Chipping the web – hektos
November 20th, 2006 5:49:35 pm pst by 
Sterling Camden
Zed Shaw’s essay The Master, The Expert, The Programmer (thanks, Assaf) reminds me of the Tao Te Ching: “When you arrive at non-action, nothing will be left undone.” Man, if Zed had a feed, I’d be so subscribed.
Speaking of the Tao Te Ching, here’s a public domain translation by J. H. McDonald that you can use until apotheon gets his version done.
Here’s why I’m NOT an atheist: Dawkins is making a religion out of atheism (via Armchair Anarchist). Even though I’m not religious, I can’t claim to know that there is or is not a God. It might even come down to definitions. I’m an agnostic, and proud of it. But I can still laugh.
Useful (and humorous) Latin quotes (thanks again, AA). If you enjoy this as much as I did, fac ut vivas.
Kathy Sierra has another great post about how companies treat the people who touch their customers. One thing though: “make Java sing”? Would that be as in Gotterdamerung, Act III?
Some random observations from Jeff Atwood. My first experience with a random number generator was on the DG Eclipse in BASIC. I proved how non-random it was by using a plotting algorithm similar to Jeff’s but with character cell coordinates — which quickly formed parallel, diagonal lines. I think I ended up using Knuth’s algorithm. Not so basic.
Scott Adams: “You haven’t achieved equality until you’re a legitimate target for humor.” The Assimilated Negro says “not yet” for the n-word. Scott says women have arrived, but I’m not so sure. For instance, I don’t think women would cotton to the c-word, but you can call a man by any name for his private body parts and generate very little shocked response.
According to the head lemur, it’s Shelley’s birthday. A very happy one, Shelley!
BTW Shelley, you were right about Megite. And Matthew Chen is a really cool guy.
It’s nice to be appreciated. Back at you, Joseph!
Randy’s a B-lister, and Tom’s an A-lister! Funny, they don’t seem at all like assholes.
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I’m actually considering devoting the month of January to completing the Tao Te Ching translation/interpretation.
We need a word in this language for the sort of linguistic interpretation that goes into something like a Tao Te Ching translation. It’s translation of the concepts to another language, not just “interpretation” in the far weaker sense normally used in English. Bah, humbug.
Sounds like you’ll have the needle pegged at “I” on the Idiomatic vs. Literal translation meter. Should be good.
Word for word translations don’t usually work well, except for readers who intimately know the original language anyway. Even French to English loses quite a bit of the original spark. Ancient Greek loses precision. Ancient Hebrew loses an entire world view and gets shoe-horned into a completely foreign one. I imagine early Chinese would be somewhere on that order.
A word-for-word translation of the Tao Te Ching would be about a thousand pages of per-character multiple-translation notes. Sifting through all that is part of what’s taking me so long on it — that, and procrastination, of course.
I’m going to keep it as close to literal as possible without sacrificing the underlying meaning. It should be at least as close to literal as Cleary’s translation, but more like Mitchell’s in terms of its faithfulness to the underlying concepts. Better, I might flatter myself to think, but time will tell.
Well, either I’m a b-lister and an asshole, or a d-lister and a real prick. You pick!
[...] Hey Sterling, tried leaving the following comment on your blog which I’ve slightly modified below but it never showed up (false positive for Akismet, maybe?) and don’t see your trackback link any more: Not sure if you knew this yet about Megite, but if you send Matthew your OPML he’ll make up your own Megite virtual newspaper based on the feeds you’re reading. This is a feature he’s had for quite some time, but I didn’t check out until he shared it with me. [...]
Well good luck, apotheon — I’m looking forward to reading it someday.
Randy: pricks have more fun (at least from where I stand)