Did Steroids Help McGwire Hit More Homeruns? Maybe.
BY Joshua Hynes ON Tuesday, January 12, 2010 @ 10:44 am
The one item that people seem to be killing slugger Mark McGwire this morning is the suggestion that he made in last night’s Bob Costas interview that while he did take steroids, his homerun records are still on the up-and-up because the steroids did nothing to help him hit homeruns. McGwire cites previous seasons where he hit 40+ homeruns when he wasn’t taking steroids as evidence that his god-given ability is what helped him hit homeruns and not a syringe with magic power juice. While some, like Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Dispatch, are mocking Big Mac for thinking that “we could so naive to believe that”, I think it’s a suggestion that has to be considered.
ESPN’s Jayson Stark, commenting on McGwire’s interview, made an interesting point about the steroid issue in general stating, “I’ve long believed that we’ve always oversimplified the reasons that many players took PEDs.” And I have to say I agree. While I think it might be foolish for McGwire to suggest that taking steroids didn’t have any effect on his ability to hit balls further, it’s also as foolish to suggest that the only reason he hit as many homeruns as he did in 1998 is because of steroids. Just how many more homeruns did he hit because of steroids? 2? 5? 8? 70? The answer probably lies somewhere in muddy middle unfortunately, and we’ll never really know what Mark could have done without steroids.
In the end though, the summer of 1998 was a magical summer and it brought baseball back to the masses in a tantalizing way. Almost a decade later now, we’re finding out that the two primary characters in that summer drama, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, were taking steroids. Does that taint that experience a little? Sure. But that should just remind us that all men are fallen, prone to mistakes and finding out that people, even “good people” like Mark, shouldn’t surprise us.
The New York Times had an article in Sunday's paper on Hoefler & Jones new typeface and the challenges with displaying fonts correctly on screen. Overall an introductory article for those with little knowledge of typefaces and their design process. The "secret formula they can't talk about yet" is probably a partnership with Typekit. They've been twittering about it for months. 0 Comments
Connecting The Dots On Big Mac’s Big Apology
BY Joshua Hynes ON Tuesday, January 12, 2010 @ 8:34 am
People don’t care much about the details. Right?
--snip--
Compared to [Jason Giambi’s, Alex Rodriguez’s and Manny Ramirez’s] confessions, this man came off as way more real, way more sympathetic, way less scripted and way more regretful than the three of them combined.
I wouldn’t say I’m totally clear on what he regretted. But at least I was 100 percent convinced that he sincerely regretted it—whatever it was.
And the fact is, history tells us that’s usually all America asks.
The tears, the sniffles, the pain—Mark McGwire laid them all out there in front of the nation.
The actual words—aw, nobody listens to them real closely, anyway.
So should he have said it better, connected those dots, acknowledged the damage he’s inflicted on his sport? I wish he had.
Jayson Stark
McGwire said enough to be believable (2010, )
Amazon.com has Vampire Weekend's new album, Contra, on sale today only for $3.99. If you want to listen to it first, check out their MySpace page for a free album stream. 0 Comments
From Passion 2010 John Piper asks "Is Jesus An Egomaniac?" 0 Comments
See and See But Do Not Perceive
BY Joshua Hynes ON Wednesday, January 6, 2010 @ 1:55 pm
Well, see and see but do not perceive, hear and hear but do not understand, as the Lord says. I can’t claim to understand that saying, as many times as I’ve heard it, and even preached on it. It simply states a deeply mysterious fact. You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
Marilynne Robinson
Gilead – A Novel (2004, pg. 7)
I'm absolutely loving Wayne Brezinka Illustration blog. I think I just lost about 10 minutes going through his archives. Amazing work. 0 Comments
Newly-found blogging favorite Justin Taylor has released an iPhone/iTouch app for his blog. It was produced by Rainsong Media. 0 Comments
Well, Hello Monday.
BY Joshua Hynes ON Monday, January 4, 2010 @ 8:13 am
Ah, Monday. A renewed start to new week to the new year. A speaking of renewed starts, here’s a photo I took over the weekend, which plays into those “New Year Resolutions” things. Enjoy.
Justin Taylor, Editorial Director for Crossway, has posted some interviews of Marilynne Robinson as well as some great summarizations of her fictional and non-fictional works. My 2010 Reading List has just had its first additions. 0 Comments
A Renewed Start
BY Joshua Hynes ON Friday, January 1, 2010 @ 6:32 pm
Well so long 2009. Last year was probably one of those few tough, exciting, life-changing years and this year looks to continue that trend. That said, here are some personal goals I have for myself during this next turn around the sun.
- Complete a half-marathon. I’m probably crazy (and some people have told me as much), but it’s not so much about finishing a half-marathon as it is about the process getting there. The race is just the carrot to get me out there training every week. Going through the process of training though is really what I want to do. Also finishing a half-marathon will be a great cumulation to look back on after going through the entire process.
- Finish more books. The word “quality” is key here. After finishing only 11 books in 2009, I found myself sputtering halfway at least half a dozen titles. This year I want to finish books and learn to give up on a book quicker. There are just too many great books out there to waste it on a book I just can’t find myself getting into at that particular moment.
- Finally get into a fantasy baseball keeper league. I have a potential opening in a league. It’s an auction league, which intrigues me. Being able to set your roster weekly versus daily? Not so much.
- Take more pictures. I’ve always wanted to improve my amateur photography skills, and now I have the best reason to do it.
- Take a vacation. We weren’t able to go on vacation this past year because I wanted to save as much time as possible for the arrival of our daughter this past December, and I’m glad I did. But now that’s she here, its time to head back out on the road and relax somewhere. And, preferably, I’m told somewhere with a beach.
- Get committed about my faith. Between getting into a small group, becoming more committed to a daily devotional time and spending more time studying Scripture, there’s plenty of room for improvement. With the Lord’s strength, this is one goal I hope I keep. Thankfully D.A. Carson‘s new daily devotional blog looks to be a great place to start.
Those are my goals for 2010. How about you?
Hello Old Friends
BY Joshua Hynes ON Wednesday, December 30, 2009 @ 10:45 am
Nine months.
It doesn’t really feel like its been that long. Yet within nine short months my world has completely shifted. The lack of posting around here however has little to do with these personal events. In fact the reason I’ve stopped posting: I got burned out. When keeping a blog began to feel more like a chore than a hobby, I realized some time off was needed. I have kept an active Twitter account this past year, so its not like I completely fell off the wagon. But time off over these last 9 months has been great for me as I worked through a number of personal events and issues.
The biggest shift in my life these past nine months has been a more recent development. That being the birth of our first child, Evelyn. She was born December 16th and she’s simply amazing. Everyday with her is a joyful one and a constant reminder of God’s blessing in our lives.
As far as my plans for this blog going forward, I’m going to start posting again here. I’ve been in the process of designing a formal personal website and I’m hoping to have it launched sometime within the next 6 months. Once launched I’ll be moving my blogging activities over there. But it’ll be better. Trust me. In the meantime, look for postings to start back up again.
Information Designers Should Not Assume Their Readers Are Stupid (Tufte)
BY Joshua Hynes ON Monday, March 30, 2009 @ 2:22 pm
Lurking behind chartjunk is contempt both for information and for audience. Chartjunk promoters imagine that numbers and details are boring, dull, and tedious, requiring ornament to enliven. Cosmetic decoration, which frequently distorts the data, will never salvage an underlying lack of content. If the numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. Credibility vanishes in clouds of chartjunk; who would trust a chart that looks like a video game?
Worse is the contempt for our audience, designing as if readers were obtuse and uncaring. In fact, consumers of graphic are often more intelligent about the information at hand than those who fabricate the data decoration. And, no matter what, the operating moral premise of information design should be that our readers are alert and caring; they may be busy, eager to get on with it, but they are not stupid. Clarity and simplicity are completely opposite simple-mindedness. Disrespect for the audience will leak through, damaging communication. What E.B. White said of writing is equally true for information design: “No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.”
Edward Tufte
Envisioning Information (1990, pgs. 34-35)
Caution: Type Nerd Alert! Check out the Deep Font Challenge for a fun typeface guessing game. Bonus: You finally get to shoot that damn Comic Sans. 0 Comments
Obama, Socialism and Charitable Reductions
BY Joshua Hynes ON Wednesday, March 25, 2009 @ 8:32 am
In the interest of full disclosure, I did not watch President Obama’s 2010 Budget Press Conference last night. So my reactions are based off of the few comments I’ve heard on the radio and read online this morning. From what I can gather in summary news stories, it appears that Obama has laid out basically what he said he would within his State of the Union address a few weeks ago. Yet one item in particular seems to setting off people on both sides of the aisle though: reducing the amount of charitable deductions for couples making $250,000 annually (or $200,000 for singles annually) from 35% to 28%.
Much of the rhetoric I’ve read or heard this morning from more staunch “right-wingers” are starting to use the dreaded “S” word: socialism. That’s right people! We’re apparently not only on its path but our current President paving a superhighway to the glorious promised land with his left-wing friends. Apparently people believe that one President can undo in 4 years what has been built in the past 222 years since our Constitution was adopted. Within this subtly sly move from the administration, Obama has single-handedly started the first pebble in concerted government-controlled landslide to render all non-profit and private charities pointless. Not only is such an idea reckless, but seems to feed off the harbored fears many within the Republican Party were told about our now “evil” President: namely, he’s a true-blue socialist that would make William Clinton blush. People who buy into such conspiratorial theories will see what they want to see inevitably, but for those you who are interested in separating fact from fiction, know this: That’s not quite what the President is proposing.
According to the Wall Street Journal today, Obama’s proposed tax-cuts merely reduces the charitable deductions to the Clinton years deduction limits. Alan Binder at the Journal explains this a bit better:
As the law now stands, when a family that does not itemize deductions on its tax return donates $100 to its favorite charity, the donation costs the family $100. But when an itemizing family in the 25% bracket donates $100, it costs them only $75 after tax. And when an itemizer in the 35% bracket donates $100, the after-tax cost is only $65. Thus the richer you are, the less it costs. Is it socialistic to say that seems a little backwards?
If that tax treatment strikes you as fair, try another example. Suppose those same three families each pay $10,000 a year in interest on their home mortgages. The cost to the non-itemizer is the full $10,000. For the family in the 25% bracket that itemizes, the net cost after taxes is only $7,500. And for the upper-income family in the 35% bracket that itemizes, the net cost is a mere $6,500. Just imagine a member of Congress proposing a homeownership subsidy like that directly, rather than through the tax code: 35% to the rich, 25% to the middle class, and nothing to the poor. Would anyone support it?
If Obama is doing anything, it appears he’s trying to undo the last eight years from George W. Bush, which for many people wouldn’t be that horrible of an idea. Now if he could just start bringing home our troops.
Drawing In Flash
BY Joshua Hynes ON Tuesday, February 24, 2009 @ 10:04 am
boy from Merdanchik on Vimeo.
WWF “Our Life At The Cost of Theirs?” Poster Series
BY Joshua Hynes ON Friday, February 6, 2009 @ 3:37 pm
Here’s an amazing poster series from Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai, India. Check out all the posters.
“I Can Read Movies” Book Cover Series
BY Joshua Hynes ON Friday, February 6, 2009 @ 3:11 pm
I’m in love with “I Can Read Movies” Book Cover Series. Brilliant!
I must say I've been very impressed with the viral marketing efforts of the upcoming film The Watchmen, helping introduce people to the back-story further for the alternative reality world coming to theatres March 6, 2009. 0 Comments
TIME Magazine: "I've finally found something more stupid than Twitter. — Claire Suddath (25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You; Thursday, Feb. 05, 2009) 1 Comment
The Limits of Science
BY Joshua Hynes ON Wednesday, February 4, 2009 @ 12:34 am
Scientific theories cannot be said to “explain the world"—they only explain the phenomena that are observed within the world. Furthermore ... scientific theories do not and are not intended to describe and explain “everything about the world"—such as its purpose. Law, economics and sociology can be cited as examples of disciplines which engage with domain-specific phenomena without in any way having to regard themselves as somehow being inferior to or dependent on the natural sciences.
Yet most important, there are many questions that by their very nature must be recognized to lie beyond the legitimate scope of the scientific method, as this is normally understood. For example, is there purpose within nature? [Richard] Dawkins regards this as a spurious nonquestion. Yet this is hardly an illegitimate question for human beings to ask or to hope to have answered. ... The question simply cannot be dismissed as illegitimate or nonsensical; it is simply being declared to lie beyond the scope of the scientific method. If it can be answered, it must be answered on other grounds.
Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath
The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (2007, pg. 38)
I've found Doug Avery's article and review of The Geometry of Design to be a fascinating read today. 3 Comments
There are certain things I have soft spots for in my life: puppies, dark chocolate and Kelly Clarkson singles. And with a three-day weekend staring me in the face (what, you don't get Superbowl Monday off as well?), here's the new fun and pop-infectious Kelly Clarkson single, "My Life Would Suck Without You", to get your weekend started. Apparently the single jumped 96 spots on Billboard's Top 100 this past week, moving from 97th to 1st. If this was 1984 and I still listened to the radio, I might actually be impressed by that record-breaking accomplishment. 0 Comments