Radio, Amateurishly

  The past couple weeks have seen not one but at least two entries into the ham radio YouTube discourse on how amateur radio is dying. The second references the first, and in some ways is a rehash of the first. Neither video presents any empirical evidence, like number of licenses or number of QSOs logged in various databases; in fact, the second video's presenter actively rejects such measures. You might find this hard to believe, but I'm going to give the two YouTubers a free pass on that one. Ad hoc social criticism needn't be subjected to the pedantic sort of methodological rigor as, say, an academic paper. It's okay to make qualitative observations, as long as you don't get too carried away with rejecting scientific evidence that doesn't quite match your feelings. My criticism of the two videos and of the larger ham-radio-is-dying subgenre of blog articles and YouTube videos is in three parts: (1) the evidence supporting the two videos' conclusions re...

TORONTO—At the insistence of Dodgers' manager Dave Roberts, Major League Baseball has taken the extraordinary step of naming two broadcasters as co-MVPs for this year's World Series. The award was bestowed in a postgame ceremony to Fox Sports play-by-play presenter and color commentator Joe Davis and John Smoltz, respectively. "Some teams think of their fans as the twenty-sixth man," Roberts said during the presentation, referring to the traditional twenty-five spots on a regular season game-day roster. "We feel that through the entire World Series we had a twenty-sixth man and a twenty-seventh man right there in the broadcast booth. For seven games Joe and Smoltzie literally showed up every day and gave us the support we needed to get through the tough times." A surprised Joe Davis exclaimed, "I'm not gonna lie. During the top of the ninth I came this [expletive deleted] close to coming to terms with the fact that the What's-Their-Names might a...