Who is to blame for the latest weekly decline in Cosmos ratings? The Walking Dead, NCAA basketball games, a mass exodus due to its opening effort to be culturally in-your-face?

There is always going to be competition on TV, just like there will always be competition for a government R01 grant. No point in whining about that. And Cosmos still takes shots at religion, but it isn't devoting 25 percent of episodes to it any more. Across the cultural spectrum, it's been much better during the last two weeks.

The Walking Dead season finale is coming soon and nothing goes with zombie television like brains. In beer.

No, really. Dock Street in Philadelphia is introducing a Walking Dead beer, called "Walker", I suppose, to avoid the inevitable lawsuit. It's the brain child (their pun, not mine) of head brewer Justin Low and sales rep Sasha Certo-Ware and is billed as an American Pale Stout brewed with wheat, oats, flaked barley, organic cranberry, and Smoked Goat Brains.

I didn't even know there was such as thing as an American Pale Stout, much less that goat brains added a certain smokiness to beer. In olden days, 'stout' just meant it was more alcohol but today stout is thick and dark.

In the absence of any evidence for why different people perform differently in school - other than that people are different - pundits have invented everything from genetic math anxiety to stereotype threat as an explanation.