My ten most-frequented websites

This last week, a friend of mine asked me what my 10 most favorite/visited websites were. I had to mull it over, and this is the list that I came up with (presented in alphabetical order):

• Aguanomics
•  David Zetland provides insights and commentary about the water economics (and water-related topic in general).

• ClimateProgress
• One of the parts of ThinkProgress.org, this site has a good set of climatologists and knowledgeable commentators on issues of climate change scientific research, policy, politics, and the social culture wars that have been raised around a phenomena that is about as recognized by scientists as gravity is.

• Copyranter 
• My day doesn't seem complete without the ascerbic wit that often accompany one strange and wacky advertisement gleaned from around the world and through time.

• Dispatches from the Culture Wars 
• Ed Brayton provides 4-6 entries each day on various topics dealing with culture war issues, including torture, war on drugs, police surveillance, gun control, abortion rights, creationism, religion in the public square, online gambling, etc. He's usually quite sharp in his insights, and although I don't always agree with him, I quite often do.

• Flowing Data 
• A wonderful website about how to make data more visually appealing, often through maps, but not exclusively so. There are also the occasional post about theories of how to better present data, how to choose the medium of presentation, etc.

• PhysOrg
• All the latest scientific and technological breakthroughs in many different and sundry fields. With hundreds of articles and briefs posted each day, it's often a chore in wading through them all. However, I often do find something of interest. (The one gripe that I have is that the news stories rarely have direct links to the articles that they are reviewing.)

• Sociological Images: Seeing is Believing 
• These (often short) blog entries are all focused about an image (or series of images) and a discussion-leader about the socially constructed problems (rarely successes) surrounding the implications, assumptions, etc. that perpetuate social ills. There are often interesting stories, and interesting commentary. However, it does tend to focus on the negative.

• The Daily Dish
• It seems almost like Andrew Sullivan gets paid to sit and update his blog about a hundred times each day. (Well, Andrew and some other people, admittedly; but mostly Andrew.) Things that I find most interesting relate to politics and stories about social trends that interweave reader commentary with snippets of what was written elsewhere and Sullivan's commentary on the points as well. (And in case you miss something, there's usually a Daily Wrap for you to catch up.) Other things that are fun are the "Mental Health Break", "Face of the Day" and "View from Your Window" entries (especially the VFWY Contest).

• Treehugger 
• What would I do without Treehugger.com's often up-beat, never stuck-in-the-weeds, story-upon-story coverage of all things environmental? From yet another "green gadget" to urban agriculture stories to reviews of scientific papers to dire warnings about the future, Treehugger is an interesting place to take an environmental pulse check.

• What Would JT Do?
• This blog is one that I came to recently, and (yes) it is a play on, "What would Jesus Do". JT (and Christina) both spend a lot of time pointing out the hypocrisy of the religious (primarily Christians, since this is the US, and the majority of hypocritical religious people in the US are Christians). The blog entries are often humorous (at least to me), often showing how unhinged people can get when you make the simple claim that their stated claim lacks evidentiary support.

So there you go, ten websites that I like to visit. There are also a number of webcomics that I like to visit, but that's a topic for another blog post.