etymological theorizing is a craft shrouded in mystery and obscure data sources. I wonder whether applying more statistics and linked data will move it towards a science. Human fascination with words is not about to disappear, no matter how fragile the threads of reasoning that reconstruct purported facts.

A couple of years ago, I watched Robert Lustig's viral video about sugar being toxic -- it is not just empty calories but it is positively harmful, like too much alcohol causing liver and brain problems, and for sugar causing the epidemic of diabetes and obesity since commercial food production changed with much cheaper sugar about thirty years ago (including High Fructose Corn Syrup). His video had a number of metabolic chemical reaction pathways, which he sort of glossed over, given the popular audience. The slides in the video were rather fuzzy, so I never did figure out the details of the mechanism for toxicity he was presenting. It seems that this article presents some clearer diagrams, comparing glucose, fructose (the real culprit) and ethanol.

Resilience: a ‘five capital’ — 5 C — metric. The loose use of the word "reslience" in the aftermath of natural disasters has long troubled me. I remember media people and volunteers dropping in after the Haiti earthquake, and gushing that the people they have met are so resilient in the face of adversity. 5 1/2 years later, there doesn't seem to be anything resilient about Haiti's response to the destruction, even with massive financial and material aid poured in from overseas. Closer to home, I remember thinking in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan that Leyte and Samar would be a lot more resilient than Haiti. This is definitely true, but the recovery is patchy.
     This article gives a glimpse at a more scientific approach. "Physical capital includes the indirect products of economic activity, such as infrastructure; financial capital assesses financial protection and diversity of income sources; human capital pertains to the education, skills and health of people; social capital accounts for social relationships, leadership and governance structure; and natural capital includes land productivity, water and biological resources and actions to sustain them."

Is there a number about the relative impact of the expansion of warming oceans vs. melting ice sheets and glaciers? And if the arctic sea ice melts completely in the summer, wouldn't this allow a large area of ocean to go significantly above the melting point of ice for the first time? What impact would that have? The NASA estimate says 1 meter is locked in based on warming that has already happened, is there a number for the additional warming of a business as usual scenario

Up to now, whenever I read something about sea level rise, there would always be a comment that substantial rises would take thousands of years, and not to expect very much this century. I guess somebody has discovered a mechanism that could make it happen quickly. I wonder where to look for an eventual IPCC statement about the likelihood of this scenario.

The Cobuild dictionary can be freely accessed on line. I don't know if it is really for learners, other less ambitious dictionaries may be more user friendly to the typical non-native speaker. But Cobuild is systematic and comprehensive, in ways that are valuable to teachers and even researchers. For example, this lookup of "run" features 31 verb senses, 11 noun senses and 11 phrase entries. The definitions are carefully formulated in a style that distinguishes each sense, and there are short samples from their corpus that are good exemplars of each sense.

This starts to summarize his 41 videos on YouTube

I saw crows like these perform in a BBC documentary on animal minds.

"He has...the habit of speaking in complete paragraphs, as though he's lecturing a psychology class instead of having a conversation." This is from a Mother Jones article, "What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?" But I don't want to comment on the content of that article, but on what this small observation can tell us about discourse and dialog. The discourse structure of text paragraphs (written or spoken) is nothing like that of natural dialog. In my view, this stems from the utterance situation of the author, who needs to plan for meaning discovery with a reader (of some targeted ideal type), knowing that the shared context with the reader will not be constrained to any particular physical situation but only constrained by the expressions on the page or screen. In this departure from the evolutionary context of language as turn-taking interaction, an author needs to plan for a "half-silent dialog" where they trust the reader to make the cognitive steps of construing what each sentence adds to (this reader's version of) the shared information state (SIS) constructed from the text. (The author also scaffolds the text with clues to the reader that they are on the right track.) The text is successful in its speech acts if the reader's SIS is substantially similar to the author's targeted SIS. Now if that account can be made mathematically precise, we could train computers to become competent readers and maybe even writers. It clearly needs a large component of pragmatics (see Korta and Perry's Critical Pragmatics, or even their SEP article "Pragmatics") to get at the author's meaning intentions (a Gricean word). Getting to certain semantic levels of content are just steps along the cognitive path to constructing an "intended" SIS. I do think a precise account of semantics and content is needed, and I think that will involve "construal" of word senses and their contribution to a dynamically evolving SIS. That in turn requires constructing "enriched content" that incorporates additional information from lexical knowledge, and be able to use the enriched content to resolve lexical and constructional ambiguities. With construal of enriched content from multiple alternatives, it is then possible to focus (in consciousness-accessible working memory) on a more "austere" content that corresponds more directly with the tracked phonological forms of the utterance. This austere content is closer to what philosophers have studied as "what is said".

Last year, Obama gave a speech at the UN where he called for major reforms in its organization. The context was combating terrorism like ISIL, but a good place to start reform would be WHO. It needs to be better resourced and more ambitious about dealing with problems like Ebola and MERS, especially when national governments are weak. The world could still have a devastating flu pandemic like 1918, when some 50 million people died, perhaps as many as 100 million.