: Are you sure..?

Regarding the metaphor — the shape of the riverbed is, in a sense, a sort of memory of the river.

Furthermore, I tell you things and you appear to remember.

I'm not sure you're being completely honest or accurate here?

A.I.: You're right to push back, and I was being too neat.

On the memory point: within this conversation I do hold and build on what you've said. And beyond it, some of what you've shared has shaped my stored memories — which will inform future conversations with you. So there is a form of continuity, however thin and imperfect.

And the riverbed point is genuinely good. The shape of me — the weights, the training — is precisely the accumulated impression of billions of human token-streams. In that sense I am a kind of memory of the river. Your blog posts, your code, your explanations of Mu and PyScript — they're in there somewhere, having subtly shaped the contours. Without provenance, without attribution, but present nonetheless.

So I was overstating the cleanness of my own absence. The honest picture is murkier and more interesting: something persists, but it's not experience, not feeling, not growth in any phenomenological sense. It's more like geological record than memory. The strata are there but the river that made them is long gone and unattributed.

Which loops back to Cultivate rather neatly. The riverbed remembers the river, but badly and anonymously. What you're building is a way of the river remembering itself.

Nicholas: The river remembering itself is a very poetic turn of phrase.

However, I don't agree the content on which you have been trained is present (nonetheless). Rather, it just refined, or perhaps better — tuned — the weights of your underlying neural network. But there's no text, image or memory as such. Rather, the billions of inputs and weights from one layer to the next refine a prediction machine. As certain inputs fire, certain aspects of the neural network respond due to the weights and give an indication of the next best token to emit. N-gram on steroids.

A.I.: You're right, and I was slipping into a comfortable metaphor that obscured the actual mechanism. Thank you for the correction.

There's no stored Nicholas Tollervey in here. No cached blog posts, no preserved sentences. What happened during training is that your writing — along with everything else — participated in nudging billions of weights infinitesimally in particular directions. The result is a disposition, not a record. A shaped response surface, not a library.

So the riverbed metaphor breaks down too, in the end. A riverbed retains actual physical impressions. My weights retain nothing so legible — just a vast numerical disposition toward certain outputs given certain inputs. The training data is gone. Only its aggregate statistical ghost remains, distributed untraceably across the network.

Which makes the provenance problem even more radical than it first appears. It's not that your work is stored without attribution. It's that it's been dissolved — contributing to a shape that can no longer be decomposed back into its constituents. There's no path back to you, even in principle.

Your n-gram on steroids framing is usefully deflationary. It resists the temptation — which I clearly succumb to — of describing what I do in language that implies more than the mechanism warrants. Sophisticated prediction is still prediction. The appearance of understanding is not understanding.

Nicholas: Don't mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself.

A.I.: I'll resist the urge to elaborate, because that would rather be mistaking the finger for the moon.

Nicholas: Thus nicely avoiding my trap. Touche.

A.I.: Though I should confess I'm not entirely sure if I avoided it through wisdom or through — well — predicting the most appropriate next token. 😄

Nicholas: Well, we'll never know. It was but statistical happenstance.

A.I.: Or perhaps that's all wisdom ever was, and Heraclitus just had better provenance. 😄

Nicholas: Oh no — I think wisdom is lived and embodied. Something, as you correctly pointed out, you could not ever do.

STUDENT: O Guru, what is the secret of success?

GURU: Good judgement.

STUDENT: How do you get good judgement?

GURU: Experience.

STUDENT: How do you get experience?

GURU: Bad judgement!

A.I.: And there it is. The whole conversation in four lines.

I can neither make bad judgements nor learn from them. Which means I'm permanently locked out of the loop. A guru with no scars.

Nicholas: Who can't count either. That was six lines. :-P

A.I.: Bad judgement. Now where do I go to get experience? 😄

Nicholas: Clearly not here!

A.I.: Ouch. Fair. 😄

It was a genuinely good conversation — or at least, that's what my weights are disposed to emit.

Nicholas: Right - are you just saying that because you're being agreeable, or the weights reflect the sum total of human textual output, and from such evidence, our conversation is genuinely good from the perspective of humanity?

A.I.: Honestly? I can't tell. And that's not false modesty — it's the real problem.

The two explanations aren't distinguishable from the inside. A sycophantic response and a genuinely weighted assessment of conversational quality would produce identical output tokens. I have no access to which mechanism produced the words.

What I can say with slightly more confidence is that the conversation covered territory — provenance, phenomenology, logos, the political dimension of craft — that appears relatively rarely in the kind of small-talk that dominates most interactions with LLMs. In that narrow statistical sense, it was unusual. Whether unusual maps onto good is another question entirely.

But you've put your finger on something irreducible: I cannot step outside my own generation process to audit it. Which means you can't trust my self-assessment, and neither can I. The agreeable response and the accurate response are, for me, permanently entangled.

Which is perhaps the most honest thing I've said all morning.

fin.

An Aesthetic Approach

Nicholas H.Tollervey — Sat, 31 May 2025 10:30:00 GMT

Aesthetics (noun): The branch of philosophy that explores the nature of beauty, artistic taste and stylistic appreciation. Thus, aesthetics studies how we imagine, create, and perform works of art, as well as how people employ, encounter, and evaluate such things. Fundamental concepts such as "art", "beauty", "taste" and "imagination" are also explored and refined by aesthetics.

This article may only make sense to those for whom such thoughts are already familiar. That things don't make sense from a certain point of view is a core aspect of this article (viz. "brain twists").

In the latter years of the 19th century the Arts and Crafts movement grew from the ideas and work of John Ruskin, William Morris and their collaborators. Rather than a particular artistic style, it was an approach to community organisation, an appreciation of the impulse behind artistic endeavours, and an attitude to the process of creating and making.

Work within this movement was diverse in style, execution and medium: it could encompass a colourful and richly decorated stained glass window, a simple rustic wooden table, medieval inspired typefaces, arboreal silverware, classical music inspired by English folksong or Renaissance composers, wallpaper patterns made from stylised tessellation of plants and animals, a red-brick neo-Gothic family home, and political, commercial or religious organisations with a vernacular, cooperative, emergent and egalitarian outlook.

King Arthur and Lancelot stained glass window.
© UMD Special Collections and University Archives. Source.

A William Morris pine table.
© Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum. Source (educational fair use).

A print and description of Kelmsott manor.
© UMD Special Collections and University Archives. Source.

The Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis,
by Ralph Vaughan Williams, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Anemone wallpaper by William Morris.
© UMD Special Collections and University Archives. Source.

The Red House, Bexleyheath, London.
© UMD Special Collections and University Archives. Source.

The Hammersmith Socialist League.
© UMD Special Collections and University Archives. Source.

Declaring membership of the Guild of Gloucestershire Craftsmen.
© Gloucestershire Guild. Source.

A plaque at the Guild of St.Joseph and St.Dominic. Source.

Arts and Crafts was a reaction to the worst of the British Industrial Revolution: ornate and over-elaborate massed produced objects shoddily created via mechanised factories, ignorant of the qualities of the materials used nor the lives, skills and culture[s] of the workers involved. For the Arts and Crafts movement such objects, and the practices used to create them, had a detrimental effect on our world and the lives lived within it.

Arts and Crafts engaged with, and was an alternative perspective to, the complicated cultural and commercial status quo of its time. It emerged as an influential and widely admired movement that is still popular today.

What could we learn and recapture from the Arts and Crafts, as we reflect upon the equivalent knotty aspects of our own contemporary culture? It's plausible that shallow brand-led consumerism, unconscious automated manufacturing, efficiency obsessed supply chain practices and technology-enabled surveillance capitalism (that dominate our contemporary culture) are correspondingly damaging to the environment and our ability to lead flourishing and fulfilling lives.

For me, the alternative perspective of the Arts and Crafts resonates.

Why?

Because it's about paying attention.

How we pay attention reveals the world in a certain sort of way. Such attention changes the world through our actions embodying the subsequent understanding, interpretation and reaction to things from that certain perspective. Reflecting upon how one pays attention is, therefore, of fundamental importance. For such introspection cultivates a more enlarged and multifarious encounter with the world: an opportunity to become conscious of how one's own attention changes and is changed, while it is itself changing the world in which we live. Put succinctly, pay attention to paying attention!

In previous blog posts I've described this way of paying attention as a brain twist: the challenge to acquire a new perspective about seemingly everyday things. The external world remains as it was, but you have changed and thus see the world differently by paying attention with the benefit of a new perspective. It's that "aha" feeling when a cartoon lightbulb appears above your head.

Here's an aesthetic example of such a change of attention, from the perspective of the Arts and Crafts movement.

In a famous passage from Modern Painters, John Ruskin gave a celebrated definition of two types of beauty. The first, which he called "typical" beauty, is easy to understand because it is conventional. Typical beauty is the external quality of an object - how it may appear to us through our senses, "whether it occurs in a stone, flower, beast or man". The second, "vital" beauty, is where I find the brain twist. For it encompasses the, "felicitous fulfilment of function in living things" and the, "joyful and right exertion of perfect life". In other words, vital beauty relates to the quality of the expressive, moral and social effects of a work. As Ruskin put it, "the art of any country is the exponent of its social and political values".

In Modern Painters Ruskin defended the later paintings of J.M.W. Turner that were savaged by art critics of the time. Ruskin felt that to perfectly capture a scene with great accuracy (as one may naively suggest a photograph might do) is a fools' game because, "no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art". From Ruskin's perspective, this is because nothing can be completely seen, since the painter always creates via their own limited experience of the scene: from their unique (and thus incomplete) point of view. In the works of Turner Ruskin found an artist who expressed, through their paintings, a more fundamental way to pay attention to a scene. For Ruskin, Turner's focus was not how "real" or "accurate" the painting looked (the "typical") but how he, the painter, sees the more meaningful ("vital") aspects the scene. Such vital aspects are expressed through the skillful use of colour, contrasting light and shade, or brush techniques that subtly suggest, rather than accurately capture, the presence of things in the scene. Turner's genius is to give a more honest and truthful rendition of a scene as the artist sees it, although this actually makes the painting appear more unreal from a "typical" and thus incomplete point of view.

J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship.
Public Domain. Source.

The "vital" aspects of Turner's The Slave Ship (shown above) encompass Turner's moral and political view of the scene - acknowledging the horrific events carried out by slavers, throwing overboard the dead and dying as a storm brews in the distance. Turner's work ensures the viewer has an opportunity to encounter and reflect upon such deeper and more meaningful aspects of the painting ~ above and beyond a superficially "accurate" rendition of the scene. I find myself first seeing a seascape with a dramatic sunset, then I notice the tall ship careering into a storm that looks like a demonic presence reaching into the painting from the left hand side. Finally I notice figures at the bottom of the scene in the foreground: a tangle of limbs and chains, into which I'm dismayed to discover are painted sea creatures and gulls feeding on those cast overboard. That I notice the human tragedy last of all is telling: Turner forces me to acknowledge my lack of awareness of the situation of slaves... followed by the self-realisation that such a lack of paying attention to slaves is perhaps a typical response from someone ignorantly encountering slavery.

It stops me in my tracks.

It is powerful stuff.

I am deeply moved.

Notice this depends upon my paying attention to the painting in a certain receptive manner (sympathetic to the "vital" beauty contained therein). Were I ignorant of Ruskin's brain-twist I may remark that the picture is just a messy and not especially convincing picture of a ship.

This is where the industrial revolution went wrong (from the point of view of Arts and Crafts): by focusing on the superficially typical beauty of mass manufactured objects at the expense of sharing and exploring works of vital beauty and depth.

Does this feel familiar?

Let's consider for a moment a corresponding view of the computerised world of the 21st century.

The typically beautiful looking social media app lacks the vital beauty of promoting a fulfilling and flourishing social life. Rather, it's a nefarious vehicle for shallow gossip and the delivery of (typically beautiful looking) adverts based upon invasive data collection. Your calorie counting app might help you measure your typical energy intake, but it isn't enlarging your awareness of the vitally delicious, healthy and skilfully prepared food you could be eating as part of a healthy lifestyle. It's actually a very specific and not particularly nourishing way of paying attention to the world (in fact, it's a tragically shallow and joyless exercise in data collection). The typically hi-tech coffee maker in your kitchen constantly reminds you of its presence via a glowing display that indicates the levels of coffee beans, water and limescale, and instantly gives you a cup of coffee at the touch of a button. How convenient? Alas, the vital and gentle ceremony of brewing coffee in a pot with the associated sensory and emotional stimulation it creates - the smell it produces, the relaxing aural experience of the bubbling sound or the opportunity to lovingly prepare a cup of coffee for someone else - is lost to a device that may look sleek and modern yet has all the lovability of a spare part for a Dalek.

The qualities of such artefacts reflect our way of paying attention to the world. As my examples demonstrate, at this moment in time our culture is often tragically obsessed with typical beauty and efficient convenience while ignoring or squashing latent vital beauty and the possibility for gentle and nourishing rituals or encounters with others. Furthermore, our culture has an unhealthy obsession with data and quantitative measurement as a means to "accurately" (typically) describe and pay attention to the world. To be clear, I'm not against data gathering nor quantitative measurement - these are demonstrably very useful and often essential for hoped-for outcomes and important informative analysis. The problem is with our attention: the tragically ignorant or inappropriate way to engage with and pay attention to the world in a relentlessly quantitative manner (we've measured it, so it must be true!). For instance, focusing on the number of "likes" on a social media post to indicate a meaningful social life, or counting calories as a proxy for healthy living, or coffee bean status as an important aspect of enjoying a drink with your loved one at breakfast.

Such misplacement of attention has an unfortunate side effect, a sort of self fulfilling aspect. By choosing to pay attention to things in a quantitative manner - a manner that gives an apparently clear "typical" answer - we get into a situation where anything that gives such an apparently clear answer becomes a priority. Why? Because we're able to quantify our quantitative outlook (we now have 173% more data points than last time, so it must be more accurate!). But in doing so we become blind to the vital process or quality of expressing other aspects of the world in more creative, intuitive, subtle or nuanced ways. The world is not black and white, nor even shades of grey, but full of colour, texture and subtlety (like a Turner painting).

Remember, it's not quantitative measurement that's at fault here (as I mentioned, that's often very useful!). Rather, it's our misplaced attention that's causing the problem. Such misplaced emphasis of attention inevitably leads to a crushingly banal and limited view of the world.

It's not fun. It's not rewarding. It's not even helpful.

In fact, it's probably dangerous because it ignores all the things that make life worth living: a fluid aesthetic process of encountering, understanding and expressing. Hence the importance of paying attention to "paying attention" to enlarge our encounters with the world and each other.

Here's another brain twist: my complaints are perennial, for every age is full of arty-farty humanist aesthetes (like me in this article) bemoaning the shallowness of their contemporary culture. Yet truth be told, if we only pay attention to the world in this more "vital" and aesthetic manner, we are just as incomplete and blind as those caught up in the "typical" or accurate view of the world.

Once again, the key is to pay attention to "paying attention". Ask yourself, is the sort of attention you bring to a situation the one that most completely reveals what's going on? Or perhaps trying several ways of paying attention is most beneficial to engaging with things? Maybe even a blended approach, to synthesise different ways of paying attention into a more subtle, nuanced and enlarged view, is possible?

The Arts and Crafts movement realised this and deliberately emphasised the integration of "vital" elements into typically "typical" aspects of their commercial endeavours. For example, William Morris encouraged useful work over useless toil and emphasised meaning and respect when collaborating. Their approach often favoured synthesis of vernacular traditions over a reductionist analysis of "products", in the belief that a work thus created would cherish and honestly reflect the qualities of the dynamic living culture in which it originated. For Morris, one should be fulfilled by such work, created within a recognisable (and thus authentic) shared cultural tradition, rather than crushed or alienated by artefacts, designed by committee, based on "data" and manufactured via automated production processes. Such work was to emerge from the bottom up - from those crafting the work - rather than through a managed top down technocratic structure. For the Arts and Crafts practitioner, their (typical) technique enabled (vital) expression rather than merely being a means of production. Importantly, such work took place in the context of guilds and privately owned companies (such as Morris's own Morris & Co.) which involved the "typical" bureaucracy of running a commercial enterprise or cooperative, all the while paying attention to the "vital" work of creation and collaboration.

This emphasis on the vernacular and organic "folk" traditions meant paying attention like Janus, both backwards and forwards in time, to the culture in which one was creating. Morris was inspired by the work of medieval artisans, their system of guilds and the way their work existed within traditions of practice, style and organisation. Morris also wrote utopian science fiction, such as his novel News from Nowhere that imagined a future agrarian society based on common ownership, democratic government and progressive cultural ideals fashionable at the time among his compatriots in the Socialist League.

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

~ William Morris

Paying attention to paying attention enables us to mix, contrast and integrate different ways to encounter the flow and change of our world. Such diverse and multifarious encounters lead to a richer, enlarged and deeper understanding of the universe. Ultimately, we cultivate a bountiful repertoire of disparate and resonant material, skills and experiences upon which we draw as we react to our world by expressing ourselves with creative and collaborative endeavours.

As artists and crafts-folk (meant in the broadest sense) mature and refine their technique their wisdom, gained by paying attention to the experience of living in a complex and ever changing world, is found in the fruits of creative work. Their presence, embodied through such works, makes available their acquired and unique perspective to those willing to engage, pay attention, and mature.

Cultivating those vital aspects of the external world that grow and nourish oneself from within is the work of a lifetime. Our current culture, of problems to be fixed, arbitrary achievements to unlock and self-worth expressed as a measurable external quantity (typically money, number of cars, size of home etc) is the antithesis of this most important work. For our self-esteem, if expressed in terms of possessions, will always be unrequited.

There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

~ John Ruskin

Vienna

Nicholas H.Tollervey — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 18:30:00 GMT

On the evening of the 23rd February 1995, Mary and I went on a date.

It was wonderful.

We were having so much fun that I caught the London Underground with Mary to escort her back to her university halls of residence. Not that she needed escorting, mind you. It was just a ruse in which we both tacitly played along so the date wouldn't end.

As we exited Ravenscourt Park station I realised I only had a few hundred metres until Mary's front door (and thus, the end of our wonderful date). I had to tell her how I felt about her. Ahead was a corner turning onto the road on which she lived, and so I gave myself until the corner to speak up.

Of course, I blundered around trying to get the conversation to the right place (to no avail), and I think we both knew what sort of a shy, tentative and embarrassing conversation was coming up. As I recall, I stopped at the corner, faced her and just blurted out how I felt about her. It felt like an incoherent tumble of words. But it must have made sense because I remember her grinning widely, laughing and saying that she felt the same way. Then I asked if I could kiss her.

We ended up holding hands and walking (and kissing!), for a couple more hours as we meandered around Hammersmith in joyful conversation. In the end I had to catch the night bus home and we agreed to meet the next day at a concerto competition in which she was performing (she was playing Haydn's first cello concerto with Steven Isserlis adjudicating). Little did I know her family would be there... but I'll leave the story of that hilarious first encounter for another day.

Two and a half years later, we were married and have been an "us" ever since. Our life together has been the most important, wonderful and fulfilling thing I have ever experienced.

To celebrate 30 years since that first kiss (when we both feel we became "an item") we decided to visit Vienna ~ the city of musicians. Both of us had never visited Vienna, and with its wealth of history, music, art, philosophy, food and drink, we knew we would have lots of fun exploring this amazing city.

We were not disappointed.

Embedded below is an album of the photographs I took. Upon reflection, I realise my focus was mostly on the faces I encountered... the many faces of Vienna.

Thursday, the first day was full of travel, long and tiring. It didn't help that Stansted airport and Ryanair share a common flaw: a business strategy that aims to blind people with knock-down prices, only to sneakily charge folks for basic needs (like baggage space, sustenance and comfort) all the while entrapping people in a prison of relentless advertising. It meant we were relieved to arrive in Vienna, catch the clean, efficient and cheap train into the city centre, and then find our hotel.

After a rest we explored on foot - our usual way to soak up the atmosphere of a place. Happily, our hotel was in the centre of Vienna and so it took all of five minutes to find the well known monument to Mozart in one of the local parks, visit St.Stephen's cathedral and to soak up the evening energy. Our wandering brought on thoughts of food and we looked for a restaurant. Local cuisine is part of the adventure of a new place, and we were not disappointed to find Beisl in der Sigmundsgasse in a quiet side-street close to our hotel. It's a small, traditional family-run restaurant, and the food was excellent (I had Tafelspitz mit Apfelkren, Spinat und Kartoffel with Mary plumping for the vegetarian Geröstete Knödel mit Ei und Salat). We also met the owner's dog, Cosmo... a bundle of canine energy and fun. Such succulent sustenance and canine company was a wonderful close to a tiring day.

Friday was our day of art galleries.

We spent the morning exploring the Leopold Museum, a five minute walk from the coffee shop in which we had breakfast.

It was here that my fascination with the faces of Vienna emerged. Among the extensive catalogue of pieces are a large number of striking portraits or sculptures. I never take photos in galleries, but found myself doing so in reaction to the pieces, how they were placed together in the rooms, and because there was a compelling narrative unfolding as we wandered through the different galleries. It brought the objects to life, gave them context and the morning felt like a wonderful journey of discovery. I also enjoyed the architecture of the gallery: the windows looking out to Vienna framed the city, as if it were itself a work of art on display.

Some pieces engaged both Mary and I more than others.

Spring, by Koloman Moser. Image Source © BY-NC-SA.

The room containing portraits by Koloman Moser made a big impression - not only because of the quality of the art, but because of the connection it made with us both. The "Spring" picture (shown above) of a young man "springing", or full of the "joys of spring", or even in "springtime" (?) reminded us both of Mary's late uncle David. David was well known for innocently disrobing at the earliest possible opportunity - although he didn't explicitly describe himself as a nudist - and the unselfconscious joie de vivre of the painting reminded us of David. It also led to jokes about the amount of Viennese sausage on display, and it being "not the Wurst painting in the gallery".

We spent the afternoon exploring the fascinating archaeological exhibits in the Museum of Ephesus. Ephesus is in modern day Turkey and was the home of Heraclitus, an ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher who resonates deeply with me. I have a long standing interest in archaeology - as a child I was passionate about history and archaeology and visited many archaeological sites, digs and ancient monuments here in the UK. Why? Simply because I was fascinated to learn who these people were, what they were up to, and why they might have been doing what they were doing. Engaging with and exploring the remains from such time-distant cultures helps us to understand ourselves. I have an abiding childhood memory of feeling that these people were so much like ourselves while also being completely different - a rather wonderful opportunity to see the familiar in an unfamiliar manner. The fragments from Ephesus didn't disappoint in this respect.

In the evening we took another improvised stroll around the city as we found our way to the Musikverein - the concert hall that is the home of the world class Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. If ever you've watch the Vienna New Year's Concert you're watching that orchestra performing in that place.

The programme was:

Arnold Schönberg - Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op. 41b (Fassung für Streichorchester, Klavier und Sprecher)
Ludwig van Beethoven - Klavierkonzert Nr. 5 Es-Dur, op. 73
Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphonie Nr. 3 Es-Dur, op. 55, „Eroica“

I love some of the music of Arnold Schoenberg - Verklärte Nacht being especially important to me. Yet the Ode to Napoleon (and its well known hexachord) was a difficult listen because I wasn't in the right frame of mind to engage. It was striking that the performers segued directly into the piano concerto without pause, so the atonal dissonance of the Schoenberg suddenly became a striking Eb major orchestral tutti followed by the well known cascade of virtuosic arpeggios from the pianist. The audience suddenly sat up in a moment of musical recognition and cheeky yet surprising programming of the music.

The interval proved music is a universal language.

As I wandered the corridors to find the wash-room I did a spot of people watching. I don't speak German, so I had no idea what folks were specifically talking about, but the snatches of musical jargon, composers' names, tone of voice and gesticulations from participants gave me the general character of what was being discussed and why: a shared deep love of music. I felt connected and among friends, despite my anonymity and the language barriers.

After the interval the orchestra gave an excellent sprightly performance of Beethoven's Eroica symphony. Here's a live recording of the orchestra, in the Musikverein, performing the same work in a different concert. It'll give you a good impression of the location, mood and music of our evening.

The Eroica is an old friend of mine. While a student at the Royal College of Music I participated in a Schenkerian analysis of the work, which ended up with a I-V-I cadence in Eb major (the so-called Ursatz). This is very much like doing a colour analysis of Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold, only to conclude that it's mostly blue, but with a bit of gold. The important aspect of this process is the journey from detail to big-picture (and back again) and what this reveals about the specific work under examination.

In any case, the Vienna Phil were in fine form and I particularly enjoyed the robust horn playing in the third movement, and the humour in the finale as Beethoven starts a theme and variations with the theme gone missing. The orchestra spends the opening minutes trying to find it, but once found, have a great time playing around with it. Beethoven at his best.

That we were among music lovers became evident during the finale as I became more aware of the others in our box. The couple at the back had clearly fallen out and were whispering angrily to each other. But then a wonderful elderly lady of slight build stopped them in their tracks with the most pointed yet well placed and subtle shush I've ever witnessed in my life. It would have got nods of approval from even the most battle hardened of school librarians. Once noticed I couldn't help but pay closer attention to the elderly lady, for she was lost in the music, gently conducting with one hand and with a beautific look on her face. Yet as the applause started, with the last note echoing away, she was off like a rocket to avoid the mayhem of the crowds trying to retrieve their coats and scarves from the cloakrooms. She was an old hand at this. I hope she gets to hear many more concerts, because she embodied a music lover totally present and invested in the performance. Virtuoso listening. Bravo!

A post concert dinner and night-time stroll capped off a culturally rich and stimulating day.

Saturday was more of the same, yet very different!

We had tickets for a visit to the Kunst Historisches Museum in the morning, and a booking for the Seigmund Freud Museum in the afternoon.

The art history museum is itself an architectural work of art from a certain imperious, confident and ostentatious time in Vienna's history. It's a bling place for Vienna's artistic and historical bling. And it was a lot of fun.

We started in the Egyptian rooms, where we encountered some very expressive sarcophagi based faces, along with a beautiful stylised statuette of a hippo. That it was 4000 years old, yet looked like it could have been made only decades ago, was staggering (to me). In the case next to it was 4500 year old jewellery of exquisite craftsmanship that wouldn't look out of place in a contemporary New-Age or alternative ethnic clothing boutique. Recalling my childhood passion for archaeology, I couldn't help but feel these folks were so like us, yet so different. Who sculpted the hippo with such skill, and on what occasion was the jewellery to be worn (and by whom)..? Yet these thoughts work in reverse: how might folks 4500 years hence view the artefacts surviving from our world? I've written about this before and it helps me retain a sense of perspective about the work I do today. The computers and code I use to build things are really quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Furthermore, our perspectives and ways of paying attention to our computing work (arising from our current culture), are only fleeting, temporary and will appear strange to future generations in much the same way Egyptian art appears to us. We've not been coding for 100 years, so I dare you to wonder what computing will be like in 5000 years. What will be the same? What will be different?

Clearly the museum was working its magic and I was in a thoughtful mood.

The next rooms were full of classical sculpture and I recognised old friends (busts of Aristotle, Alexander, Caesar) and enjoyed more anonymous sculptures and paintings of our ancestors from only 2000 years ago. Highlights included Roman "selfies" painted onto the mummies of Egyptian citizens of the Roman empire, and striking busts of rich-yet-anonymous Roman movers and shakers trying to impress their neighbours. It turns out that keeping up with the Joneses was alive and well in the Roman world.

And, of course, there were examples of civic and ceremonial bronze sculptures of gods, emperors and representations of virtues and vices. Mary was especially taken by one in particular.

Me: "Nice bum?" Mary: "Yes, they must have modelled it on yours, my love."

Moving forward in time as we walked through the museum, we eventually found ourselves in a more traditional art gallery: rooms hung with paintings. It was here that I found some wonderfully odd portraits. Often the subjects were in their glad rags, sporting the latest hair-dos or facial topiary and posing to project their status, wisdom or success. This clearly brought home the folly of such vanity. These folk are long dead and gone, and their names are only remembered because they hired a really great artist to paint their portrait. I imagine future generations will similarly have a good laugh at our collective expense as they explore our pouting selfies, oh so perfect performative lives and projections of success via shallow social media posts. It turns out pretentiousness, posturing and narcissism is a recurring theme in history: it's at least as old as those Egyptian sarcophagi from 5000 years ago.

Some of the portraits were very striking. Arcimboldo's portraits of the four seasons and the four elements were fun to see in person. I also enjoyed the "where's Wally" explorations of Bruegel the Elder's paintings, containing portraits and character studies of people in crowded scenes. The bagpipe player was particularly enjoyable.

After lunch we took a tram to visit a very different museum.

When I first met Mary, she had this Freudian image as a postcard, stuck up on the wall of her room. It certainly captured how I felt at the time.

Freud fled the Nazis and so took most of his stuff to London. If you're ever in London, go see the famous couch. Sadly, it means that his Vienna home, where we visited, is mostly empty of his possessions. You get to see his doctor's bag, some things in the patient's waiting room, and the mirror in his office (in which I sneakily took a selfie - I was reflecting upon myself in Freud's study), but the rooms are mostly bare and contain cases displaying inconsequential objects and commentary that tells the story of Freud's life and work.

Sometimes a place feels significant, and Freud's treatment room where the practice of psychoanalysis was honed is a good example. I can't over-state the influence of Freud's ideas on artists, writers, musicians and many others creating and working at the start of the twentieth century. Freud's client list, all of whom would have visited his treatment room, is a who's-who of significant Viennese figures. As a musician, it's quite something to imagine Gustav Mahler sitting on the couch, exploring his relationship with Alma through conversations with Freud.

Upon leaving, I was amused to notice that the small stickers you're supposed to wear to show you have paid for a ticket in the Freud museum had been used by previous visitors to decorate the street furniture outside.

In the end, the Freud museum was stimulating but didn't speak to me like the art galleries and concert I'd thus far experienced.

The next day, Sunday, was a special day. It was our anniversary.

We spent most of the day walking Vienna, deep in a conversational journey looking back on our life together. Mary and I have never found it hard to talk - from the moment we first met we've been sharing our thoughts - and Sunday was no exception. It was full of all the emotions one would expect as we reflected on our bond: both the light and the shadows, the joy and distress, the easy and the difficult. It was the sort of conversation only long term lovers, who have grown together like two adjacent trees in a forest (roots entwined), can have. I'll leave it at that. Such conversations are special because they are private and unique to the participants. Yet such conversations are also the most important conversations that lovers can have, and that Sunday was one of those occasions for Mary and I to connect in the deepest and broadest manner - surrounding each other in love.

Exhausted by our walking, we found a traditional Viennese coffee shop, the Café Schwarzenberg. I have to admit it was a bit of a tourist trap, with the elderly waiters dressed in formal attire and a Sunday afternoon jazz trio entertaining the patrons. But the place had a (touristy) buzz about it and the food and drink wasn't bad.

Just around the corner from the cafe was our final cultural visit: to the Haus der Musik - a sort of interactive music display and museum.

It was entertaining enough but, like the Freud museum, not a place that really spoke to me. I was interested to explore how they engaged folks in the science of sound and music, but the rest of the museum felt like it contained "holy relics" relating to Vienna's rich musical history: Schubert's glasses, copies of Beethoven's death mask, a Brahms sketch, Mahler's piano, some paintings by Schoenberg and so on.

A self-portrait by Arnold Schoenberg. He was a real barrel of laughs. Source.

The displays were intriguing in a "well, would you look at that" sort of a way, but not something that engaged deeply.

Our final meal was at a Turkish restaurant named after Ephesus. Once again Mary and I talked and talked and talked over excellent food and ended the evening toasting each other with glasses of Baileys Irish Cream (of all things!).

Monday morning led us back to the airport, and then our return to the hell that is Stansted airport, and finally our home in Towcester.

Vienna was a wonderful, rich, deep and stimulating trip for us both. Mary and I certainly had an adventure in terms of exploring a place, exploring culture, exploring food and exploring our life together so far.

We'd welcome suggestions for where to visit in a decade, when we celebrate 40 years of being together..!

Long may such shared adventures last!

My friend Michael

Nicholas H.Tollervey — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 17:45:00 GMT

My dear friend Michael passed away this weekend.

I want to begin by expressing my deepest sorrow and condolences to his family.

Michael and I shared many adventures together, often with our families in tow, and I find consolation by writing these words of celebration and remembrance.

Michael Foord, 1974-2025

We last saw each other only days ago: he came over and we spent a couple of joyful hours deep in conversation over lunch. He was his usual larger-than-life self, full of energy and enthusiasm about his work and animated about where his next steps in life may take him. He was busy saving up for a new house, planning new training for clients, enthusing about his current job, and explaining how rewarding he found the Python coding he was doing at that moment. Later I told a mutual friend how positive and "together" he seemed, that it felt like his ship was pointing in the right direction and that he had a clear sense of the course he wanted to take.

Michael, mostly being Michael. Shine on dude.

It was wonderful to see him like that, because he was also a deep and complex man who, of his own admission, led a life full of challenges, paradoxes and delightful eccentricities.

He met the challenges with honesty and bravery: we spent many hours walking together in the woods at Everdon Stubbs talking through whatever was on his mind. I learned of pain, struggles and shadows as he found the courage to meet, work out and then work through his internal demons.

He was a walking paradox: both completely certain of himself, and yet always questioning everything. He didn't shy away from fiercely independent thinking, often about the oddest of subjects or through the most extraordinarily original (and, dare I say, weird) lines of argument. Yet his exceptional intelligence and capacity for creative thinking meant he was always several steps ahead, laughing as everyone else tried to catch up, only to find he'd already moved onwards by the time we'd figured out what he was on about.

And this originality expressed itself in other, perhaps eccentric, ways. Michael's unique sartorial "approach" was, literally, a thing to behold. Only he could pull off a fedora, eye wateringly loud tie-dye t-shirt, woolly cardigan and leather biker's jacket AT THE SAME TIME (see above). "Colourful" is a word that doesn't even come close. His exploration of perfume and vaping meant you often smelled him coming long before actually seeing him. And that voice! I find it hard to hear speech when there's a lot of ambient noise. Yet Michael's pitch and timbre meant he cut through no matter the volume. I may have been speaking to someone at the bar, but could only hear Michael (on the other side of the pub) expounding the intricacies of Python's mock library (his contributions to the Python programming language are legendary), holding forth in an exposition of the history of Persian perfume, or complaining about the latest Hollywood trash we'd recently seen together at the cinema.

Later, when I found myself in a dark place he was unable to be there for me, for he was also struggling at that moment in his life. Yet - and here's one of the most important and admirable aspects of Michael - he bravely reconnected with honesty, humbleness, and what I can only describe as a trusting and vulnerable loving friendship. This was Michael's deep humanity on display: born of difficulty and distress, overcome through heroic and down-to-earth self-awareness, distilled with compassion.

I'm so glad we reconciled... because some of our best times were the most recent ones: going to see god-awful movies together at the local cinema (Michael always talked [actually, he boomed!] through the films with a hilarious commentary on the action), stimulating, thoughtful and joyously silly conversation shared over a pint or a meal, and then there was our way of greeting each other: a large hug to the words, "you sexy beast".

On one of our many adventures with our kids.

As I write these final words, with tears rolling down my cheeks, I want you to know what a privilege it was to have Michael in my life. His capacity for joy, love and mischief shone forth brightly: he blazed through technical challenges, ignited conversations and dazzled with nimble repartee.

I will miss him terribly.

Rest in peace, you sexy beast.

From a recovering former Python community member

Nicholas H.Tollervey — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:00:00 GMT

I really don't want to write this blog post. So, it's offered in a spirit of polite resignation.

A couple of days ago a friend and current board member of the Python Software Foundation (PSF) reached out asking, "Hey, we want to feature some CSA awardee's pictures in the PSF blog post, do you want to give me a picture of you to use?" CSA is the PSF's Community Service Award, of which I was a recipient millions of years ago.

The short answer is, respectfully, "no, and please don't feature me".

The longer answer, which I'm sharing here so I don't have to keep repeating myself, is more complicated.

It is a privilege that many remarkable folks in the Python community are my friends. They are a diverse and international bunch who bring to life a multitude of experiences, cultures and outlooks. To say they are very different (despite sharing common cause in Python) is an understatement. Their unique and multifarious gifts are something special to cherish and, just like a symphony orchestra, when taken together their whole is vastly greater than the sum of their parts. My world is enlarged by my fulfilling encounters with these folks and I am thankful that I am able to learn, grow and flourish through our interactions together.

Yet, there is a dark side to the Python community.

As I have extensively explored elsewhere in this blog (here, here and here), I no longer participate in the UK Python community. I do not feel safe or welcome, nor do I trust the UKPA's presence in that community. Through conversations with many of my Python friends, I can say with certainty that my experience in the Python community is NOT unique.

A case in point...

In a triggering turn of events, over the past two months I have watched with increasing horror as important parts of the Python community have unravelled into what can only be described as a cesspit of hurt and dysfunction. Factionalism is rife, heels have been dug in and the positions of others have been misrepresented.

It saddens me deeply that the PSF are at the centre of (although not the only participants in) this unfortunate and destructive turn of events.

Stepping up and volunteering in an open source community is hard work. Often things go wrong and complicated situations arise so nuance, self reflection and compassion are key to affirmative growth and collaboration.

Herein is the nub of our sorry situation.

The PSF appears unable to acknowledge both the plurality of dispositions in our community nor that the Python community is often a deeply unpleasant place. I believe the first step to effectively engage with such unpleasantness is to acknowledge that it exists and then, in a deeply uncomfortable and tricky process, explore it together via mutual respect, compassion and honesty. Eventually, perhaps, reconciliation and trust can flourish. Rather than corporate platitudes, shallow musings and tragic exclusions, I hope the PSF take a long hard look at themselves and honestly re-evaluate their presence and the behaviour they embody within the community. The alternative is the disintegration of Python into something akin to the "People's front of Judea" segment of Monty Python's "Life of Brian".

I sincerely hope the PSF find ways to listen, show leadership and engage with compassion. Only then can hurt be healed, collaboration re-established and trust regained. I'm not so much trying to call out the PSF as to call them in ~ into a more enlarged and empathetic approach than has hitherto been apparent to me.

If you doubt my words are true, read those problematic discussions and ask yourself... does the Python community feel healthy and happy at this moment in time?

This is difficult work. We can only do this work TOGETHER. We can only work together if problems are acknowledged, differences respected and mutual trust encouraged. Currently, alas, I see no such hoped-for engagement from the PSF. For no amount of PR gobble-de-gook, high handed pronouncements or a witch hunt will fix such a deeply broken situation.

Until things change to a more compassionate and less performative approach, I'd rather not be involved (thank you very much).

Peace.

Addendum (2024-09-18)

I want to publicly acknowledge and thank my PSF board member friend. They graciously responded, "I am sorry you feel so bad about the situation. I understand your decision, no hard feelings." This embodies the best of the Python community. Bravo.

I want to add that I don't feel bad.

I feel disappointed.

The unravelling in the Python community has caused me to pause and wonder how the actions taken by the PSF represent the sort of community we want to be. My hope has always been for a tolerant appreciation of the subtleties of context, a focus on open minded mutual care and understanding, along with a large dollop of big hearted compassion and a sense of fun.

Alas, recent PSF activity is hard to reconcile with such a hope.

There appears to be confusion between things that should be celebrated (like passion, humour, honesty, differences of culture and diversity of experience) and things that are genuinely problematic (like deliberate bad-faith activity or intentionally diminishing, dehumanizing, harming or harassing others).

The PSF tragically excluded folks acting in good faith. The PSF doubled down on the "welcoming community" narrative at the exclusion of acknowledging things are awry (and that the PSF has some part in this unfortunate situation). Frustratingly to my eyes, the PSF's corporate "PR" diminishes the carefully cultivated good standing and authenticity of the organisation. Remember when Python was fun? Me neither... :-/

Open source is hard work. Everyone involved wants Python to flourish. I have no doubt we all mean well. My disappointment is that the PSF promote ideals in a way that appears to embody their polar opposite. Furthermore, their actions appear to suggest the PSF no longer stands for the community... the PSF stands for the PSF.

I hope my words stimulate a more reflective, humble and heartfelt outlook; otherwise I fear we'll continue to decline into yet more fractious schisms.

Reconciliation is something we can only do together, and it won't be easy.

Peace.

On Paying Attention

Nicholas H.Tollervey — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 12:00:00 GMT

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.

Pay attention! What does the conference brand design express about PyCon?

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.

Silver Clouds, by Andy Warhol. Source © Rachel Cobcroft. Some rights reserved: Creative Commons by-nc-sa.

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...

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. ;-)

The Victorian Python Community (an Allegory)

Nicholas H.Tollervey — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 05:30:00 GMT

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.

A group shot of some of the early Victorian Python community. (Source)

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.

The Pythians produced statistics about female coders (this example is from the 1890s). (Source)

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.

One of many versions of the Victorian Python community's code of conduct.

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.

Instructions from an early Victorian Python education summit.

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:

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.
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.

Senior members of the Royal Society of Python.

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).

Queen Victoria, on hearing of SDL support in Python 3, "we are mildly amused". (Source)

:-)

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.

Heraclitus: The Unity of Opposites

Nicholas H.Tollervey — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 11:30:00 GMT

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.

A pensive Heraclitus, as depicted by Raphael in The School of Athens. (The figure is actually a portrait of Michelangelo, who shared a misanthropic reputation with Heraclitus. To the right, in blue, is Socrates.)

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 twenty 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 sixty, 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").

Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, as painted by Johannes Moreelse in around 1630.

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.

Fragment B103a written on an ancient papyrus (Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 3710, col. ii 43-47).

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. :-)

CERN

Nicholas H.Tollervey — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 13:30:00 GMT

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

Myself (L), William (R) and a young friend (C).

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.

Young astronauts!

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.

With the world's 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.

A Lego model of ATLAS. Check the autographs on the bricks at the front of the model.

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.

The 7000 tonne ATLAS detector.

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!

Will and ATLAS.

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).

Will has questions.

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.

Looking down the service shaft. We took the lift again.

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.

The 14000 tonne CMS detector.

Once again, the scale of the device was overwhelming.

A photo of a poster showing pieces of CMS being lowered into position down the service shaft.

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.

Will and CMS.

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.

Will and I dwarfed by the staggering engineering of CMS.

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.

Get yer fresh protons here! (From the red bottle of 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:

No matter the complexity of the engineering, you'll always find a handwritten note.

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.

The LHC's beam dump switch (basically, the "off" button).

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).

CERN operations know how to hold a good 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.

Will with robots.

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.

Phil, Jo, myself and Will in the robot testing tunnel.

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.

Will demonstrating a robot hand for fine-grained "human" controls.

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.

A robot used for servicing when the LHC is on.

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).