Comments on: Texas: Your “Weaknesses” Are Weak — And Old, Too

By: Tony Whitson

Tony Whitson — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:19:14 +0000

I lost my domain name!

The page referenced above with the audio of the hearings can still be found at

http://curricublog.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/texas-sboe-evolution-2008nov19/

By: Steven Schafersman

Steven Schafersman — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:57:56 +0000

I apologize, but I made my own error since I was writing too quickly. The correct name is Dan Quinn of TFN, not David. Wes, please correct this in your blog column.

By: Steven Schafersman

Steven Schafersman — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:26:53 +0000

Good, Wes. I have the same list you do of the Religious Right SBOE members’ “weaknesses” or problems of evolution. As you recognize, all are either very old YEC Creationist objections or DI’s Icons of Evolution. These people have no imagination, and it is obvious what they have been reading. You would think that their mentors the DI would prepare them better with more sophisticated objections. But no, it’s goind to be Piltdown Man, Haeckel’s embryos, and polystrate fossils all the way. Nice touch to correlate them with the Index to Creationist Claims by Mark Isaak on TalkOrigins, a valuable resource for those unfamiliar with every Creationist specious argument.

I am writing to correct an error. David Quinn of TFN, not Kathy Miller, did the live blogging for TFN. We sat very close to each other for seven hours. Kathy and Ryan Valentine of TFN were there, too.

Keep up the good work.

By: Tony Whitson

Tony Whitson — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 06:01:33 +0000

I’ve made audio files available at
http://curricublog.org/2008/11/26/texas-sboe-evolution-2008nov19/
and in a linked wiki where people can help develop an annotated account of the event & testimony

By: Austringer

Austringer — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:50:37 +0000

I just talked with the audio/visual media technician for the TEA. He wants to provide the MP3 files for direct downloading, and is communicating with some other IT people there to make that happen. He hopes to have that ability set up sometime shortly after the Thanksgiving holiday.

By: Austringer

Austringer — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:05:48 +0000

The direct transcoding in VLC was a flop. However, VLC was able to get the ASF stream and store it properly. FFMPEG could then transcode that to MP3 format.

The state of Texas should use an audio file format that isn’t tied so tightly to a single provider.

By: Austringer

Austringer — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:34:31 +0000

What an incredible pain…

I’ve found a means to get the audio. It’s not via my Windows Vista laptop, nor the Mac laptop, but rather my FreeBSD server. I downloaded the link with wget, then extracted the second reference, the one with the explicit dotted-quad form for the server. I fed that into the VLC media player, and that has a stream capture and transcode feature that I’m giving a try right now. If this works, I will get the set of files from the 19th. This works in real time, so it is going to take a while.

By: John Pieret

John Pieret — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:55:40 +0000

There are some more indications of what weakness they mean from an article in the Baptist Press:

SBOE member Terri Leo, quoted in the Houston Chronicle in 2003, said that the “SBOE received volumes of peer-reviewed scientific evidence that documents textbook problems relating to origin of life research, embryology, the Cambrian Explosion, the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution and peppered moth research.

http://www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=29374

In other words, Wells’ Icons … though what that has to do with peer review, I (and, more importantly, Terri Leo) haven’t a clue.

By: Mike from Ottawa

Mike from Ottawa — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:41:36 +0000

Dave, that first part was probably vandalism, because it’s accurate and thus doesn’t comply with Conservapedia’s standards.

By: JLT

JLT — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:10:18 +0000

Re audio archive files: It doesn’t seem to be possible to download the actual audio files, only media player links, and I could only listen to them with media player. Even opening the mp3 url with winamp didn’t work (and it should)…