Unstructured Geekery

As every true geek knows, geeks come in all sorts of varieties. There are computer geeks, political geeks, movie geeks, weather geeks, as so forth. The diversity of geekdom is, indeed, deep and wide.

As for myself, I am very much a science geek. I've been deeply interested in science since I was five. One of the great disapointments of my life was the dawning realization that I would make a lousy scientist. Fortunately, science is much like sports in that even if you aren't a player, you can still have a lot of fun being a spectator. So for today's fun, I thought that I'd list out some of my favorite science sites:

Slashdot is a site that is largely dedicated to computer geekery (Linux is very much a holy word among those people), however, it does have a great science sub-section that has the additional advantage of being accessible via an RSS feed.

The Loom is an excellent science blog run by Carl Zimmer, who is the author of some marvelous science popularizations. The focus of the site is mainly on the biological sciences with special emphasis on evolutionary biology. It also has an RSS feed.

ScienceDaily.com is, at the sites name would imply, a site dedicated to breaking science news. One of the things that I particularly like the fact that they are very good about linking to the original news releases for their articles.

Finally, we come to my favorite site: the arXiv.org e-Print archive. Be warned, this is not a site for the faint of heart. It is a repository of original papers in the fields of physics, mathematics, nonlinear science, computer science and quantitative biology. If you are serious about science, this is where you can see the cutting edge of research and theory (many papers appear here before they are officially published in scientific journals), but be warned that these are undiluted publications that tend to be filled with a lot of technical jargon and hardcore mathematics.