Alfredo writes:

>A while back, there was a discussion on trying to have the
>shortest-possible URL to type into our browsers.  After having SUCCESSFULLY
>gone to Wirt's web site by typing just "aics-research.com" (I said, "why
>not try that today?"), the thought came to type just "adager.com" and
>PRESTO!  I have not changed anything in Adager's DNS setup since those
>HP3000-L discussions a long time ago (Neil Harvey was involved).  But I
>have certainly upgraded my version of Netscape.  So, it appears that it is
>a browser-dependent property.

Actually, I don't think that it is wholly a browser-dependent property. When we
 set up our web site, I was specifically asked if we wanted both addresses,
 www.aics-research.com & aics-research.com, to go to the same place. I of
 course said yes, because that's the way our web site acts now.

But I do know that it is possible to have differently resolved URLs for
 differently expressed names. The American Museum of Natural History in NY is
 the only site that I know that uses this feature, but it does work quite
 nicely. The "front door" to the Museum's exhibit halls is

       http://www.amnh.org

 while the "back door" (to the research site) is:

       http://amnh.org

The Field Museum, with which I've been associated for some time, has
 surprisingly just recently gotten on the web -- and it too has differentiated
 its two web addresses. The standard entrance is:

      http://www.fmnh.org

while the other, shorter URL form doesn't currently work (is unresolved).

[As a complete aside, a portion of the Field Museum's web pages are on our
 (AICS) server. These pages will probably be moved to the Field Museum's server
 soon, but at the moment, their URL is:

     http://aics-research.com/nestedness/tempcalc.html

And as a second aside, the "nestedness" calculator that is available for
 downloading at this site was developed originally on one of our HP3000s, in
 BASIC/V and PostScript. The nestedness calculator was the program on which I
 first learned to program PostScript code. A few years ago, I translated the
 calculator from BASIC/V  into Visual Basic, in part to provide a easy
 distribution mechanism -- and to learn VB (See, this isn't so off-topic, after
 all :-). The translation was easier than I would have imagined. BASIC is the
 least standardized of languages, but moving from HP3000 BASIC to VB was not
 particularly difficult. As to the rationale behind "nestedness," the idea is
 quite simple. We looked for "natural experiments" on scales (continental size)
 and times (500-15,000 years) large enough and long enough  to demonstrate that
 as habitat area shrinks, species go extinct in a relatively highly
 predetermined order. The nestedness calculator measures that contention,
 noting that each smaller biota (assemblage of species) tends more or less to
 be a proper subset of all larger biotas. This observation has a great deal to
 do with a very heated argument called SLOSS (single-large or several small)
 that has been persistent in ecological management now for ten-twenty years on
 how national biodiversity reserves are to be designed. While this may truly be
 off-topic, you are, under any circumstance, more than welcome to download the
 nestedness calculator. Just remember that it was my first VB program.]

Wirt Atmar