The astute observer will notice degradation of the PDA-8899’s plastic casing.  Indeed, the plastic used for the casing (but not yet that used for the screen or keys) has begun to literally dissolve away over time and has become sticky and slimy to the touch.  Provided with fresh batteries, however, the unit continues to function perfectly as far as I can tell.

Here at the link is a short video clip of a sample translation to demonstrate the basic operation when used for Chinese to English translation. One must take a brief tutorial to learn in general terms the manner and stroke order in which to write Chinese characters so that the device can more readily recognize them.

https://ProfAccord.WayOfAges.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/20170729_PA_Trans_Kit_16.mov

One should look up a character in the paper dictionary before translating it using the device shown above to ensure that you’ve chosen the correct character.

• Of all the translations of the Tao Te Ching you will come across, this one is surely the best. You can finally understand the context and meaning of Lao Tzu’s wisdom.
• Sieving’s insightful explanations, asides and “interpolations” bring the work back to life after a century of dusty and opaque translations. You can hear and feel the presence of the old master again in every chapter and on every page.
• Profound Accordance is highly recommended for all cultural time travelers who seek the wisdom of the ancient masters.

My unofficial credentials for the first two years or so that I spent translating Lao Tzu’s ageless classic were the more than twenty years of immersion in his philosophy that led up to that effort and the nagging questions arising about the accuracy of this or that translation and of how to reconcile the various passages and translations with one another.  Knowing that my expertise would have developed during my first pass over the source materials, I saw fit to revisit them from the beginning in a second pass, for which my credentials now included the first pass.  That 3-year effort was mostly concluded more than 16 years before the 3rd and probably final edition of Profound Accordance was finally published alongside the 3rd edition of its companion volume and raison d’être, The Way of Ages.  Here’s the chronology:

• 1995: Wrote the first draft of The Way of Ages in Thousand Oaks, a quiet suburb of Los Angeles, in the summer of 1995 between jobs.
• 1995-1997: Realized that I would need to produce my own translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching for the reasons described therein.
• 1997-2000: Shifted all of my spare time onto the translation project using the tools described as follows and depicted in a subsequent post.
  • a Taiwanese-made digitizer device that inputs Chinese characters and idioms using a stylus and displays a number of alternative English translations.
    • Made a personal visit to the Los Angeles offices of the manufacturer to familiarize with its use for my intended purpose.
    • This device added a great deal of range to my reference space beyond that afforded by static paper dictionaries from which many of the older senses of a given definition have most likely been edited out over time.
  • a more traditional paper Chinese to English dictionary cited in Profound Accordance.
  • a number of pre-existing translations to cross-reference, also cited in Profound Accordance.
• During this time for obvious reasons, I also approached two native Chinese speakers on separate occasions and showed them a few of the more difficult passages.  In both cases, they said that the ancient writing style used by Lao Tzu is no longer used in China.  Since the characters themselves clearly hadn’t changed, they were referring instead to the metaphorical and often intentionally obtuse manner of expression found in the pages of the Tao Te Ching.
• Thus while the elemental aspects of translating Lao Tzu are more or less mechanical, achieving a clear and true translation is more a problem of interpretation than of rote translation.  This depends in turn on an appreciation of Lao’s teachings as a whole – a common conceptual framework with which each individual passage remains consistent when properly translated.  The proper translation is then achieved through an iterative process until such a broader consistency emerges.
• While idioms can play a part in such a process, their literal translations must also be considered.  If the literal translation – considered literally, as possible satire and metaphorically – fits the teachings as a whole better than the traditional idiomatic interpretation then the idiomatic interpretation must be discarded as most probably a later development of the Chinese language.
• 2000-2016: As eBook technology emerged – at a painfully glacial pace I might add – and knowing that The Way of Ages in particular was far better suited to hypertext than to paper presentation because of its numerous cross-references – I transformed it from the latter to the former.
  • It seemed unfortunate during this period that it was taking so terribly long for eBook technology to support what I considered my quite modest use of Microsoft Word features, but the longer it took, the more time I had to develop and polish The Way of Ages.
  • Despite my Acrobat bug reports and persistent followups, the promise of DRM-protected PDF support came and went.  I must say that Adobe really lost track of its surfboard as the eBook wave approached, crested and crashed over its head.  It was a missed opportunity of epic proportions.  I ranted and raved on my eBook technology blog but to no avail.  Most of the material on that blog thus faded into obsolescence, so I took it down.
  • At some point circa 2013-2016, it appeared as though the ePub standard had begun to fully support my eBooks but when tested on the latest devices, they failed to render properly.
  • Finally with the advent of the Kindle Fire and the latest Kindle mobile apps, a more complete support became fully evident, at which point I moved steadily to full and final publication of my two eBooks, the content of which by 2016 were both in their 3rd editions.

Because I did not want to make material edits to my Tao Te Ching translation in Profound Accordance outside of the deep and broad perspective afforded by that years-long immersion in the source materials circa 1997-2000, it remained almost entirely unchanged during that 16 year period as I developed and polished The Way of Ages.

Now that it’s finished and now that you the reader have a better perspective on what went into its creation, how do you feel about the translation?  How might it be helping you on your journey?

My own main takeaway as of this writing is that it revealed to me a method to the madness of life that I could verify through observation of real-world events and through protracted reflection on their long-term aftereffects against the canvas of Lao’s treatise.  There really are immutable laws of actions and their retributions, I had discovered.  I really could proceed with confidence in nature’s dispassionate devotion to these laws to incrementally build a successful life – confident not only in my path forward but in the future success of that path for as long as it maintains its basis in those laws.  The courage to build, in 4 words or less.

How about you?

• Upload <your-image> to wp-content/themes/pixel/images/
• Add the following SINGLE line to wp-content/themes/pixel/header.php:
  • <link rel=”Shortcut Icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>
  • /images/<your-image>” type=”image/x-icon” />
• Reload your blog page and behold the new URL icon! Thing of beauty.

HOW TO SET AND LINK THE BLOG TITLE ICON

• Find the logo div in wp-content/themes/pixel/header.php.
• Add the line:
  • <a href=”http://<your-domain>/<your-blog>/”><img src=”http://<your-domain>/<your-blog>/wp-content/themes/pixel/images/<your-image>” alt=”” height=”47px” width=”32px” align=”left” style=”padding-right:10px;” /></a>

HOW TO STYLE THE BLOG TITLE FONT

• Find the logo div in wp-content/themes/pixel/header.php.
• Edit the line containing bloginfo(‘name’).
• To the link section containing href, append the following element and adjust the parameters to fit your heading and its adjacent elements:
  • style=”font-family: monotype corsiva; font-size: 160%”><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>
  • e.g. <h1><a href=”<home-page>” <see-above>></a></h1>
• and for the bloginfo(‘description’) element:
  • <span><h2><div style=”padding-left:14px;”><?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?></div></h2></span>
• Reload your blog page and behold the new title font! Thing of beauty.

HOW TO DISPLAY YOUR PROFILE PICTURE

• None of the surgical techniques I’ve used on other themes worked on the Pixel theme.
• Simply insert and format your profile picture into your About page or post (or whatever you entitle it) in the conventional manner using the associated Edit link.
• Before previewing the result or sending it as an update, edit the href element to point to your chosen link destination for the image.
• Preview and Update the page or post.
  

HOW TO FIX THE PROFILE-PIC PLUGIN

• To get the Profile Pic plugin to attach your gravatar to your posts in the Pixel theme, uncomment the apply_filters call in /wp-content/plugins/profile-pic/profile-pic.php.
• This method of activating the Profile Pic plugin produces a PHP error message near the bottom of the page first presented to users after login.
• To clear this PHP error message, comment out the following code further down in profile-pic.php:
• // echo “<pre>datafields:” . print_r($profilepic_datafields, true) . “\r\r stored options:” . print_r($profilepic_displayoptions, true) . “</pre>”;
  // prep checkbox display
  // foreach ($datafields as $fieldname => $fieldid) {
  //      if ($profilepic_displayoptions[$fieldid] == 1) { $checked = ” CHECKED “; } else { $checked = ”; }
  //      $checkbox_string .= “<label><input type=’checkbox’ name=’profilepic_displayoptions[]’ value='”.$fieldid.”‘”.$checked.”/> “.$fieldname.”  </label><br />”;
  // }
• Upload the modified PHP file to your site.
  

HOW TO CONTROL THE SIDEBAR CONTENT

• Download and edit:
  • <your-site>/<your-blog>/wp-content/themes/pixel/sidebar.php
• Comment out or otherwise edit the various elements to taste.
• Re-upload the file to its rightful place in your blog code.

HOW TO CONTROL YOUR FONT SIZES
(without hacking your theme)

• Select the Customize toolbar button or got to Site Admin > Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS.
• Start off the text entry field with a hard html base font size specification, e.g.

html {
    font-size: 10px;
}

• Frisk your style.css file under wp-content/themes/pixel for the CSS elements it actually uses.
• Search on font-size and go through this file systematically.
• Wherever you find a CSS definition containing a font-size specification, copy and append the first and last lines of the definition to the contents of the Additional CSS text entry field.
• Between the brackets of the new CSS style definition, add font-size: X.Yrem; with a best first guess as to the right font size (X.Y) for that CSS element and watch for changes in the previewer panel.
• This has the effect of overriding (rather than hacking) the default font definitions in style.css. While style.css may be updated in a future release of your theme (thus overwriting any changes), the overrides you specify under Additional CSS will survive new releases because they are saved in your content database.  This means that the work you put in now will carry forward, though you can always come back and make adjustments as needed.
• By using rems as the unit, you’re defining the remaining font sizes as offsets from the hard base font size you specified above in your initial html definition.
• If nothing changes on any of your site pages when you adjust the font size in a particular CSS style definition, consider omitting that entry from your Additional CSS list for now.  The definition may not (yet) be used on your site, and you don’t want to guess wrong now on the font size only to introduce unintended consequences when at some point in the future you do start using it without immediately knowing it.
• Iteratively adjust your base and relative font sizes while previewing the result in the Additional CSS previewer panel until you home in on the best combination of font size overrides for your site.

A software engineer who missed his calling as an archaeologist finds a way to start over. Sifting ancient philosophy for common themes of enduring relevance since 1995, The Way of Ages and Profound Accordance break new ground in the characterization and interpretation of abstract antiquities.

Fast forward to October 2021: Now it’s Plato’s turn. Atlantis Revisited: Interception is a scientific analysis of Plato’s Atlantis. Bypassing Hollywood, this feature-length video examines the Atlantis myth from a fresh perspective: straight from the source to the science.