Quiz Guy John Chaneski invites us to a party where all the adults have professions that match their children’s names. For example, if dad is a barber, or if mom is a recording engineer, what would they name their boys? This is part of a...
Dear friends and listeners, As we near the end of our biggest year yet, we must raise $75,000 before 11:59 PM, December 31st. Reaching that goal will mean covering fixed costs: Broadcast studio rental. A sound engineer and board operator. Website...
If you’re on tenterhooks, it means you’re in a state of anxious anticipation or suspense. But what IS a tenterhook? The answer goes back to a 15th-century manufacturing process. Also, you probably have a term for those crumbs that...
Pie charts were invented by the Scottish engineer William Playfair, but the name for these visual representations of data came later. In other countries, this type of graph goes by names for other round foods. In France, a pie chart is sometimes...
velvet coup n.— «A senior official with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen. Yadollah Javani, was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as saying opposition leaders, including Mir Hussein Moussavi, who came second in the June 12...
memristor n.— «The four passive components of electronics are the resistor, capacitor, inductor and the memristor, which was discovered only a few months ago. Memristors (from memory-resistors, geddit?) are resistors whose resistance...