A few sweet blogs

There are a lot of really terrible blogs out there, but there are also a few good ones. Here are a few of the ones I frequent:

Frontal Cortex
This is Jonah Lehrer's blog (the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist). Every post so far has been very enlightening, well written, and well researched. This is probably the only blog where I make a serious effort to read every post.

Mind Hacks
This one publishes a lot of posts so I have a hard time keeping up. Still, the posts are short and generally very interesting. Its main thread of interest is the mind, and topics generally touch on the ideas of consciousness, psychology, illusion, and awareness. I think I discovered this one via Lehrer's blog, but I'm not sure.

Science of the big bang
I just found this one today. I am doing a bit of research on nuclear reactor technology and ran across this classic text by Glasstone on reactor design. When I did a Google search on him, I found this blog (Glasstone is dead, but this guy must have liked his work, hence the url). The very first post dives into climate skepticism, cold war propaganda and the arms race, and the un-provable nature of string theory. I'll probably be pulling information from this blog in future posts.

STATS
Not technically a blog but rather a website with articles that analyze popular trends using statistics. A lot of popular conception is debunked, which is basically my criteria for good reading, so this one is fun.

The Economist -- Science
Most of the articles I have read in the Economist have been very well done. The topics are also usually relevant and objective, and the science section is particularly interesting for me. One problem is that you can only access a small number of articles before you reach your quota for free access. This will be one the one publication I'll almost certainly get in print later on in life.

The Big Picture
Since most news is pretty boring, I use this as my substitute. This site provides a chronology of current major world events through pictures. From natural disasters to political gatherings, it covers it all in brilliant photographs.

Autopia
I like cars, and I especially like to follow the technological innovations going into new car designs. This Wired blog does a great job of covering this side of the business. For reviews of production cars, CarMagazine.com is a great free source that allows you to get all the info you want without purchasing one of those shiny (and expensive) car magazines.

American Enterprise Institute - Energy and the environment
Energy and the environment does not seem to have a section on the AEI website, but it is one of the RSS feeds available. AEI is a conservative think tank, and most of the writers seem to be libertarians. AEI is fairly similar to the Cato Institute and the Ludwig von Mises Institute in this way, but the articles from AEI come less frequently and are more put together than the blog posts from Mises, and they are less political than the stuff at Cato. One nice thing about AEI is they tie in economics, business, and government fairly well. There is a bias toward conservative views in all three of the sources I mentioned here. I realize all media is going to have biases, but I'll occasionally try to augment these with articles from the New York Times to get a little more balance in view.

Harvard Business Review
This is another blog that will overwhelm you with posts if you try to read all of them. The posts cover a wide range of very MBA-ish topics like leadership, management, etc. In my opnion, a lot of this stuff is not very useful, but it does help you develop the lingo needed to communicate with MBA types. Also, there is the occasional article that will inspire you with a great story or share an interesting tidbit of knowledge.

As a bonus, here are two great links my father shared with me. These are interactive maps that allow you to view interesting data on different places in the USA:
1 - Forbes migration map
2 - Measure of America Map
Enjoy!