The website www.backcountrymaps.com is a really great site for looking up topos. I have checked out quite a few places online for topo maps, and none is as smooth and easy to move around in once you have located your desired area. Unfortunately there are rough edges since the site is a project being run by some folks in their spare time. It seems there is no way for ordinary layman to register, and if you are not registered then finding that area that you are interested in the first place can be a little challenging. You can move around on the map till you find what you like though.

Another neat topo thing that I got working the other day is topos in google earth. Here you can download a file that you can then use with google earth to view topos of anywhere in the US. The only negative for this is that it is a little slow loading the various maps so moving around can be just a little tedius.

Although neither of the mentioned topo sources are of a high enough quality that you wouldn’t want to buy a map before going out in the backcountry, I think both will be very useful in planning future trips.

Check it out google mars, its pretty nifty. This reminded me of another thing google did a little while back, google moon. I guess this must be the Beta versions of both though, because they couldnt give me directions and mars local didnt come up with any pizza places.

In the last couple years laws have been passed that require parental notification if a teen is going to have an abortion. The NY Times did an analysis of the effects of these laws and published this article. In it they make the claims:

The analysis, which looked at six states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last decade and is believed to be the first study to include data from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent trends.

For instance, in Tennessee, the abortion rate went down when a federal court suspended a parental consent requirement, then rose when the law went back into effect. In Texas, the rate fell after a notification law went into effect, but not as fast as it did in the years before the law. In Virginia, the rate barely moved when the state introduced a notification law in 1998, but fell after the requirement was changed to parental consent in 2003.

If you take the NY Times word for it, this could be very discouraging news. Since the NY Times is an esteemed news source then why wouldn’t we take their word for it? Maybe because they have an agenda. Here is a very interesting article by the The Heritage Foundation which picks appart the NY Times analysis and does some analysis of its own. Here is the conclusion that The Heritage Foundation came to after doing their own analysis of the data:

With this data, I examined teen abortion rate in the states that the Times reporters discussed in their article. Because Arizona’s parental-consent law took effect in 2003 and CDC data is unavailable for years after 2002, I was unable to include Arizona in this analysis. However, in three of the five other states analyzed by the Times, I found significant reductions in the teen abortion rates after the passage of parental-involvement laws. In Texas, the teen abortion rate fell 25 percent since the passage of a parental-notification law in 2000. Both Virginia and South Dakota passed parental notification laws in 1997, and since that time their teen abortion rates each declined by over 33 percent.

It is true that in the remaining two states the Times examined, Idaho and Tennessee, the passage of parental-involvement laws had little immediate effect on the abortion rate. However, additional information about each state provides some important context, which is ignored in the Times article. Idaho already had one of the lowest teen abortion rates in the country prior to the passage of its parental-consent law. Similarly, while Tennessee’s teen abortion rate fluctuated little in the years following the passage of its parental-consent law in 2000, its teen abortion rate fell sharply in the year before the passage of the law. Tennessee’s parental-consent law may have played a role in preserving this decline.

I have to agree with The Heritage Foundation when they conclude that:

It is regrettable that the Times reporters refused to acknowledge academic research that contradicts their conclusions. This continues the newspaper’s trend of poor reporting on abortion statistics over the last decade. For example, during the 2004 election season, the Times reported Glen Harold Stassen’s erroneous finding that abortions had increased during the George W. Bush’s presidency. When the Alan Guttmacher Institute later released more comprehensive data showing that abortions had actually declined since President Bush’s inauguration, the Times was among the media outlets that failed to report the finding, much less correct its own record.

Once again the liberal media has no problem reporting absolute falsities if it promotes their agenda, and it doesn’t even matter if they are wrong because there is no one with the kind of audience that they have to set the record straight. At least not up until now. At last bradlands is here to propogate truth to every corner of the world. Please stay tuned for your comprehensive news updates, brought to you daily… or at least bi-daily… um, minus the weekends. I’ve got your back

Jillian and I celebrated our first anniversary over the weekend by going out to Beaufort, NC for a long weekend. Friday I surprised her with the trip and we spent Friday morning packing at a liesurely pace. By 6 we arrived at The Cedars Inn, a bed and breakfast accross the street from the water in Beaufort. We had our first taste of the local seafood for dinner, including some sushi.

I asked her if she wanted to go deep sea fishing the next day and she was very excited about it, so we were up at the crack of dawn and on a boat out at sea by the time the sun rose. Although it was a little early in the year and the water was very choppy, we had a really great time pulling in fish. We each caught two sharks and a red snapper, and our big fish story for the day is that one of Jillians sharks was a 5 foot long, 100 pound sand tiger that tangled all of the lines on one side of the boat. For the record its impossible to get any of the local restaurants to cook fish that you have caught. Saturday evening we drove around beaufort a little and took pictures of some of the many local houses that are from the 17 and 1800s.

Sunday we went to an independant fundamental baptist church in New Bern about 30 minutes from Beaufort. There was preaching and the sermons were packed with scripture, although the expounding didnt follow any particular direction. In the evening the pastor announced that he had originally planned to talk about one thing but that since the service began he changed his mind and he was going to wing it. I also witnessed an alter call for the first time. Overall it left us very thankful for the church in Mebane, and at the same time we were glad for the opportunity to meet fellow christians of other traditions. All of the people were very friendly and it seemed that the church was zealous to spread the gospel and reach out to the community.

Sunday afternoon Jillian and I visited Fort Macon by Morehead City and very much enjoyed our time there. The fort is from the civil war and visitors pretty much have free range of all of the rooms and walls and nooks and cranies. It would be a great place for some manhunt or capture the flag and it would be the ultimate paint ball course. We also strolled the beach a little and took our usual Sunday afternoon naps.

Monday was a little bit rainy but thankfully we anticipated it and spent the early afternoon checking out the nc maritime museum and the boat building shop accross the street from the museum. When the rain stopped we checked out the old burying grounds and the hammock house, which was originally built for Blackbeard in 1709. Jillian also provided some entertainment for the local police crew when they filed their first ever traffic incident of a “pedestrian coliding with a car” (as opposed to one they are more used to filing, which is a car coliding with a pedestrian). With that we called it a day and headed home where we cooked up the red snappers that we caught and enjoyed the fruit of our Saturday labors.

We both enjoyed our getaway very much and we are looking forward to many anniversaries to come.

There is a club called South Beyond 6000 that is exclusively membered by those who have climbed all 40 Appalachian Mountains that are higher then 6000 feet. Here is a page for the club, and here is my listing of the 40 peaks along with a record of the ones I have climbed so far. Hopefully as time goes on I will get a chance to fill out this sheet, and maybe when I am an old man I will be able to tell my grandchildren that I am a member.

Here is a list of peaks above 6000 feet in the NC and TN area. The only other peak on the east coast which is over 6000 feet is Mount Washington in NH which is 6288 feet above sea level. The South Beyond 6000 club is for all those who have bagged all of these peaks. Here is their website. This list is from Cutters Blog here, but I think he wont mind me using it to keep track of my own expeditions. There is also a useful listing of the tallest mountains on the east coast here that includes topos and more for each of the peaks. Here is another site that lists them all.

Here is a very interesting blog by Al Mohler concerning possible future cultural changes that could occur as a result of liberals and feminists who refuse to have babies. Will men soon rule and conservatives inherit the Earth?

Ok I am sure everyone has already heard this but I just had to put it out there because it makes me sick every time I read or hear about how “the President’s numbers have reached an all time low”. The poll was conducted by CBS and the NY Times and is reporting that the presidents approval rating is down to 34%. In the fine print however you can read that they contacted 272 republicans and 409 democrats, so of the people they polled only 28% were republican. Also of those they polled many are not registered voters, meaning they are the least significant jumble of people politically. Here are some notes on the scam from NewsBusters.

It makes me sick that the Media can say anything they want even if it is known to be slanted or just plain untrue, and it not only stands but it is repeated over and over by everyone. If anything is confirmed to be untrue then the networks just shut up about it. I think the networks realize that even if what they are saying is found to be a heap of wretched lies, and even if later the truth is discovered, political damage is still done to the President. It doesn’t matter if what they say is true or not, it still hurts the President so they are willing to preach it. Gaaa, its too early to be getting upset.