Behind this suddenly active business category — which includes companies like iREIT in Houston, Marchex in Seattle, and Demand Media in Santa Monica, Calif. — is the recognition that not all Internet users turn to a search engine when they are confused about where to find something online. Rather, 5 percent to 10 percent of people will simply type in a name that sounds as if it might suit their needs.

The so-called direct search or direct navigation approach is seldom fruitful for users, nor has it been particularly profitable for owners of the sites that they visit. An obscure Web address may have four or so visitors a month, and perhaps half will click on an ad.

How awful. Linked from circleid.

Millions of Addresses and Thousands of Sites, All Leading to One - New York Times

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing a Boeing Co. unit it accuses of helping the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency transfer foreign suspects to overseas prisons where it says they were held and tortured.

Rights group sues Boeing unit over CIA flights | Reuters

With only four months notice, we molded, cast, mounted and installed a 40 foot long bronze Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. The commission involved producing waxes and a ceramic shell mold, casting in bronze, assembly, chasing, sandblasting and patinating. The stainless steel support armature was also made in our shop. The skeletal mount is the first of its kind. The 6,500 pound skeleton was unveiled at the 2001 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference in Bozeman.

This has since found its way to my workplace. Along with some plastic pink flamingoes. I need a picture of myself in front of it!

Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, Montana: Bronze Tyrannosaurus rex, 2001

CD Baby is a little online record store that sells CDs by independent musicians.

I bought some indie/ambient/electronic thing I heard on SomaFM from these guys; they seem pretty cool.

CD Baby

For years, China has chafed at efforts by the United States to exclude it from full membership in the world’s elite space club. So lately China seems to have hit on a solution: create a new club.

Beijing is trying to position itself as a space benefactor to the developing world — the same countries, in some cases, whose natural resources China covets here on earth. The latest and most prominent example came last week when China launched a communications satellite for Nigeria, a major oil producer, in a project that serves as a tidy case study of how space has become another arena where China is trying to exert its soft power.

Snubbed by U.S., China Finds New Space Partners - New York Times

What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.

For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.

Creation Museum - Religion - New York Times

Decius wrote:
HD-DVD or BlueRay?

I'll probably buy a bluray player in the form of a ps3 this summer. I'll consider buying a standalone dual-format player when they become available (winter?). My prediction is that dual-format players will end the format war; consumers don't want to bet on one or the other.

Hopefully, this will be the last generation of fixed-format stuff that has to be set in stone for 20 years and there will be enough network in a few more years that we can just ship the stuff around that way instead of on silly plastic discs.

RE: Survey Question

That money's not going into my pocket, I can promise you that. It's just these guys who have f---ed themselves out of a job essentially, that now take it out on ripping off the public. I've got a battle where I'm trying to put out quality material that matters and I've got fans that feel it's their right to steal it and I've got a company that's so bureaucratic and clumsy and ignorant and behind the times they don't know what to do, so they rip the people off.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails | Herald Sun

Designed to provide communications in otherwise inhospitable environments, the six or eight-foot sphere contains a plastic satellite dish that unfolds when the ball is inflated and can be targeted to within one-tenth of a degree.

Cute.

GATR-com inflatable satellite ball goes where other satellite dishes can't - Engadget

Physicists are now foretelling the death of cosmology, or the study of our universe, as we know it. Thankfully, cosmologists won't be jobless for a couple trillion years.

SPACE.com -- Physicists Predict the Death of Cosmology