• Change.org: Why I Choose Streets Over Shelter. A homeless person explains why one might rationally choose sleeping on the street over going to a homeless shelter.
• Ken Kuhl: My Weekend with the Electric Mini Cooper (Mini-e). Mini has provided a few prototypes to regular people in New York and Los Angeles to get their feedback.
• Matthew Yglesias: China to Require All PCs Include Internet-Censoring Software. Really smart comments. China’s market power is such that they can demand concessions to authoritarian censorship that other countries cannot. However, those other countries can then take advantage of the anti-liberty “features” that were created for China’s government.
• Jake Tapper: Ex-Gitmo Detainee Lakhdar Boumediene Details Tortures. While in Paris covering President Obama, Jake Tapper took time to do this interview.
• New York Times: How the U.S. Surplus Became a Deficit. Everybody already linked to this article, but it’s a must read.
• Alex Moskalyuk: Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Who doesn’t want to be more persuasive?
• Ruby Best Practices: Quack Attack: Making Your Code More Rubyish. It’s my goal to speak every programming language I use like a native.
• Language Log: Obama’s Imperial ‘I’: spreading the meme. The recent claims that Obama says “I” more than other Presidents is wrong.
• GitHub: whenever. A Ruby wrapper for cron.
• Tim Bray: On Carving Your Initials. More engineers should be invited to give commencement speeches.
• James Fallows: Departing questions. A comparison of the rendering of Beijing’s CCTV tower and what was actually built. The concept is much more impressive than the execution.