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A Brief History of Laelaps

It seems that I'm down with the memes again, for as I was searching for some Thoughts in a Haystack I managed to once again become infected. Indeed, John has asked me to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to throwing around words like "pseudoextinction" in reference to my blog, and hence here's a fitting meme about the "evolution" of Laelaps; In order to understand from whence Laelaps sprang, we need to travel backwards through the mists of time to the tumultuous year 2006. On October 18th, 2006 I wrote my first "real" science-oriented blog post about the lack of understanding about…

How many bullets did the commando shoot?

Somewhere on the internet, I came across this Cracked.com article on movie myths about guns. The article wasn't too bad, but I really liked this video they included from Arnold's movie Commando. The myth for this particular clip was that guns never run out of ammo in the movies. Right away, I thought: I wonder how many bullets he shot? BRING IT ON. First, I am going to find the fire rate of Arnold's weapon. Oh, I know I could look it up on Wikipedia or something - but I am not going to do that. I am going to determine the fire rate from the clip. After capturing an audio segment where…

MythBusters - velocity is relative

So, I complained about MythBuster's explanation of relative velocity. How would I explain this? I would start by saying that velocity is relative. Here is the definition for velocity: I put the "avg" in there because it is more true. If the acceleration is zero, I could drop this. For the rest of this post, I am going to assume zero acceleration. Ok. But what is the r vector? It is simply a vector from the origin to the object. Here is a picture. Simple, right? And so the velocity tells how this vector r changes. But wait. Who says that I used the correct origin? How do you…

Scale Model of the Solar System

The solar system is difficult to show correctly. Why? It is difficult because the size of things are vastly different. Let me use units common in solar-system astronomy, the Astronomical Unit (or AU). One AU is the distance from the Sun to the Earth. If I want to look at all the planets, I would need to go out to about 30 AU (to Neptune - remember that Pluto is not a planet). That is not a problem but then if I want to look at the size of even the Sun, it is just 0.001 AU across. And the Earth is even smaller, at 0.0001 AU. So that is the problem. The distance from the Sun to Neptune…

McDonald's and Mere Exposure

Little kids love McDonald's: Hamburgers, french fries, chicken nuggets, and even milk and carrots all taste better to children if they think they came from McDonald's, a small study suggests. In taste tests with 63 children ages 3 to 5, there was only a slight preference for the McDonald's-branded hamburger over one wrapped in plain paper, not enough to be statistically significant. But for all the other foods, the McDonald's brand made all the difference. Almost 77 percent, for example, thought that McDonald's french fries served in a McDonald's bag tasted better, compared with 13 percent…

Visiting Iraq

There's been a bit of controversy over John McCain's recent remarks suggesting that Baghdad was much safer than conventional media descriptions suggest. "There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods," McCain said, before castigating Baghdad reporters for not "getting out more". McCain was part of a Congressional delegation visiting Iraq. At this point, I think it's pretty clear that these visits are rather useless. They aren't serious fact-finding missions. Instead, they are little more than dangerous photo-ops. Congressmen don't go to Iraq to…

David Sedaris and Imaginary Memories

In a recent issue of The New Republic, Alex Heard takes David Sedaris to task for blurring the line between memoir and novel, fiction and non-fiction, truth and lies: I do think Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using the nonfiction label. And after spending several weeks fact-checking four of his books--Barrel Fever (1994), Naked (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004)--I'd recommend that he issue Oprah Moment apologies to a few people, including all the unclothed frolickers at the Empire Haven nudist camp in the summer of 1996;…

Pets on Prozac and Animal Rights

I'm curious how animal rights activists feel about this: They are the new "Prozac Nation": cats, dogs, birds, horses and an assortment of zoo animals whose behavior has been changed, whose anxieties and fears have been quelled and whose owners' furniture has been spared by the use of antidepressants. Over the last decade, Prozac, Buspar, Amitriptyline, Clomicalm -- clomipromine that is marketed expressly for dogs -- and other drugs have been used to treat inappropriate, destructive and self-injuring behavior in animals. It's not a big nation yet. But "over the past five years, use has gone…

Laughter and Grief

A few weeks ago, I got an email wondering why people sometimes "break into uncontrollable laughter or smiling when faced with terrible situations, like death or illness." Where does this perverse emotional reaction come from? Why do we smile at the most inappropriate times? I looked into the peer-reviewed literature and didn't find much. While there have been some interesting fMRI studies of our comedic circuits, I don't think that references to the left posterior temporal gyrus explain very much.* Our anatomy is always interesting, but localizing the laughter reflex won't tell us why we…

Social Networks

I've got a new essay on social networks and the research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in the latest issue of Wired: There's something strange about watching life unfold as a social network. It's easy to forget that every link is a human relationship and every circle a waistline. The messy melodrama of life--all the failed diets and fading friendships--becomes a sterile cartoon. But that's exactly the point. All that drama obscures a profound truth about human society. By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made a…

Team Loyalty

Matthew Yglesias advocates for the free movement of sports franchises, so that they can hop from city to city with ease and thus follow the movement of population: Right now, the New York City Designated media area contains 6.5 percent of households. LA has 5 percent. Chicago has 3 percent. Philadelphia has 2.6 percent. Dallas, San Francisco, Boston, and Atlanta all have about 2.1 percent. And things taper off from there. But considering that New York City has a media market three times the size of large cities like Dallas and Atlanta (and especially considering that it's nearby to the…

Schrock explains the meaning of Christmas in schools

In the Wichita Eagle, we get Santa Claus and the Establishment Clause: This time of year, every public school administrator has to know a simple fragment of Constitutional law. It has many implications in the school setting during the holiday season. "Jingle Bells" is OK. Christmas hymns with denominational themes are not. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." is part of the First Amendment. This segment is called the "Establishment Clause" because it prevents the government and all of its federal, state and local…

Amy Bishop and lactose intolerance

It just gets weirder. Ipswich neighbors recall confrontations with Amy Bishop: Bishop once stopped a local ice cream truck from coming into their neighborhood. According to WBZ-1030 radio, she said it because her own kids were lactose intolerant, and she didn't think it was fair that her kids couldn't have ice cream. "That's who it was!" Lafoe said. "When we were younger the ice cream truck just stopped coming around. That's strange." Bishop & her husband both seem to have a history of self-centered anti-social behavior. There seems a precedent of many actions aimed at optimizing their…

Sometimes my half-baked planning works out.

Because I was in Sweden for my younger offspring's birthday, and because my older offspring's birthday is nowhere near the school year, we gave them a joint un-birthday party today. Each was allowed to invite eight friends. Of these, a total of five attended (plus a younger sib), but there was some suspense about what the actual turnout would be due to low RSVP rates. Summer vacation can be like that. Food is pretty straightforward for the age-range involved (4 to 7): raw veggies and dip, chips and salsa, Smart Dogs in blankets. Younger offspring and I squeezed a bunch of lemons from our…

Saving Wild Salmon

I was raised on Costco farmed salmon, those mealy slabs of pinkish fish protein. My first bite of wild salmon was a revelation. It was a different species of taste, so rich and oily and strong. You could practically taste the swim upstream. So I was interested in this WSJ article on the billions of conservation dollars that have been wasted on wild salmon in the Northwest. The failed program offers a lesson in the difficulty of tampering with the logic of nature, even when our intentions are noble: For more than a quarter of a century, a federal agency in the Pacific Northwest has been…

Chemistry sets and homeland security.

Y'all know that I'm an advocate of kids being able to get their science on. It's great when they can do this is school, under the guidance of knowledgable and enthusiastic teachers. But sometimes the teachers are ... not so knowledgable, or not so enthusiastic. Even when they are both, sometimes there are not enough school hours a week for kids to get the science they crave -- especially the hands-on exploration. According to Boing Boing, certain avenues of extra-curricular science exploration have just gotten harder to pursue. As posted today on Boing Boing: US bans sale of chemicals to…

Voodoo fMRI

I just wanted to draw attention to two fantastic blog posts that describe a new paper by Edward Vul, a grad student at MIT, and colleagues at UCSD. The first post comes from Vaughan over at MindHacks: I've just come across a bombshell of a paper that looked at numerous headline studies on the cognitive neuroscience of social interaction and found that many contained statistically impossible or spurious correlations between behaviour and brain activity. Social cognitive neuroscience is a hot new area and many of the headline studies use fMRI brain imaging to look at how activity in the brain…

Skeptical Genetics

How much can we learn about disease from studying genetics? A few months ago, Nature published an interesting article on the possible impossibility of ever finding the faulty genes behind many mental illnesses. Today, Nicholas Wade in the Times had an interesting article on the skeptical geneticist David Goldstein: Goldstein says the effort to nail down the genetics of most common diseases is not working. "There is absolutely no question," he said, "that for the whole hope of personalized medicine, the news has been just about as bleak as it could be." Of the HapMap and other techniques…

Rationality, Science, Rorty

Razib makes an excellent and obvious point: I do not believe scientists are particularly rational people as compared to the normal human. Because the average scientist has a higher IQ than the average artist I am willing to grant marginally higher rationality to an average scientist. Their ability to decompose and abstract any given conceptual system is greater. That being said, the contrast between the disciplines of art and science are far greater than those of individual artists and scientists. Why? Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It…

The Limits of fMRI

My latest article for the Boston Globe Ideas section looks at some recent criticisms of fMRI, at least when it's misused: The brain scan image - a silhouette of the skull, highlighted with bright splotches of primary color - has also become a staple of popular culture, a symbol of how scientific advances are changing the way we think about ourselves. For the first time in human history, the black box of the mind has been flung wide open, allowing researchers to search for the cortical source for every flickering thought. The expensive scanners can even decode the hidden urges of the…

A History of Objectivity

I've been remiss in not linking to Benjamin Cohen's incredibly interesting series of posts on scientific objectivity. The mere fact that objectivity *has* a history is revealing. It's more typical that the timeless, ahuman connotation of "objectivity" renders it the precise sort of thing that does not change throughout history. Subjectivity certainly does, since people change. But objectivity would seem to be ahistorical. It is not. In their 1992 article, by looking across scientific atlases and forms of visual representation across the nineteenth century and to the mid-twentieth, they…

The Community of Religion

PZ attacks religious beliefs with his usual angry panache: Religion is a bad thing. It encourages people to believe in things that are not true. It really is as simple as that; we'd be better off if people valued truth over comfortable delusions. Unlike most Americans, I don't believe in angels, the devil or the possibility of eternal salvation. I think Armageddon has more to do with nuclear proliferation than the Book of Revelations. But attacking the ideas of religion fails to address the real value of religion. People don't go to church because they want to read the same old fantastical…

Poorer people in Vermont are Republican?

Dept. of Enduring Myths: I've just come back from a weekend in Vermont -- and here's how I understand it: Modestly off people -- "real Vermonters," as some people say -- are voting for McCain and Palin. Comfortably off people, such as those who own ski chalets, are voting for Obama and Biden. And the following has been frequently noted about the city of my residence, New York: The rich are voting Democratic. And those who work for them -- driving cars, cleaning rooms, and so on -- are voting Republican. Yet, when I was growing up, the Republican party was always called the party of the rich,…

Are blacks exceptionally homophobic?

Ta-Nehisi Coates asks: ...I don't want to scapegoat my brown bothers--my sense is that ethnicity is a really bad filter here--for blacks, whites and Latinos. For instance, is homophobia tied to wealth? Is it tied to education? Is it tied to region? What is the best predictor of homophobia? Is it really race? Or is it something like poverty or even church attendance? The charmingly named "HOMOSEX" variable in the GSS has large sample sizes, so I decided to look into the various relationships. The question is: "What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex?" The responses are…

On categories

Andrew Sullivan responded to my post, Science is rational; scientists are not: ...One of the greatest errors of modernity is simply conflating the truths of one world of experience with the truths of another. I guess Michael Oakeshott instilled in me the sense that this confusion is the central intellectual problem of modernity. It is indeed at the root of a great deal of our difficulties. It is a mistake to apply the truths of science to that of history or aesthetics or politics. They are simply different categories of understanding the world. And the most profound mistake in human thought…

More on career makeovers and their risks

A couple of follow-up items to that last "how did I get here" post: At Confessions of a Science Librarian, John Dupuis shares the story of his transformation from software developer to science librarian. I love stories like this, and I kind of wish more of them had been around when I was trying to figure out what to be when I grew up. In the comments, to my earlier post, Abi writes: Given the oft-repeated assertion that philosophy and the job market occupy parallel universes, did you have any worries at all when you started out (or, while doing your second Ph.D.)? Did I have any worries?…

Redoubt erupts (? ... !)

Date: February 07, 2009 Image Creator: Bleick, Heather Image courtesy of AVO/USGS. So much for my oh-so-eloquent eulogy for early 2009 activity at Redoubt. AVO reports that it appears that the volcano has potentially erupted - or at least released a lot of steam and (possibly) ash. Seismic activity at Redoubt has increased since about 13:00 AKDT and is continuing. An AVO observation flight reported that a steam and ash plume rose as high as 15,000 ft above sea level and produced minor ash fall on the upper south flank of Redoubt. Last reports are that the plume is now mainly steam. Doesn't…

Early warning for volcanic eruptions

Since the "surprise" eruption of Chaiten in southern Chile (still erupting away), I'm sure there has been a lot of talk about better monitoring and predictions for volcanic eruptions. Now, we don't know the full extent of the facts, but usually an eruption of the magnitude of Chaiten (VEI 6, i.e., BIG) don't just go off out of the blue. There are precursors, such as seismicity under the volcano, uplift of the land over the volcano (think of the bulge of Mt. Saint Helens prior to the 1980 eruption), increasing emissions of volcanic gases such as carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide, increase in…

Firing bad teachers doesn't create good teachers

Sara Mead writes at Ed Week about teacher legislation, especially new policies allowing "ineffective" teachers to be canned, or at least to be laid off first: But what about teachers who are rated "Needs Improvement" [the second lowest category] --but never actually improve? Under many of these laws, a teacher could remain in the "needs improvement" category for his or her entire career. Is this a good policy? Or should these teachers be given some window of time in which to improve or find something else to do? I'm not sure, but it's a question worth asking, particularly as we gain more…

Simple answer to stupid questions: Cothran and Beckwith edition

Martin Cothran, friend to bigotry of all kinds, wonders "Has the Obama admininstration [sic] endorsed Big Love?" No. He is reacting to the Obama administration's decision not to defend section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, and to Francis Beckwith's erroneous comments on that decision. Before delving into the argument, a few basic facts. DOMA was passed in 1996, and polygamy was illegal without section 3 of DOMA. Striking down DOMA's section 3 will not change the status of polygamy laws, because marriage laws have generally been a state matter, not a federal matter, and because anti-…

On denying reality

I've had my disagreements with Martin Cothran over the years. He's a bigoted man, proud of teaching logic at a private school, yet utterly dependent on logical fallacies in his actual argumentation. He wants creationism taught in public schools. He dislikes gay people and anyone else who challenges his notions of how sex and gender should work. He enjoys quoting Holocaust-denying racists like Pat Buchanan and cross-burning racists like Charles Murray. He celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday by listing the blog posts from 2009 he's most proud of. Sometimes he's basically…

Swine flu keeps killing, but HHS Secretary is delayed by abortion opponents

Steve Benen observes that the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees our response to pandemics like swine flu, is currently without its Secretary. Governor Kathleen Sebelius, whose own state had some of the first cases of swine flu in the US, is waiting for Senate confirmation. The delay? Anti-abortion activists couldn't kill her nomination, but extracted the delay as a compromise. It doesn't actually get them anything tangible, but it makes them feel tough. Benen writes: I'm not arguing the U.S. response to the swine-flu problem is necessarily less effective because…

Why ligers are huge

Believe it or not, tigers are not the largest big cat. Ligers are (you might remember ligers from Napoleon Dynamite). Why? It has to do with the weirdness that occurs when you hybridize across two lineages which have been distinctive for millions of years, but not so long so as not to be able to produce viable offspring (in fact, many ligers are fertile as well). Here's the explanation: Imprinted genes are under greater selective pressure than normal genes. This is because only one copy is active at a time. Any variations in that copy will be expressed. There is no "back-up copy" to mask its…

A genetic test to tell you what "population" you are?

One of the major reasons that so much human genetic work is fixated on ascertaining the nature of population substructure is that different populations may respond differently to particular drugs. Of course population identification is only a rough proxy, but in many cases it is a good one. Years ago, Neil Risch reported the utility of genetic markers in differentiating individuals into distinct groups, and the high fidelity of these identifications with self-report. But this sort of generalization is contingent on particular conditions. In Brazil centuries of admixture have resulted in a…

Understanding Sex Differences in Humans: What do we learn from nature?

Nature is a potential source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane decisions such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast. When it comes to airplanes, you'd better be a servant to the rules of nature or the airplane will go splat. When it comes to breakfast, it has been shown that knowing about our evolutionary history can at times be a more efficacious guide to good nutrition than the research employed by the FDA, but you can live without this approach. Nature works when it comes to behavior too, but there are consequences. You probably…

Hindsight and Foresight in Iraq

Much has been written about the incompetence with which the Bush administration has pursued the war and post-war occupation in Iraq. I'd like to add to our understanding of that situation by looking, in hindsight, at what was predicted with foresight before the war. Many of the people who were deeply involved in the situation have been coming out lately and admitting that the administration was caught completely off guard by the strength of the guerilla insurgency that we're facing in Iraq. The latest to do so was Jay Garner, the man Bush picked to oversee the Iraqi occupation before Paul…

If you hand me some stupid, yes, in fact I am going to hit you over the head with it. Because you absolutely deserve it.

Oh, goody! Vox Day wants to play. You remember Vox "Hey, it worked for Hitler" Day," don't you? It's been a long time. In fact, I had to do a search to find the last time I had a run-in with him, and it appears that it's been about a year since I last noted him mindlessly parroting antivaccinationist myths and spouting his usual misogyny. Alas, Vox has been a regular irritant to this blog since very early on, when he didn't like my likening his views towards women to the Taliban for his arguing that women shouldn't be allowed to vote because they are "fascists at heart." Since then, every so…

Rethinking cancer screening?

Here we go again. I see that the kerfuffle over screening for cancer has erupted again to the point where it's found its way out of the rarified air of specialty journals to general medical journals and hence into the mainstream press. This is something that seems to pop up every so often, much to the consternation of lay people and primary care doctors alike, often trumpeted with breathless headlines along the lines of "What if everything you knew about screening was wrong? It isn't, but some of it may be. The problem is the shaking out process. I'll try to explain. Over the last couple of…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: I need this like I need a hole in the head

This week sucked. OK, it was the last two or three days that sucked, but they were bad enough to ruin the whole week. The only reason my blogging didn't reflect this is because most of the posts over the last couple of days were actually written earlier this week, and the true magnitude of this week's suckitude didn't hit me until yesterday. Suffice it to say that my lab minions have caused me considerable aggravation and angst this week by doing something really, really dumb, a problem whose effect was amplified by the response of a colleague. (That's all I'm going to say about it.) To top…

An interesting offer from ASPEX

I had my doubts about this; I got an offer from ASPEX corporation to let people get free scanning electron micrographs of just about anything. They make a desktop SEM, and all you have to do is fill out a form and mail it in with your sample of a dead bug or a microchip or bacon, and presto, within a few weeks they'll have it scanned in and the image available on their website. I asked them if they knew how many readers I have, and they said no problem, they can handle it. Huh. Well, you heard them. Scavenge your trash cans, dig into your local sources of vermin and oddments, and send them in…

Intelligent Design Creationists: Still Liars

And, thankfully, the NY Times' Cornelia Dean calls the intelligent design creationists out on it: There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth. And while individual scientists may embrace religious faith, the scientific enterprise looks to nature to answer questions about nature. As scientists at Iowa State University put it last year, supernatural explanations are "not within the scope or abilities of science." It's about time this is stated more forthrightly. One section of the article piqued my…

Crawling pigments

Here's another of Casey Dunn's Creature Casts, this time on shifting color spots in marine snails. CreatureCast - Flamingo Tongue Snails from Casey Dunn on Vimeo. Pigment cells are always very, very cool. I've been intrigued by them for a long time — they show up in my time-lapse recordings of developing zebrafish and are always active. Here's a quick one, a few hours of time in a roughly 24 hour old zebrafish embryo, compressed to about 30 seconds. You can see one corner of the dark eye at the bottom left of the image, and that oval structure near the middle with two spots in it is the…

What the Hell Does This Have to Do with S-CHIP?

By way of Shakes, this display made its way into the House debate on S-CHIP: What does abortion have to do with healthcare for children? It's as if conservatives believe in the totemic power of the Fetish of the Fetus. As bad as the Democrats can be, when they usually try to make some semblance of an argument. This is just waving the Bloody Fetus around, and hoping it causes enough people's brains to shut down their ability to think ('cuz fetuses are icky). This is completely insane. How does one have a national conversation about anything when one half is utterly incapable of a…

More Lies From the Discovery Institute

I know, I know: dog bites man. Anyway, I received this note from a colleague who attended a Seattle screening of Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos: ...There were lots of ID folk in the audience, since the Discovery Institute is here in Seattle. So we had some pretty antagonistic questions. But what was really amazing is that Discovery Institute folks secretly tape recorded the whole event and posted a podcast with edited segments to their website, taking Randy's comments out of context and making it look as if he was retracting the claims in his film. Talk about slimy tactics! I've never…

Iraq: It's Not Just the Army, But the Guard Too

You might have read about (or are personally experiencing) the massive snowstorms hitting the Plains states. So what does that have to do with Iraq? From the NY Times: Colorado and Kansas were trying to find enough helicopters capable of hauling hay bales weighing up to 1,300 pounds, said Don Ament, Colorado's agriculture director. Many helicopters in the state's National Guard fleet are in the Middle East. That is supposed to be the primary role of the Guard: natural disaster, backup for enforcing civil order, and threats against the country itself (I refuse to use that Orwellian-sounding…

Keep the godless out of office

Cecil Bothwell was elected to the city council of Asheville, NC. Cecil Bothwell is an atheist. Now some kooks want to deny Cecil Bothwell his seat on the council because the North Carolina constitution forbids atheists from taking public office. Amazing. I know that several states have these laws on their books, but I thought they all avoided enforcing them, since they're clearly unconstitutional. In this case, it's one crazy right-winger, H.K. Edgerton, who wants to impose the law to selectively block someone he doesn't seem to like. We know he's crazy because he's threatening the city and……

When Your Foreign Policy Repulses John Negroponte...

...the man who helped bring you Iran-Contra, you know you've gone too far. Seymour Hersh has a new article in the New Yorker about the Bush Administration's Middle East 'strategy.' It's more ridiculous than Iran-Contra. Why do I say that? Because we're backing indirectly Sunni groups in Lebanon opposed to Hizbollah that are linked to Al-Queda. Let's replay that last sentence: Because we're backing indirectly Sunni groups in Lebanon opposed to Hizbollah that are linked to Al-Queda. [sound of jaw hitting floor] I swear to the Intelligent Designer, these guys are dumber than Conservapedia.…

The Enlightenment blues....

Diana of Letter from Gotham expresses some of what I've been thinking. I am rather uninspired by what I perceive as the relative silence on the Left and the swarming hysterics on the Right.1 Though I tend to sympathize with the suspicion of Islam evinced by many on the Right, I have commented on the problems with a singular focus on reiteration of values in a vacuum of empirically driven analysis, and attempted to address the issue obliquely later in the form of a post. As for the silence of the Left, I am silent myself because the gut reaction is so inchoate and underwhelming. Addendum: I…

Strange drifts

As I have said before, sometimes you actually have to play the game. An interesting thing that surprised me years ago was that the time until fixation of a highly deleterious allele was lower than a neutral allele. In other words, if you had an allele with negative fitness implications the time it takes to traverse 0% to 100% on the frequency chart for the population will be shorter than for one with no fitness implication (neutral fixation in generations is 4 * effective population size). Why? Because for a highly deleterious allele to fix it has to do it quickly, selection works…

Links 7/3/11

Links for you. Science: Four mysterious retractions in the JBC for a group whose PI recently passed away Finches use their own form of grammar in their tweets (so do humans. Snare drum, please) UC fears talent loss to deeper pockets: The departure of three star scientists from UC San Diego has officials worried about a possible brain drain tied to budget cuts. Kansas outlaws practice of evolution Other: Why Is Jerry Falwell's Evangelical University Getting Filthy Rich off Your Tax Money? We Don't Need to Cut Corporate Taxes, We Need to Raise Them (this is on Fox News. Really) First, Blame…