In this episode, Martha and Grant honor winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes, those wacky awards for weird academic research, and they help a caller decipher a puzzling word from a personals ad: what does paratereseomaniac mean?
Pass the Gatorade! Martha and Grant work up a sweat in this episode as they tackle a sports quiz and lob vocabulary questions back and forth. They also settle a family dispute about the pronunciation of eco-friendly and unlock the etymology of...
interruption science n.— «The average knowledge worker switches tasks every three minutes, and, once distracted, a worker takes nearly a half-hour to resume the original task, according to Gloria Mark, a leader in the new field of...
operacy n.— «In fact, argument and criticism—the tools of philosophers and thinkers in any serious field of knowledge—are to be dispensed with in the de Bono outlook, since they apparently lead to a “dangerous arrogance.”...
tick and flick n.— «Unallocated offenders are expected to report to a community justice office, where a duty officer, usually with little knowledge of them, ticks them off after asking basic questions—a process known as “tick and...
user anthropologist n.— «He’s also sometimes referred to as a “user anthropologist.” To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much...