Tonight CNBC interviewed science fiction luminary Neal Stephenson about his new "geoengineering climate change thriller" — and about his coining of the original term "metaverse." Author Neal Stephenson shot to fame almost 30 years ago with the science-fiction novel "Snow Crash," which envisioned a future dominated by mega-corporations and organized crime, competing for dominance in both the real world and the "metaverse," a computer-generated world accessible through virtual reality headsets. Since then, he's written several more novels encompassing technology and history, including a trilogy set at the dawn of the scientific revolution, and has done work for various technology companies including Jeff Bezos' space travel company, Blue Origin, and augmented reality company Magic Leap.

His new novel, "Termination Shock," out November 16, focuses on the looming issue of our age — human-generated climate change, projecting a near future of extreme weather and social chaos. Against this setting, a maverick oilman decides to take matters into his own hands and builds the world's biggest gun to shoot canisters of sulfur dioxide into the air, echoing the effects of a volcanic eruption and temporarily cooling parts of the globe. Geopolitics, social media and Dutch royalty all play a part.

Stephenson acknowledges that geoengineering is a radical step, but suggests as the effects of climate change grow more destructive, the demand for radical solutions will grow.
In the interview Stephenson suggests one factor that might increase popular support for climate-change action: rising sea levels. "You can be as ideological as you want. But you can't argue with the fact that your house is full of water."

The interview also touches on how it was 1992 when Stephenson coined the word "metaverse," and now it's being claimed by major tech companies. "All I can do is kind of sit back and watch it in amazement," Stephenson tells CNBC: But, as many have noticed, "There's a pretty big gap between what Facebook is actually doing, like running Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram, and the visions that they're talking about for the metaverse."
Neil Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot readers back in 2004...

Does a meme a day keep the doctor away? Not quite, but it looks like it might help, according to one recent study. From a report: Researchers with Pennsylvania State University and the University of California Santa Barbara found that memes helped people cope with life during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study published this week in the Psychology of Popular Media journal. Researchers found that those who viewed memes -- a type of humor they described as funny or cute pictures that reference pop culture -- reported "higher levels of humor" and more positive feelings, according to a news release from the American Psychological Association, which publishes the journal.

They surveyed 748 people online last December: 72% of those who responded were white, 54% identified as women, 63% didn't hold a college degree, and their ages ranged from 18 to 88, the release states. They were shown a variety of meme types, with different kinds of photos and captions, and asked to rate the cuteness, humor and emotional responses prompted by the materials, as well as how much the memes in question made them think about COVID-19. Those who viewed memes that specifically referenced the pandemic felt less stress than those who viewed non-pandemic-related memes. They also felt more capable of coping with the COVID-19 crisis and were better at processing information, according to the study. And they were also less likely to be stressed about the pandemic than those who didn't view memes related to COVID-19 at all, researchers concluded.

An anonymous reader writes: As reported by Motherboard, Emily Crose, a FOIA researcher, obtained emailed complaints showing how life at the NSA can be incredibly mundane:

"The cafe menu items and pricing are out of control! Weighing the food to get more money, the scales are not properly adjusted, ripping us off. They stopped serving fried eggs at the OPS1 breakfast bar because it's faster and cheaper to get them. Now if you go to the grill the price is inflated. What's the difference between the grilled chicken at the grill and the grilled chick at the chicken shack?"

A person who used to work in the intelligence community told that they could confirm that the NSA cafeteria is "depressingly bad." "Maybe not the worst cafeteria I've ever eaten in but worse than the time I ate at US run military base mess hall," they said, asking to remain anonymous.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're an iPhone user, the weather is always a particularly nice 70 degrees. Or 68 degrees. Any temperature but 69 degrees, actually, because it turns out that the built-in weather app on some versions of iOS -- including the current version, iOS 14.6 -- will refuse to display the internet's favorite number, even if the actual temperature in a given location is, in fact, 69 degrees. It's not clear if this is a bug or an intentional attempt from Apple to cut down on 69-related humor. The rounding is only visible in the weather app itself: clicking through to Apple's source data from Weather.com will show the proper temperature, as does Apple's home screen widgets.

League of Legends developer Riot Games released a 37-track album of ambient tunes (now on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music) "that will let gamers stream their sessions accompanied by music that doesn't infringe copyright protections," reports Bloomberg.

And that's just one response to aggressive copyright enforcement: For example, a new Guardians of the Galaxy game to be released later this year will be loaded with a soundtrack with songs by Iron Maiden, KISS, Wham!, Blondie and more. To stay on the good side of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the studio behind the game, Eidos Montreal, has created a toggle switch that will allow gamers to turn off the soundtrack when live streaming, Venturebeat has reported. Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt SA also created an option for players to turn off certain songs that could cause trouble and replace them with an alternative.

After largely ignoring streaming platforms for years, last spring the music industry suddenly bore down on Twitch, owned by Amazon.com Inc. and started sending users thousands of DMCA takedowns for copyright violations. Twitch responded by telling users they could no longer use copyrighted material and also had to remove old posts that violated the rules. Some games are still struggling to adapt. Earlier this month, a number of music publishers, including those that represent Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande, sued Roblox Corp. for copyright infringement, saying the company hasn't licensed the music many of its creators have used in their games. The lawsuit is seeking at least $200 million in damages, the Wall Street Journal reported...

The collection is just the beginning and Riot said it's committed to creating more projects like Sessions in the future.

CBS News reports: A mysterious and puzzling email with the subject line of "Integration Test Email #1" landed in the boxes of some HBO Max subscribers on Thursday. Just hours later, the company said that the message was intended to be an empty test email, and "yes, it was the intern." The unnamed intern quickly became the new star of HBO Max on social media, as hundreds of encouraging messages poured in to reassure the intern that mistakes happen, in all phases of careers... And instead of subscribers responding with angry messages about an inconvenience, they used the opportunity to tell their own stories of work snafus...

One individual wrote about how they "once globally took down Spotify." It almost happened twice," they wrote. "...You managed to find something broken in the way integration tests are done. It's a good thing and will help improve things...."

"When I was 25 I made a PDF assigning each employee to the Muppet they reminded me of the most," another wrote. "I meant to send it to my work friend, but I accidentally sent it to the entire company. My supervisor (Beaker) wanted to fire me, but the owners (Bert & Ernie) intervened."
Dozens of news outlets, from the Huffington Post to media wire services, soon began covering the funny stories shared in support:

• "Don't feel bad Integration Test Email #1 intern...when I was an intern once I accidentally powered off every device during a complicated laser experiment at MIT."
• "In the first month of my new HR job with a major defense contractor, I sent out an email about shirt orders that included the division president and several corporate leaders. Title of email: Your Shit is in the HR Office..."

But my favorite reply of all?

"Dear intern, welcome to Systems Engineering."

Share your own thoughts and stories of support in the comments...

Today ZDNet's "Technically Incorrect" columnist Chris Matyszczyk discussed a new pop-up message that's now appearing in Windows 10's notification center.

It's warning Windows users that "Microsoft recommends different browser settings. Want to change them?" The notification adds that you'll get "Search that gives you back time and money." And "fast and secure search results with Bing." Oh, yes. Bing, the MySpace to Google's Facebook, is still being pushed.

I learned that this Bing-pushing is pushing Windows users' buttons. There's a little Reddit thread where you'll see laments such as: "You're not the first to have this Microsoft Annoyance. Apparently, there are thousands in front of you." The most poignant, perhaps, was this: "Miserably I get this despite using Edge AND having Bing set as my default search engine... (the latter of which for Microsoft Rewards). I think the 'problem' is that not ALL of my browsers had Bing as the default search engine? Which is ridiculous because I never use Chrome or Firefox anyway. But after clicking the popup, it ludicrously opened up all my browsers...."

What's most distressing is the lack of any attempt at charm or humor in these notifications. Are they all written by engineers? Or robots, perhaps...? Perhaps Microsoft believes that irritation works. Perhaps it simply has no better ideas to persuade anyone to try Bing.

And really, it's not as if Redmond is alone in pursuing this sort of communication. Why, I've even had Apple notifying me of its angry feelings whenever I open, oh, Microsoft Edge.

According to The Guardian, a man in Catalonia died after becoming trapped inside a large dinosaur statue while trying to retrieve his smartphone. From the report: Officers were called to the statue in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a satellite town of Barcelona, after a man and his son noticed something inside the papier-mache stegosaurus on Saturday afternoon. A spokeswoman for the regional police force, the Mossos d'Esquadra, said the death of the 39-year-old man was not being treated as suspicious.

"A father and son noticed that there was something inside and raised the alarm," she said. "We found the body of a man inside the leg of this dinosaur statue. It's an accidental death; there was no violence. This person got inside the statue's leg and got trapped. It looks as though he was trying to retrieve a mobile phone, which he'd dropped. It looks like he entered the statue head first and couldn't get out." "We're still waiting for the autopsy results, so we don't know how long he was in there, but it seems he was there for a couple of days," she added. Slashdot reader shanen submitted this story with the following commentary: Not sure what the technology link is. Smartphones make people stupid? Dinosaurs are scientific, but this is ridiculous? It would be funny, but it's too gruesome. But I guess I'll go ahead and submit it in the Darwin Awards category. Maybe a better title is man kills himself with dinosaur and smartphone? Death by paper mache?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Among humans, laughter can signify a lot of different things, from intimacy to discomfort. Among animals, however, laughter usually communicates something along the lines of "this is playtime -- I'm not actually going for your throat." According to new research from the University of California, Los Angeles, there are likely at least 65 different creatures, including humans, that make these vocalizations. They're most commonly found in primates, but they have also been noted in distant relatives like birds. It's not clear whether this is because laughter has arisen several times over the course of evolution or if it's more widespread and we just haven't noticed.

The list of "laughing" animals is mostly made up of primates, but there are a few other mammals on the list, such as the degu -- whose laugh is described as purring or grumbling -- and the killer whale. There are even three birds on the list, such as the kea parrot, which uses play vocalizations discovered in 2017. According to [Sasha Winkler, a PhD student in UCLA's anthropology department], there have been other surveys of the primates who laugh, but little work has been done outside that group. "To my knowledge, no one has gone through and tried to see a comprehensive look of all the vocalizations during play across all mammals, and we even found some birds," she said. Winkler told Ars that understanding animal laughter could help us understand the origins of human laughter. Laughter in humans plays several other functions beyond play, such as indicating membership in a group. The findings appear in the journal Bioacoustics.

"An XKCD comic — and its many remixes — perfectly captures the absurdity of academic research," writes the Atlantic (in an article shared by Slashdot reader shanen).

It argues that the cartoon "captured the attention of scientists — and inspired many to create versions specific to their own disciplines. Together, these became a global, interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of modern research practices." It depicts a taxonomy of the 12 "Types of Scientific Paper," presented in a grid. "The immune system is at it again," one paper's title reads. "My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it," declares another. The gag reveals how research literature, when stripped of its jargon, is just as susceptible to repetition, triviality, pandering, and pettiness as other forms of communication. The cartoon's childlike simplicity, though, seemed to offer cover for scientists to critique and celebrate their work at the same time...

You couldn't keep the biologists away from the fun ("New microscope!! Yours is now obsolete"), and — in their usual fashion — the science journalists soon followed ("Readers love animals"). A doctoral student cobbled together a website to help users generate their own versions. We reached Peak Meme with the creation of a meta-meme outlining a taxonomy of academic-paper memes. At that point, the writer and internet activist Cory Doctorow lauded the collective project of producing these jokes as "an act of wry, insightful auto-ethnography — self-criticism wrapped in humor that tells a story."

Put another way: The joke was on target. "The meme hits the right nerve," says Vinay Prasad, an associate epidemiology professor and a prominent critic of medical research. "Many papers serve no purpose, advance no agenda, may not be correct, make no sense, and are poorly read. But they are required for promotion." The scholarly literature in many fields is riddled with extraneous work; indeed, I've always been intrigued by the idea that this sorry outcome was more or less inevitable, given the incentives at play. Take a bunch of clever, ambitious people and tell them to get as many papers published as possible while still technically passing muster through peer review ... and what do you think is going to happen? Of course the system gets gamed: The results from one experiment get sliced up into a dozen papers, statistics are massaged to produce more interesting results, and conclusions become exaggerated. The most prolific authors have found a way to publish more than one scientific paper a week. Those who can't keep up might hire a paper mill to do (or fake) the work on their behalf.
The article argues the Covid-19 pandemic induced medical journals to forego papers about large-scale clinical trials while "rapidly accepting reports that described just a handful of patients. More than a few CVs were beefed up along the way."

But pandemic publishing has only served to exacerbate some well-established bad habits, Michael Johansen, a family-medicine physician and researcher who has criticized many studies as being of minimal value, told me. "COVID publications appear to be representative of the literature at large: a few really important papers and a whole bunch of stuff that isn't or shouldn't be read."
Unfortunately, the Atlantic adds, "none of the scientists I talked with could think of a realistic solution."

A farmer in Belgium has caused a stir after inadvertently redrawing the country's border with France. From a report: A local history enthusiast was walking in the forest when he noticed the stone marking the boundary between the two countries had moved 2.29m (7.5ft). The Belgian farmer, apparently annoyed by the stone in his tractor's path, had moved it inside French territory. Instead of causing international uproar, the incident has been met with smiles on both sides of the border. "He made Belgium bigger and France smaller, it's not a good idea," David Lavaux, mayor of the Belgian village of Erquelinnes, told French TV channel TF1. That sort of move caused a headache between private landowners, he pointed out, let alone neighbouring states. The border between France and what is now Belgium stretches 620km (390 miles). It was formally established under the Treaty of Kortrijk, signed in 1820 after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo five years earlier. The stone dates back to 1819, when the border was first marked out. "I was happy, my town was bigger," the Belgian mayor added with a laugh. "But the mayor of Bousignies-sur-Roc didn't agree."

A viral internet joke becomes a real-life, good-natured 'battle' for a lot of people with the same first name. Behind the scenes of the 'JoshFight.' From a report: It began as a joke, Josh Swain emphasized. Spring, a year ago. As a pandemic surged, and millions idled at home, Swain, an engineering student at the University of Arizona, was very bored online. He noted that every time he tried to create a social media account, the name Josh Swain was already taken. An amused Swain logged onto Facebook, gathered every "Josh Swain" he could find into a group message, and offered a brash challenge, which was basically this: On April 24, 2021, everyone named Josh Swain should meet at these select coordinates -- 40.8223286, -96.79820002; it turned out to be farmland in Nebraska -- and duel for the right to be The One and Only Josh Swain. "We fight, whoever wins gets to keep the name, everyone else has to change their name, you have a year to prepare, good luck," Swain wrote.

Over time, Swain's terse, off-the-cuff, throw-down to all Josh Swains became a viral internet meme, leaping the curb from a bored joke into something quite real. The battle would broaden from Josh Swains to anyone named Josh, with Joshes from all over suggesting they, too, would come to Nebraska for a fight to be the The Only Josh. Terms of engagement were offered: they'd fight with foam pool noodles. Last Josh Standing wins. A public location was settled upon. (The original one turned out to be a private farm.) There was even a charitable angle: Supporters were asked to make contributions to the Nebraska Children's Hospital and Medical Center Foundation, and bring an item for the local food bank. On Friday, Joshua Swain, 22, got on a plane for Nebraska. And this past Saturday, on a grassy field in Lincoln, it actually happened. Josh vs. Josh vs. Josh vs. Josh vs. Josh, in the JoshFight of the Century. "It was insane," Swain said. "I can't describe it. It's so heartwarming, so incredible. It was a beautiful day."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Amazon's small Twitter army of "ambassadors" was quietly conceived in 2018 under the codename "Veritas," which sought to train and dispatch select employees to the social media trenches to defend Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, according to an internal description of the program obtained exclusively by The Intercept. Amazon ambassadors drew attention this week as they responded to a wave of online criticism for the company's treatment of workers amid a union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama.

Anticipating criticisms of worker conditions at their fulfillment centers in particular, Amazon designed Veritas to train fulfillment center workers chosen for their "great sense of humor" to confront critics -- including policymakers -- on Twitter in a "blunt" manner. The document, produced as part of the pilot program in 2018 and marked "Amazon.com Confidential," also includes examples of how its ambassadors can snarkily respond to criticisms of the company and its CEO. Several examples involve Sen. Bernie Sanders, a longtime critic of the $1 trillion firm who has been targeted by it in recent days. It also provides examples of how to defend Bezos.

"To address speculation and false assertions in social media and online forums about the quality of the FC [Fulfillment Center] associate experience, we are creating a new social team staffed with active, tenured FC employees, who will be empowered to respond in a polite -- but blunt -- way to every untruth," the project description reads. "FC Ambassadors ('FCA') will respond to all posts and comments from customers, influencers (including policymakers), and media questioning the FC associate experience." Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, said via email: "FC Ambassadors are employees who work in our fulfillment centers and choose to share their personal experience -- the FC ambassador program helps show what it's actually like inside our fulfillment centers, along with the public tours we provide." According to the BBC, accounts claiming to be Amazon workers are using the @AmazonFC handle followed by a first name to praise their working conditions on Twitter. Twitter has now suspended many of the accounts, and Amazon has confirmed at least one is fake.

An otherwise meaningless game during Monday's preliminary stage of the $200,000 Magnus Carlsen Invitational left a pair of grandmasters in stitches while thrusting one of chess's most bizarre and least effective openings into the mainstream. From a report: Norway's Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura of the United States had already qualified for the knockout stage of the competition with one game left to play between them. Carlsen, the world's top-ranked player and reigning world champion, started the dead rubber typically enough by moving his king's pawn with the common 1 e4. Nakamura, the five-time US champion and current world No 18, mirrored it with 1 ... e5. And then all hell broke loose. Carlsen inched his king one space forward to the rank where his pawn had started. The self-destructive opening (2 Ke2) is known as the bongcloud for a simple reason: you'd have to be stoned to the gills to think it was a good idea.

The wink-wink move immediately sent Nakamura, who's been a visible champion of the bongcloud in recent years, into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Naturally, the American played along with 2 ... Ke7, which marked the first double bongcloud ever played in a major tournament and its official entry to chess theory (namely, the Bongcloud Counter-Gambit: Hotbox Variation). "Don't do this!" cried the Hungarian grandmaster Peter Leko from the commentary booth, looking on in disbelief as the friendly rivals quickly settled for a draw by repetition after six moves. "Is this, uh, called bongcloud? Yeah? It was something like of a bongcloud business. This Ke2-Ke7 stuff. Please definitely don't try it at home. Guys, just forget about it." Why is the bongcloud so bad? For one, it manages to break practically all of the principles you're taught about chess openings from day one: it doesn't fight for the center, it leaves the king exposed and it wastes time, all while eliminating the possibility of castling and managing to impede the development of the bishop and queen. Even the worst openings tend to have some redeeming quality. The bongcloud, not so much. What makes it funny (well, not to everyone) is the idea that two of the best players on the planet would use an opening so pure in its defiance of conventional wisdom.

A Brooklyn-based film director is simultaneously mocking and attempting to profit off the cryptocurrency craze for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by selling a year's worth of fart audio clips recorded in quarantine. The New York Post reports: "If people are selling digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?" Alex Ramirez-Mallis, 36, told The Post of his dank addition to the blockchain-based NFT market. His NFT, "One Calendar Year of Recorded Farts," began incubating in March 2020 when, at the beginning of the global coronavirus lockdown, Ramirez-Mallis and four of his friends began sharing recordings of their farts to a group chat on WhatsApp.

On the one-year anniversary of the US's COVID-19 quarantine this month -- by which point Ramirez-Mallis said he could darn near identify members of the group by their farts alone -- Ramirez-Mallis and his fellow farters compiled the recordings into a 52-minute "Master Collection" audio file. Now, the top bid for the file is currently $183. Individual fart recordings are also available for 0.05 Ethereum, or about $85 a pop. The gassy group has so far sold one, to an anonymous buyer.

Intel has hired Apple's former "I'm a Mac" actor Justin Long to create new ads praising PCs. From a report: Long starts each commercial with "Hello I'm a... Justin," with the typical white background you'd find on Apple's Mac vs. PC ads from the 2000s. Naturally, the ads focus on Mac vs. PC again, with Long mocking Apple's Touch Bar, lack of M1 multiple monitor support, and the "gray and grayer" color choices for a MacBook. One even goes all-in on Apple's lack of touchscreens in Macs or 2-in-1 support by mocking the fact you have to buy a tablet, keyboard, stylus, and even a dongle to match what's available on rival Intel-based laptops. Another ad also points out that "no one really games on a Mac." Intel has put out more ads where they point out that Mac doesn't have the gaming ecosystem that Windows laptops enjoy.

Amazon has quietly changed the design of its new app icon, replacing the blue ribbon on top that drew some unfavorable comparisons. From a report: Users of the Amazon Shopping app will now see a brown box that resembles a parcel with a blue strip that looks like packaging tape above the company's signature arrow in the shape of a smile. Amazon introduced the initial new icon in a handful of international markets in late January, but has now changed the design of the blue tape after some said it resembled a toothbrush-style mustache, similar to the one worn by Adolf Hitler. "I completely missed that amazon quietly tweaked its new icon to make it look... less like hitler," wrote Alex Hern, a technology editor for the Guardian, on Twitter. The new icon, the first design change in more than five years, replaces the shopping cart and ditches the word "Amazon," but displays the company's smiling arrow logo more prominently. The blue tape looks like it's being torn off, as if opening the package.

Frosty P writes: The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has removed Marko Rodriguez from the TinkerPop project he co-founded because his provocative Twitter posts were said to have violated the ASF Code of Conduct. "I was removed from the project I started 11 years ago for 'publishing offensive humor that borders on hate speech,'" Rodriguez explained in an email to The Register. "However, now that Big Tech has secured the ASF board, it is a way to 'shut me up' about the monopolistic practices of Big Tech." Rodriguez argues that "woke culture" is a creation of "Big Tech," and that it serves to protect the industry's economic monopoly "by monopolizing the ideology of the people." Asked whether he sees the problem in light of the content-moderation challenge faced by social media services, which police speech without clear, consistent rules or due process, he said not at all. "I like to tweet, so I tweet. If Apache likes to police tweets, then may they police tweets," Rodriguez replied. "The question becomes: do they really like to police tweets? Are they finding as much joy in policing tweets as I find in tweeting tweets? If so, then we are both happy and the world rejoices. If not, then how can we help Apache find joy ... For joyless people ultimately impede those that do find joy in what they do." In a subsequent message he noted he has received death threats demanding he apologize for his thoughts, and that those people always assume he's a Trump supporter. "I've never voted," he said. "I simply don't care."

Facebook has restricted access to news in Australia, and so far the tech giant seems to have taken a pretty broad definition of news. From a report: Some pages that don't fit the traditional news genre have been stripped out as part of the stoush between Facebook and the federal government over whether the social media company should pay for Australian content it runs on its site. In response to the outages, Facebook said government pages should not be hit by the changes. A spokesperson said any inadvertently impacted pages would be fixed. "As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted," the spokesperson said in a statement. [...] Post are down for the Bureau of Meteorology, the government agency responsible for providing weather service updates. [...] The health departments for the ACT, South Australia and Queensland have had posts taken down. [...] Law enforcement has also been caught by the ban. Content under the "latest news" tab for the Victoria Police Facebook page is unavailable. [...] Domestic, family and sexual violence services 1800RESPECT and DVConnect have had posts taken down. Also affected is the Australian Council of Trade Unions. [...] Other pages which have been stripped of their content include Urban List, which offer restaurant reviews, satire sites like the The Betoota Advocate and The Shovel, and even homemaker magazines like Home Beautiful.

An 8-year-old from Minneapolis recently pointed out a big problem with NPR's oldest news show, All Things Considered. Leo Shidla wrote to his local NPR station: My name is Leo and I am 8 years old. I listen to All Things Considered in the car with mom. I listen a lot. I never hear much about nature or dinosaurs or things like that. Maybe you should call your show Newsy things Considered, since I don't get to hear about all the things. Or please talk more about dinosaurs and cool things.
Sincerely,
Leo
NPR: Leo has a point. All Things Considered is about to turn 50 years old. NPR's archivists found the word "dinosaur" appearing in stories 294 times in the show's history. By comparison, "senator" has appeared 20,447 times. To remedy the situation, All Things Considered invited Leo to ask some questions about dinosaurs to Ashley Poust, a research associate at the San Diego Natural History Museum. Leo wants to be a paleontologist when he grows up.