Feces & vaginas: Two stinky things that need fixin’

Silicon Valley must really hate women. First, Peter Thiel thinks the world went to hell in a handbasket when women were given the vote (they are insufficiently ardent about libertarianism), and now a couple of guys have created a startup to make probiotic supplements that make your vulva smell like peaches. Along the same lines, they want to sell a probiotic for your pets that will make their poop smell like bananas.

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Mainstreaming absurdity

I remember, once upon a time, back in the 1990s, while reading the usenet group Talk.Origins, that some creationist named Lionel Tun declared that all animals used to be vegetarian, and that T. rex used its teeth to cut down trees and eat tough fruit, like pineapples, and that their jaws were clearly designed to slice open coconuts. This was obviously contrary to the mechanics of these carnivorous animals’ jaws, their anatomy, and their digestive physiology. We laughed and laughed, and this was one of the gleefully cited examples of creationist idiocy that got cited for years afterwards.

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Every university is broken

But the University of Hawaii at Mānoa looks to be more broken than others. Christie Wilcox writes about the budget cuts there: the place is being gouged to the bone — the College of Natural Sciences has a cohort of graduate students to whom they are failing to live up to their responsibilities (the university brought them in, these students made a commitment to UH Mānoa, you don’t get to suddenly decide midway through their training to abandon your obligations.)

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