A MISUNDERSTOOD PASSAGE (ISAIAH xli 5–7)

Reading Isaiah Berlin in China1

A year before his death in 1997, Isaiah Berlin was invited by a Chinese scholar named Ouyang Kang to write a summary of his thought for the Chinese reading public. Berlin, as Dr Henry Hardy recalls, much valued this new readership, and therefore wrote his last essay, ‘My Intellectual Path’. It was first published in English in the New York Review of Books, and then included in The Power of Idea...

Misunderstood MTBE.

Your recent article panning methyl-tert-butyl ether use (EHP 102:913) was extremely misleading and focused on unpublished, and therefore not critically reviewed data, which is inconsistent with standards of scientific journals. Given the confusion caused by the article, you should provide more accurate information to your readers on why methyl-tert-butyl ether (MTBE) is in gasoline and how it i...

Room Reflections Misunderstood?

In a domestic living space a 2-channel monopolar and a dipolar loudspeaker system are compared for perceived differences in their reproduction of acoustic events. Both sound surprisingly similar and that is further enhanced by extending dipole behavior to frequencies above 1.4 kHz. The increased bandwidth of reflections is significant for spatial impression. Measured steady-state frequency resp...

Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation

Isaiah 1:2-20 Reconstructed Original Orthography

In the scansion offered below, a reconstruction of the Isa 1:2-20’s original orthography is presented. It is based on the premise that the text derives from the late 8th or early 7th cent. BCE. The orthography mimics that of the Siloam inscription and other inscriptions of that period. Even if by definition the reconstruction is less than certain in a number of instances, it serves to highlight...