You're hardly the only person I know who is grossed out by meat. To me, though, that's not just a mental issue, it's mental illness. We are omnivores.

If a person grossed out by meat suffers from mental illness, then so are people grossed out by genocide. If we simply follow our genetic instincts, then keeping ourselves or at most our tribe alive is our prime directive, and we should kill, butcher, or massacre everything or anyone that helps us achieve that goal.

The hardcore news for nerds is that the director of the CIA, the leading spy agency in the free world, was using gMail. Either Petraeus is too stupid to be spymaster-in-chief or Google is running an email system secure enough for the CIA and the FBI team that combed through his emails. It's also possible that the account was phony but one wonders why Petraeus wasn't quick to deny the authenticity of the emails.

Given the $100+ price tag, they should have put a small e-Ink screen in there. A $99 Nook Simple Touch (without those annoying Amazon ads) has a faster CPU and bigger RAM. Color e-Ink screens are coming up, so maybe that can also be an option.

By following a set of rules described in a paper published in Nature (abstract), a husband and wife team from David Baker's laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle has designed five proteins from scratch that fold reliably into predicted conformations.

Barring certain genetic anomalies, it should be pretty easy for any husband and wife team to produce protein sequences that result in predicted conformations.

2. Learn to work 16 hours a day, standing.

That can cure a lot of couch potatoes. And after all the BigMacs, the cup of tea and biscuit can also do wonders for the beer belly.

I vaguely remember some saying that if you owe your debtors a little then you have a problem, but if you owe them a lot then your debtors have a problem. I suppose it's different if your debtors happen to be the Mafia.

Looking at the video I had some trouble figuring out if I was already looking at the boat or just the dock. The rounded corner jokes aside, I think the iYacht's one clear Jobs design feature is the way it blends in with its surroundings. The only really loud Apple products I know of are those radioactive iMacs that came in a various colors.

What are the prospects for a single orbiting planet (let's exclude other objects) orbiting both stars in a figure 8 configuration, crossing the barycenter of the star's combined rotations?

Why not just an ellipse? As it nears each star, the planet gets a gravity assist that forces it into an extended comet-like orbit.

Bad copypasta: my last sentence should begin with "Google Translate appears to have reordered" etc.

Parent is correct. The following link contains the passage in question. Google translate the paragraph that begins with "Das Wort Gott ist für mich nichts":

"Das Wort Gott ist für mich nichts als Ausdruck und Produkt menschlicher Schwächen, die Bibel eine Sammlung ehrwürdiger, aber doch reichlich primitiver Legenden. Keine noch so feinsinnige Auslegung kann (für mich) etwas daran ändern. Diese verfeinerten Auslegungen sind naturgemäß höchst mannigfaltig und haben so gut wie nichts mit dem Urtext zu schaffen. Für mich ist die unverfälschte jüdische Religion wie alle anderen Religionen eine Incarnation des primitiven Aberglaubens."

The machine translation is pretty readable:

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still plenty of primitive legends. No matter how subtle design can (for me) change this. This refined interpretations are naturally highly diverse and have next to nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other genuine religions is an incarnation of primitive superstition. "

"Reichlich Google appears to have reordered the adjective in the last sentence, transferring it from "the Jewish religion" (die unverfälschte jüdische Religion) to "all other (genuine) religions". Translating that part alone produces "the unadulterated Judaism".

The same effect can be achieved when you get enough warm bodies that suppressing the protest would only trigger widespread chaos. Guns are overrated unless they have the power to take out tanks and fighter bombers. Proof is Libya. The rebels had to be bailed out by NATA airpower. If a totalitarian government really wants to crush you, you need more than the right to bear arms. You need tanks, jets, and maybe even tactical nukes.

Are you sure plagiarism rates are increasing? Maybe it's simply that these days, with everything being digital, it is way easier to uncover plagiarism.

That or perhaps the many eyes of the Internet, bloggers, anonymous Wikileakers, etc. Maybe we can call it opensource journalism or at best the start of opensource government (ex. the anti-ACTA movement).