Here’s an amusing headline from a couple of days ago: “Giant dog turd wreaks havoc at Swiss museum.” The Guardian newspaper reports: “A giant inflatable dog turd created by the American artist Paul McCarthy was blown from its moorings at a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a window before landing in the grounds of a children’s home.” The Zentrum Paul Klee also describes the work: “Paul McCarthy will be subverting the otherwise harmonious landscape sculpture of the Zentrum Paul Klee with his installation Complex Shit – a giant pile of dog faeces.”

My man, Paul McCarthy. He’s one of several contemporary artists I especially enjoyed studying in art history classes. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about American artists Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, and Canadian Aboriginal artist Brian Jungen . . . specifically, how they use/subvert mass-produced commodities and represent the “cute” commodification of animals, cultures, and objects in their works. Their art often features anthropomorphized playthings and the appropriation of objects from popular culture.

Paul McCarthy is arguably most famous for his 1970s and 1980s performance art involving the violent and comic use of rubber masks, toys, and food-based props. In the Paul McCarthy at Tate Modern exhibition catalog (2003), McCarthy says: “To put an un-refined clumsy appearing object into art is a political act.”

Which reminds me of this quote, in which South Park co-creator Matt Stone is talking about Team America: World Police:

We’re just telling people to lighten up and not take themselves too seriously. What are my politics? Setting a puppet on fire. That’s my politics.
–Matt Stone, USA Today, October 11, 2004

See quotedump.com for many more quotes I’ve collected.

A friend sent me this comic strip archive I’d never seen before, Buttercup Festival by David Troupes (AKA Elliott G. Garbauskas). He also created Green Evening Stories. This year, Troupes started Buttercup Festival Series II, a new webcomic. I really like his work.

On Thursday and Friday, May 22-23, I attended the WebVisions 2008 conference at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. Below is a quick overview (or: potentially understandable scrawling connected by lots of ellipses) of all five sessions I attended on Friday, with links. Many of the slides from these sessions and others are available at SlideShare.

Going Fast on the Slow Mobile Web – Jason Grigsby
(9:00 am to 10:15 am | session details)

There are 3.38 billion mobile devices in the world. This compares to the 1.58 billion TVs, 1.48 billion credit cards, 1.38 billion telephones, 0.98 billion PCs, and 0.88 billion cars. It’s the largest mass media/market in the world: “the mother of all markets.” In 2007, SMS revenue exceeded the movie, music, and video game industries combined. From the early 1990s of Gopher to Mosaic . . . and from WAP to the iPhone (the Mosaic of the mobile web). “It’s about usage. Not units.” That’s why there are iPhone-optimized web services despite the relatively low number of units (1% market share). We’ve left web optimization behind with broadband penetration . . . we’ve become bandwidth gluttons. Since 2003, web page size has tripled and the number of objects has doubled. Since 1996, web page size is 22x and the number of objects is 21x. Human factors research shows that: 0.1 seconds is viewed as instantaneous, 1.0 seconds allows users to move freely, and 10.0 seconds is the limit of being able to retain focus on a task. Web speed = perception . . . the usability, quality, service, and credibility of an organization is impacted (i.e., your brand is being damaged by a slow-loading site).

Yahoo’s 80/20 rule . . . the biggest impacts on a website’s performance are those things that are handled after the HTML document is loaded. Yahoo’s 13 Performance Rules (now 34!) include: make fewer HTTP requests, put stylesheets at the top and move scripts to the bottom. Also use GZIP compression; it can reduce download time by up to 75%. GZIP works on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML and JSON files. In the HTTP header you can add a GZIP line . . . server modules GZIPing files on the fly for client delivery. Make fewer HTTP requests because you only get two concurrent connections per domain in most browsers (which is why multiple domains/subdomains are used to load supporting CSS/image/scripts for a given site). The many(!) mobile browsers do not have documentation as to the number of allowed HTTP requests, but Jason has created a Mobile Browser Concurrency Test. Results: On mobiles, GZIP support is better than expected and caching support is much less than expected. For CSS support, use CSS sprites (“sliding doors”-type techniques). Inline images . . . you can use base64 code right in the image tag. Make sure to add an Expires header dated in the distant future. Also see YSlow Firebug add-on from Yahoo.

Jason mentioned the Mobile Portland Users Group. Jason’s websites are Cloudfour.com, Userfirstweb.com and Cloudfour.com/blog. Slides for this presentation are on SlideShare.

CSS Transformation – Christopher Schmitt
(10:30 am to 11:45 am | session details)

Christopher Schmitt is the author of CSS Cookbook. The limits to design are your experience, your tools and your browser. Semantic markup: “The radical notion of using the appropriate tag for the appropriate content.” There are 91 HTML elements (see W3.org site). He recommends using “CSS Reset” . . . don’t rely on browser default behavior (see Yahoo! UI Library: Reset CSS and Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS).

The project of this session was to create the USA flag using only CSS (including attribute selectors) and ordered list markup. Em-based layout has its benefits . . . every element scales up proportionally. For em-based sites, see Dan Cederholm, author of Bulletproof Web Design, who runs SimpleBits. “Default size in all browsers is 16 pixels.” Multiply font-size in body by 62.5% to get 10px. Also see Mark Newhouse and A List Apart (a favorite of mine) . . . putting Unicode characters into Web pages . . . auto-generated content.

Christopher is planning to publish his “how to create an American flag with CSS” tutorial on July 4. Look for it at ChristopherSchmitt.com.

The Web is Dead – Roger Black
(1:15 pm to 2:30 pm | session details)

Roger immediately denied the title of his presentation. He clarified: The old concept that the web has to be done a certain way is pretty much gone. The current/old web is about links (hypertext markup language) . . . but HTML creates a dangerous behavioral form (ADHD, excessive multitasking). Now clients are challenging the browser (Flash & Silverlight, video, widgets). YouTube is the best example; it’s primarily about video and not HTML. “There’s still religious objection to Flash in the HTML community.” But it has calmed down. People are regularly using it for interface design now. Roger told the crowd to check washingtontimes.com on Monday; there will be a new Flash component in the header.

The trends: search (Google is god); community; social networking; blogs, citizen journalism (millions of mommy blogs); aggregated content; and rich media. Old model: One (publisher/producer/author) to many (reader/viewer). New model: Many (user/producer) to many (user/producer). Mentioned Houston Chronicle’s web presence as a newspaper that’s doing a good job. Multiple targets (publisher/producer/author to magazine, newsletter, website, RSS, newspaper, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, radio, video, TV, podcasting, etc.) . . . then the flow is reversed: Subscribers to the new portal. Aggregators he mentioned: Popurls, iGoogle, Yelp, NetVibes (a graphical aggregator).

Narratives: How do you tell a story? How can the narrative form be told most effectively within the context of the Web? Example of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) in use: New York Times Reader. With WPF, the presentation layer of Windows could be its own object that could be “floated” off of Vista and scaled to mobile, Mac, Linux, etc. A multi-platform rich-media environment . . . like Adobe AIR. Click on “First Look” at the bottom of nytimes.com to access the Reader. The Reader has dynamically sizable windows . . . uses cleartype anti-aliasing. Microsoft abandoned WPF as a portable application. Silverlight has recently replaced WPF as the New York Times Reader. Fonts: Fitting to the grid (still look good at small text sizes) . . . typeface is very important. Implementation of Adobe AIR for a runtime environment. Example multimedia web magazines: Indigo, a digital magazine (in Spanish) and Flyp Media. Next for the web: live content, inline discussion, user design (design by users) and fix fonts. Font resources: Typophile, Typographica, Font Bureau. Also see rogerblack.com.

What You Need to Know About IE8 and Standards – Aaron Gustafson
(2:45 pm to 4:00 pm | session details)

This was a great in-depth presentation about how the team behind Internet Explorer 8 has almost fixed all of the annoying things that didn’t work in previous versions (or will have fixed them by the beta launch). Aaron also brought the audience through a brief history of Internet Explorer and how we got here. The bottom line: IE8 has been completely rewritten; it will conform to standards and will be CSS 2.1 compliant. A few key points: hasLayout is dead, object fallbacks work now, style is mostly available via DOM, list-style-type and white-space have been completed, background-position and table styles have been fixed, and you can choose between the content (W3C) or border (IE) box model. There are many other IE8 fixes and additions, including the very interesting version targeting. Complete slides are available at slideshare.net/AaronGustafson.

Overcoming Chaos: Designing the Future Web – Jeffrey Veen
(4:15 pm to 5:30 pm | session details)

Jeffrey focuses on data visualization and interface design. He’s interested in putting data into context (vs. data decoration). Author Steve Krug says: “Don’t make me think.” History lesson: Charles Joseph Minard created the classic thematic map model used to describe historical scenarios. A huge quantity of data can be related visually, such as with Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. One random factoid that interested me: Napoleon lost 23,000 troops at the Berezina River . . . Berezina now means catastrophe in French.

Examples and selected mentions: Unnecessary data decoration using 3D woodgrain-textured charts, titled “Percentage of chart that is gratuitous” . . . The MegaPenny Project puts size into context . . . artist Chris Jordon does the same with objects/garbage of mass consumption. The idea is to make meaning from (abstract) statistics . . . add visual meaning to data to make it more usable and accessible. Starting with data visualization and moving into data interaction design . . . let users be part of the story; giving people the powerful tools to make their own visualization . . . Stamen Design . . . MeasureMap (blogging analytics tools) and Google Analytics (turn static reports into more of a narrative). Jeffrey led the team that redesigned Google Analytics last year . . . Post-it notes of ideas stuck everywhere during the process . . . he said the new Google Analytics chart style was inspired by the dotted flight path of Indiana Jones’s plane in Raiders of the Lost Ark). “Math is easy. Design is hard.” The goal is providing solutions for needs . . . solving problems/frustrations . . . allowing people to participate in the data. Book plug: Mental Models by Indi Young (nice cover design).

Jeffrey shared the following quote from a young Steve Jobs:

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple with all these simple solutions, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don’t work. Then you get into the problem, and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, underlying principle of the problem, and come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works.
—Steve Jobs, 1984

Overall, this was a great presentation and a perfect way to end the conference. The slides for this keynote presentation can be downloaded at veen.com/data-design.pdf. Jeffrey made a point to mention that he used Gotham font in his slides (as does the 9/11 Memorial and the current Obama campaign).

Last Wednesday’s South Park episode, “Imaginationland,” was one of the best I’ve seen in ages. I loved the parts with M. Night Shyamalan, Michael Bay, and Mel Gibson. They were perfect. The episode was the beginning of what I’m sure will be an epic three-part story arc. On the flip side, Heroes does not seem to be maintaining its great momentum from last season. I don’t really care about the new characters; I just tolerate them as I wait to learn about the plot threads from last season. Those are the only two shows I watch (download) with any regularity.

Though sometimes I catch MythBusters or Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe on the Discovery Channel. I would definitely watch a number of Comedy Central and Cartoon Network shows if Comcast offered channels à la carte. But I’m not wasting money on expanded basic cable or any premium packages when more than 90% of it is commercial-ridden stuff I would never watch. At least I have Adult Swim and MotherLoad.

Here are a couple of my favorite Discovery Channel show quotes (there are lots more at quotedump):

“I’m here to slow you down, cost you money, and, in general, retard the process.”
—Mike Rowe, Dirty Jobs, Season 2, “Well Digger”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own.”
—Adam Savage, MythBusters (as borrowed from Paul Bradford in The Dungeonmaster)

In unrelated news, I guess I am a Round Earther. Do you know any Flat Earthers?

How about Pastafarians (AKA Flying Spaghetti Monster believers)?

It’s cool that the Flying Spaghetti Monster originated at Oregon State University. I never knew that until looking it up on Wikipedia recently. I had always assumed this most nourishing deity had come from someplace like Fark.com.

Oregon State University is pretty cool for being able to call itself the home of Linus Pauling, open source software like Firefox, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Yes, everybody is talking about the cuddly hospice cat that can sense impending death. Here’s a quote from today’s article, “Oscar the cat predicts patients’ deaths,” from the AP:

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

I am intrigued by this story and its “psychic kitty” implications. MSNBC is also covering it. This now-famous cat Oscar looks a lot like a longer-haired version of my kitten/cat Eli.

So . . . what is ESP? Is there a missing sixth sense in humans? Have humans lost the ability to sense subtle (but important) electrical charges or chemicals? Is this still the case if our, uh, “doors of perception” are opened?

And now for your sporting news.

Have the professional sports headlines ever been so screwed up? I’ve been thinking about mentioning this for a while, but the scandals just keep getting worse. The NBA is in trouble with allegations of a crooked referee, Tim Donaghy, who fixed games (not to mention its crappy playoff system where the best teams regularly meet before the NBA Finals). The NFL is under fire with the off-field activities of a number of players, headlined by Michael Vick (dogfighting allegations) and Adam “Pacman” Jones (coercion stemming from a nightclub shooting). And Major League Baseball is trying to deal with Barry Bonds on the verge of breaking Hank Aaron’s beloved all-time home run record (and the forever-ongoing steroids scandals in general). So, I guess the NHL must be feeling pretty good right about now . . . except that no one cares about the NHL. Here’s a good summary of the current NBA, NFL, and MLB controversies from ESPN columnist Pat Forde: “For Stern, Goodell and Selig, hot seat has rarely been hotter.”

Meanwhile, the Tour de France 2007 has been a mushrooming disaster of doping and disqualified riders, dating back to last year with the (now unrecognized) winner Floyd Landis. And then there’s the recent murder-suicide of Chris Benoit, adding to professional wrestling’s legacy of untimely deaths and tragedies (which may kill the WWE yet). And since I’ve shifted from sports to entertainment with that mention of pro wrestling, let me also say that it amazes me how many Hollywood starlets are doing (hard?) time these days (mainly for drunk driving and drug possession). Don’t you just despise humanity sometimes?

Hey, but speaking of jail . . . what about doing time in the Philippines and practicing Michael Jackson dance moves with your fellow inmates? That’s cool, right? You should watch these orange-suited prisoners reenact “Thriller” on YouTube.

Here’s Tom with the weather.

So, all this talk about sports scandals and dumb celebrities makes me want to listen to Tool’s Ænima. And maybe Bill Hicks too.

“Today young men on acid realize that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There’s no such thing as death. Life is only a dream and we’re the imagination of ourselves.”

(Read more quotations at quotedump.com.)

See you in Arizona Bay.

In the best-of-three finals, they beat the North Carolina Tar Heels for the second straight season.

OK, you know how I love random trivia, so here are some CWS facts:

The Beavers (49-18) trailed for only one of 45 innings they played in Omaha, and they became the first team to win four CWS games by at least six runs. North Carolina (57-15) was runner-up for the second straight year after the first CWS finals rematch since Arizona State and USC met in 1973.

And some more trivia: Last year, Oregon State became the first true northern team since Ohio State in 1966 to win the championship. This year, Oregon State became the first team since LSU in 1997 to repeat as College World Series champs. Texas (1949-50), Southern California (1970-74) and Stanford (1987-88) also won consecutive titles.

Read the full ESPN recap and last night’s AP article.

Now go out and consume a crapload of officially licensed Oregon State merchandise and be happy! It’s just like OMM says: “Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy. And be happy.”

I guess the next exciting sports event is the NBA Draft on Thursday, especially for Portland and Seattle. Also, the NHL Draft, according to Bill Simmons, apparently just happened too.

Aside from Wimbledon 2007, I can’t think of any other sports news I care about. So, shifting gears . . . while not a sport (but perhaps akin to gambling), exotic melon tasting is fun. Yesterday I bought a pepino melon (also called a tree melon or pepino dulce) to try. (It’s like Jerry Seinfeld once said: “Fruit is a gamble. I know that going in.”) What is a pepino dulce? It’s about the size of a baseball, but shaped like a pear. Here’s a quote:

Pepino is Spanish for cucumber. Dulce means sweet. This yellow-skinned fruit with streaks of purple is between four and six inches in length and is a member of the nightshade family along with peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, and potatoes. . . . Pepinos grow on shrubs that reach a height of 3 feet. The plant has evergreen leaves and purple blossoms. It’s difficult to understand how it ended up being named cucumber in Spanish. The inside contains a sweet orange or yellow flesh with edible seeds.

I’m looking forward to tasting it, though I think it needs a day to ripen. What random produce item will I throw a few dollars at next? Well, Sunday’s purchase was a toss-up between the pepino and the kiwano (horned melon). So, maybe I’ll get a kiwano next time; it’s certainly a weird one. See more melon varieties.

Here’s an interesting article about the genetic modification of tree height that forest scientists at Oregon State University are working on: “A six-inch tall tree: researchers demonstrate way to control height.” Oregon State researchers are also looking into welcoming our nanobot overlords.

Lastly, have I ever mentioned that I don’t like amusement parks? I found a disturbing article last week and have been afraid to search for a follow-up. Anyone interested in cheap thrills in exchange for severed feet? Ugh. I have no idea what the girl was doing, or if the park will now be sued, but still . . . I’ve heard too many of these stories. About the worst I can remember personally is getting whiplash on a rollercoaster ride as a kid. I’d much rather take my thrillseeking desires into the mountains than pay to get buckled into some whirring mechanical contraption.

Speaking of mechanical contraptions . . . the OSU baseball boys should be rolling back into town this afternoon for a celebration in Parker Plaza, in front of Reser Stadium.

Well, the mystery was solved today. The quote is from the cartoon TV show “Invader Zim,” which, actually, I can’t ever remember watching. Maybe the soundbite was sampled in a song I’ve heard?

According to IMDb, Ms. Bitters, the schoolteacher, says the following to her class: “Children, your performance was miserable. Your parents will all receive phone calls instructing them to love you less now.”

So awesome.