Ira Glass

His latest book, Nothing to See Here, is available from Conundrum Press.

Act IV.

when small thoughts meet big brains.

Okay, so all this hour we've been talking about kid logic.

And you know, sometimes the incorrect logic of childhood does not get corrected during childhood.

It does not get corrected until much, much later, when childhood is long over.

Alex Blumberg explains.

I can reconstruct the events that led me to one of the most embarrassing conversations of my adult life.

The chain starts back when I was 11 or 12, and I first heard the term Nielsen family.

I was probably listening to some adults talk, and from their conversation I gathered that networks consulted Nielsen families to find out how popular a television show was.

But that didn't make sense.

Why would they only ask people named Nielsen which shows they liked?

I started thinking.

I knew that when they figured things like this out, they didn't ask everybody, they just asked a small percentage of people and then extrapolated.

I think I figured they'd done some research and found that the name Nielsen, because it was a common name maybe, and it seemed to cut across class and economic lines, actually came pretty close to a representative sample.

I knew this wasn't the way they measured public opinion now, but it seemed like the Nielsen surveys had been around for a while, and I figured they were just a holdover from a more primitive, less statistically rigorous time.

After that, I really didn't think about it again.

Or if I did, it was only with a mild curiosity.

I wonder why TV still does it that way.

Fast forward 20 years.