Some Sunday Links

I find posts so you don't have to. Here's the sciency stuff:

1. David Hillis has some suggestions for improving biology textbooks.
2. 1700 years later, humans can still influence community ecology.
3. Unlike the Creationist Museum, some museums still try to teach science. Nebraska has one.
5. ScienceBlogling Chris explains what the normal distribution is. He also discusses Z-scores.
6. ScienceBlogling GrrlScientist tells us all about giant (fossil) penguins.
7. The basic biology of horseshoe crabs according to Mark H.

The other stuff:

1. It's a point I've made before, but Darksyde does it quite well: evolutionary biologists kick creationist political ass. 'Progressives' might want to learn from that.
2. If we can eat croissants, why can't we have French healthcare?
3. Sara at Orcinus has a great post about the generational aftershocks of lynching.
4. Glenn Greenwald makes the excellent observation that every bad person on the planet is now being called Al-Queda by the Bush Administration. Chris Floyd makes the obvious, but overlooked, point that when we kill people we claim are Al-Queda, and they turn out not to be Al-Queda (or, in fact, Iraqi goverment-allied Shiites), that's called a massacre.
5. Scott Lemieux reminds us that, during segregation, whites didn't want to attend black schools.
6. Once you get beyond Publius' invocation of the Dreaded We, there is an excellent point: Cheney's rise is part of a much larger political illness. Brad DeLong thinks Washington Post columnist David Broder sat on Cheney's importance for six years.
7. Jill documents the horrifying consequences of religious zealots who force their beliefs on rape victims.