Slashdot Mirror

I also found this comical link to "End of Pi Found" on some Physics forum:

http://lofi.forum.physorg.com/...

*SPOILER ALERT*

It's a '4'.

Can someone explain to me exactly what is so marvelous about what this dude can supposedly "see"?

A google search reveals a history of his story popping up from time to time - probably whenever he can find a venue to promote himself, and whenever sites like Slashdot get duped into posting about him - but I found nothing that describes anything that he's actually able to intuit about math since this injury other than a bunch of crap about how he can 'see mathematical patterns' now. Awesome - so how about parlaying that into any statement that demonstrates any extraordinary grasp of math? Because in all my searching, I haven't found this dude to have ever said anything that anyone couldn't easily just make up.

I also found this comical link to "End of Pi Found" on some Physics forum:

http://lofi.forum.physorg.com/...

Not sure if it's the same guy but it was posted by a Jason Padgett who says he is a "math/physics student in Washington state", and the Jason Padgett in the article is supposedly from Tacoma, Washington. Note that the post was from 2008 and the article that Slashdot has linked to describes Padgett as a "sophomore in college". Some math genius - still a sophomore in college 6 years later!

Slashdot, why do you waste my time with this crap?

I swear, Slashdot editors are worse than the patent office; they don't do even he smallest amount of verification before rubber stamping what is presented to them and pushing it out.

It has to do with the difference between phase and group velocities when dealing with groups of waves. You can have a phase velocity greater than c but information is transferred via the group velocity. One place to start is here, another here. You can find some nice applets around that will show it to you graphically. The topic comes up from time to time because it is at the heart of the misunderstanding of faster-than-light "photons".

No, it would not.

This problem is about the hydrostatic equilibrium of a self-gravitating sphere of water. Let's take:

• P to be pressure,
• g to be gravity,
• G to be Newton's gravitational constant = 6.67384E-11,
• R to be the radius of the planet,
• r to be distance from the centre of the planet. We will essentially use this a variable to integrate.

According to the last equation here, we have that:

dP = g(r) rho(r) dr

Water under great pressure does compress, but just to make things easy, let's assume it doesn't. This makes rho=1000Kg/m^3, a constant. We can also use the Shell theorem to point out that g(r)=-GM/r^2, where M is the mass inside r. We have thus:

M=4/3 pi r^3 rho

dP=-4/3G pi r^3 rho (rho/r^2)=-4/3G pi rho^2 r

Now we integrate this from R to 0, and determine that the pressure at the centre of a planet of radius R is:

P(R)=2/3G pi rho^2 R^2 :: Pascals

The radius of earth is roughly 6371Km, which means that if it were made entirely out of water, the pressure at the centre would be about 5.67gPa. Now take a look at this phase diagram for water and notice that at this pressure, and for any temperature roughly between 0 and 100C, water is in the Ice VII phase. Which is solid.

Thanks to rpenner here. Why can't I get fucking rho and pi to display?

Surfing Robot Tracks Great White Sharks

that was nowhere near as cool as I imagined it.

Maybe they have good reasons to distrust it...

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-modern-science-dysfunctional.html

The recent explosion in the number of retractions in scientific journals is just the tip of the iceberg and a symptom of a greater dysfunction that has been evolving the world of biomedical research say the editors-in-chief of two prominent journals in a presentation before a committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) today.

"Incentives have evolved over the decades to encourage some behaviors that are detrimental to good science," says Ferric Fang, editor-in-chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), who is speaking today at the meeting of the Committee of Science, Technology, and Law of the NAS along with Arturo Casadevall, editor-in -chief of mBio, the ASM's online, open-access journal.

In the past decade the number of retraction notices for scientific journals has increased more than 10-fold while the number of journals articles published has only increased by 44%. While retractions still represent a very small percentage of the total, the increase is still disturbing because it undermines society's confidence in scientific results and on public policy decisions that are based on those results, says Casadevall. Some of the retractions are due to simple error but many are a result of misconduct including falsification of data and plagiarism.

Link to full summary. Good thing this bias and falsification of data only exists in the biomedical sciences. Whew! Quick question: you're a researcher and you've just found, by empirical research, something that confirms what conservatives have been saying for decades. The effect of your research will be profound, and likely change the course of public policy. Do you publish, or quietly bury your story? Or, do you falsify data to support what you desire to be true? It happens. For real. Real scientists do this, people just like you.

By far, the more interesting question about this discovery is what kind of reasoning brought these researchers to dip their samples in wine and test if superconductivity would emerge?

Not the first scientists to take such a tangent:
http://www.physorg.com/news145255770.html

A team of Mexican scientists found that the heated vapor from 80-proof (40% alcohol) tequila blanco, when deposited on a silicon or stainless steel substrate, can form diamond films.

nuclear-fusion-simulation-high-gain-energy

How likely is this approach to pan out in testing? It seems to me that plasma control would be paramount to success. I've read elsewhere that there have been advances is plasma control for tokamak reactors using supercomputers. Could these advances also be applied to this technique?

~Scott

They got a grant for a 5-year study, in 2008. So it ain't over yet.

http://www.physorg.com/news135928212.html

EU still sticks to dictating what people and companies can do within it's own borders.

No they don't.

http://www.physorg.com/news180722781.html
"Researchers have known for more than 20 years that a reaction by a patient’s own immune system against the artery wall can trigger a heart attack."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/274921.stm
"Heart failure may be caused by a malfunctioning of the body's immune system, according to new research."

there's a lot more out there.. google it...

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-lifebrowser-personal-microsoft.html

"Searching a person's name made it possible for Horvitz to find the first e-mail that person sent him"

... they can penetrate almost anything they encounter ... Well... "penetrating" seems a bit out place... I think a more appropriate description would be something like "chance of interacting with other other particles is extremely low" Which of course makes detecting neutrino's a hell of a job. To get an impression of how hard that is, consider this: "About 65 billion (6.5×1010) solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the Sun in the region of the Earth." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino) and the size of the largest neutrino observatory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SskyDuTfH0o , http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/IceCube-schema.jpg

I think this very much is an Intel ad. I was curious, because this sounded familiar, so I looked it up. From the press release and GE's white paper, it looks like their system:
Uses 25 mAs dose (75% less than standard, they say)
Is ready in an hour, 100 times faster than when they started in 2006 (so 6-10x of that speedup is Moore's Law, the other 10-16x is algorithm improvement)
Uses 28 quad-core Xeons

On the other hand, a GPU solution from 2 years ago:
Gives a 2-4 mAs dose (97-99% less than standard, they say)
Is ready in 1-2 minutes, 100 times faster than contemporary CPU algorithms
Uses a single GPU

Better, faster, cheaper... Pick three.

Apparently light can move matter. http://www.physorg.com/news152456596.html

Granted I doubt a solar flare would affect an asteroid, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.

Depends on where it hits. One that big into the Indian Ocean could replicate Noah's Flood, which is probably what happened THEN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burckle_Crater

Sure. An inundation of the entire world for forty days and forty nights is no problem, all you need is a big enough impact. I take it this Holocene Impact Working Group has a religious agenda?

They don't actually come out and say it (as far as I can tell), but they have a very specific time estimate (2800-3000 BCE) with no actual dating procedures performed, and they admit that their hypothesis flies in the face of most relevant research ("The scientific community, I wouldn't expect 99.9 per cent of it to agree with us"). What's more, their research is generally clutching at straws and is easily repudiated by experts in the relevant fields. All this makes it reek of religious revisionism of science, itself disguised as science.

Why can't religious nutjobs just leave science alone?

There seems to have been some breakthrough regarding hydrogen tanks recently. BMW had stopped their development, but they've restarted it, too.

Sorry, I don't have a cite but I'm in automotive and got this through the grapevine. Could be because of this research.

Touching/Landing on asteroids is difficult because they have very complicated structures and rotations. The best way to deflect an asteroid is not by nukes or what you suggest, but by spraying it white (solar radiation pressure) or parking a mass (e.g. 1t) with a ion drive next to it.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-deflect-asteroid.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid-impact_avoidance#Collision_avoidance_strategies

wasn't really called that, you can look for "y chromosome degeneration" http://www.physorg.com/news167026463.html

It's not that simple. Research is showing a correlation to the large number of vaccines as a child and autism. We don't know for sure.

Horseshit.

The doctor who made that claim has been shown as being fraudulent.

There is simply no reputable evidence to believe this. But it's still propagated by people who refuse to accept that the evidence was fabricated -- but now that people believe it, you can't get rid of it.

> "[E]vidence to sustain such dire warnings is conspicuously absent."
Guess the Wired.com authors live in a different world than I do:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-nortel-penetrated-hackers-decade.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/17/opinion/ed-cyberwar17
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/rsa-details-march-cyber-attack-blames-nation-state-for-securid-breach.ars
http://www.commandfive.com/research.html
http://www.darkreading.com/database-security/167901020/security/attacks-breaches/229700229/targeted-attacks-on-u-s-defense-contractors-fallout-from-rsa-breach.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

I'm concerned about the response, but the threat is real.

I understand your feelings, and I just posted about why this stuff should be deleted. However, when this thing blew up I became curious about the correlations between child porn and child predation.

I found these: http://www.news.com.au/study-finds-no-link-between-child-porn-and-sex-abuse/story-0-1225749645592
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-legalizing-child-pornography-linked-sex.html

It appears that child porn may not lead people to child predation, and perhaps the availability of what is or resembles child pornography can even lower child predation. I don't know how you separate 'harmless' use of child porn from the coupled market-making that would encourage actual predators to make more for these mere users. Nevertheless, it appears that child porn may not cause behavior escalation any more than snuff films produce serial killers or marijuana produces crackheads. In my opinion, there's likely something wrong with predators, chronic addicts, and serial murderers that goes well beyond the content and availability of their "soft" content like pot or movies. It looks like child porn leading to child predation may be one more "gateway" theory in which the correlation is far weaker than we believed.

I obviously don't support watching or producing child porn, snuff films, or even necessarily pot - but newer data suggests the situation may be a lot more complicated than people think.

In related news from last year, global sea levels dropped 6mm over 2010.

I'm pretty sure Google and D-Wave even worked together as well on something. I'm sure it was posted on here with some pictures too.

Found it on physorg - Google and D-wave collab.

The "mainstream media" in question is RT, the Kremlin-funded TV. I kid you not.

better reporting than any of the american cable 'news' channels. Go watch RT America.

www.rt.com/usa

The "mainstream media" in question is RT, the Kremlin-funded TV. I kid you not.

If a monkey can control a robotic arm with 7 degrees of freedom http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnWSah4RD2E
http://singularityhub.com/2010/06/12/monkey-controls-robot-arm-with-7-degrees-of-freedom-video/
http://www.physorg.com/news194796581.html
you would think a brain implant would be a useful thing at this point for him. Yes it is a risk, but really, wouldn't it be worth it?

That's the first thing that came to my mind as well. The goats were engineered to produce milk with high quantities of protein found in spider silk.

P.S. It's a pity that the BBC has to stoop to sensationalising their headlines. "GM silk worms make Spider-Man web closer to reality"? Twits.

How about what has already been found out there:

Most Distant Water in the Universe Found

and

Evidence of Water in Atmospheres of Planets Orbiting Distant Stars

And I hear we've only been doing this planet finding stuff successfully for a little while.

That's not actually quite correct. The current debate isn't about whether hands-only CPR is more effective than full CPR (It's not), the question is whether hands-only is more easily performed correctly than compressions/vents, and is, on average, going to be more effective as it gets performed in the field, add into that the fact that hands-only is easier and faster to teach, and maybe we'll have more of the population able to perform CPR, which means a decrease in time from arrest to start of CPR, which will always improve outcomes.

Actually the current debate is not about the effectiveness per se but about the outcome. Compression only CPR is showing better patient results for lay-people and professionals alike.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-chest-compression-only-cpr-survival-cardiac.html
http://www.theheart.org/article/1106815.do

And the quality of compressions in compression only CPR goes down over time.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17069958

Have you seen some of the research into serial killings? One study from 2007 implied that we may underestimate the number of people killed by serial killers each year by a factor of 10.

So yeah, I agree that there are probably hundreds of thousands of small- to big-time crooks that are getting away with their crimes on a year-to-year basis, undetected, not making all the dumb mistakes. Occasionally one of them gets caught and makes the news and we're all horrified that this was happening "just under our noses" and we're all happy that it's over, but in reality it just keeps going with some other criminal a little ways down the road...

Disclaimer: I do experimental searches for dark matter for a living, so I may be biased in my judgement of these types of papers that crop up so often. There was a similar paper a few weeks ago from someone claiming that quantum vacuum polarization could account for dark matter PhysOrg link.

The issue with both of these explanations, is that they only address galactic rotation curves. Those are among the first and easiest to explain indications of the need for something like dark matter, but are not the strongest by a long shot. For instance, this guy's explanation can't explain things like the famous Bullet cluster , nor can they explain the evolution of structure formation or the spectrum of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background which, in the field, are considered much stronger constraints.

The Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory of cosmology fits all of the astrophysical measurements reasonably well, and has a nice tie-in to supersymmetric particle physics, which is one of the current leading theories. No one in the field will take any new theory seriously until it can reproduce ALL the phenomena at least as well as the current model (which of course is exactly how the scientific process is supposed to work!)

Maybe they'll just use cool lighting.

For an actual touchable hologram, see this SIGGRAPH 2009 presentation. It uses something called acoustic radiation pressure based on ultrasound projection.

It's all around us and has far more to do with consciousness than any most scientists and theologians can fathom. http://tgd.wippiespace.com/public_html/genememe/asymmetries.pdf one important thing to note in that paper is "Note that matter antimatter asymmetry in the scale of entire genome has largest positive value for human genome and negative value only for yeast genome: this case the magnitude of the asymmetry is largest." and it's no coincidence that this coincides with http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-scientists-fountain-youth-yeast.html announced yesterday "Collaborations between Johns Hopkins and National Taiwan University researchers have successfully manipulated the life span of common, single-celled yeast organisms by figuring out how to remove and restore protein functions related to yeast aging." Also see http://tgd.wippiespace.com/public_html/articles/newcosmo.pdf

Funnily enough, this was actually in my RSS feed as I was scrolling down them.

It is being done in this trial.
Inhalation of nanoparticles to attack cancer of lungs and prevent rejection.
Sounds pretty promising.

You make a good point. We are by nature (literally) designed to deal with a very specific realm of dimension, time and environment. The minute the universe moves outside the range of our "evolutionarily engineered senses", the universe almost instantly ceases to be intuitive and/or predictable. Any of the universal phenomena that are mind numbingly large, extreme or ridiculously small, confuse and amaze the hell out of us. Even though our brains utilize quantum phenomena, understanding quantum mechanics is not at all intuitive. So trajectories for flying balls and golden means, no problem, we are hardwired for parabolas and the number Phi. the statistical nature of quantum mechanics, not so much. The chaotic mechanics in the frame dragging around a black hole, hell no. Dark Energy??? WTF! Brane Theory and CalabiYau Spaces... just leave it at, it hurts my head. Without the distinctions that rigorous mathematical abstraction make possible, these realms would almost certainly be completely inaccessible to human understanding.

Except that buying local can increase your carbon footprint. Basically, for things not involving expensive inputs (e.g. produce), the price of a commodity correlates pretty well with the energy expenditure required to produce it. There is a reason local produce tends to be more expensive--it is less efficient.

I’ve suggested electrifying the roads and been told we don’t even have enough resources to manufacture enough wire to do that. Dunno, they might be right.

As for putting cars on railcars, I invented a rail switch that would allow a railcar with an automobile to be plucked from the center of a train at speed, without slowing the train. Talked to a lot of people that said it would be too expensive to build that infrastructure, and they’re probably right. What is railway, $10M / mi when you’re providing power to a railcar with electric motors to move itself? That’s probably the price out in the country, let alone ripping up cities. You have to build it new for several reasons, one of which is that most current railway isn’t good for 100+ mph.

I don’t think the unions have anything to do with people choosing trucks to ship things, trucks are just a lot faster, that’s all. There are rail unions, too.

I think it’s going to take a lot more than 3 or 4 large reactors to power the USA. Doing some math, the Chevy Volt goes 40 miles on 8 KwH. Cars alone travel nearly 2 trillion miles a year in the USA. That’s 2 X 10^12. Divide that by 40 and multiply that by 8 and you get 400 billion KwH, or 400 X 10^9 KwH. With 24 X 365 hours in the year, that’s 8760 hours, leaving 45,662,100 Kw generating capacity requirement, or 45,662.1 Megawatts. Some of the largest reactors in the world are around 1,300 megawatts. We’d need 35 of them to power Chevy Volt sized cars, probably twice that many to power average sized cars, double it to account for needing peak power when people are using their cars during certain times of the day rather than being evenly distributed over the 24 hours of a day and 7 days of the week, and then probably double it again to include the trucks. We’d probably need close to 300 new nuclear power plants to run all our transportation that moves on highways with electricity.

As for the power source, it’d be better to build solar power stations. They can be built with molten salt as a storage medium so that they work at night and during the day, solving the storage problem. The big poblem with that would be that our solar resources are mostly in the southwest, so we would need very high voltage DC power distribution to get it around the USA, and a whale of a lot of copper even then. How to build power lines at millions of volts so that the current required is small and therefore the I*R loss is small? Plus of course there are the NIMBYs to fight to build the power wires. Or, killing 2 birds with one stone, get this:

http://www.physorg.com/news199005915.html

to work, capture the elemental carbon in the atmosphere, and truck / rail it to ordinary coal-fired power plants around the country, and make the power plants squeaky clean in emissions, while all you need to do is haul more carbon out of the atmosphere than you burn in the power plants to solve the CO2 in the atmosphere “problem” if you believe in that. If you don’t, it still shouldn’t hurt anything to do it.

Yep, natural gas is a fossil fuel, but emits far less than other fossil fuels. Its the best we can do. We CANNOT aboandon fossil fuel unless we want to allow nuclear, can pay for nuclear, and get cars to run on electricity. There's no reason to build that sort of capacity until we get the cars running on electric, either, and nobody's invented the practical magic battery yet.

Want to do something? Think geo-engineering. I've already posted this link once:

http://www.physorg.com/news199005915.html

Perfect that, and then solve the next problem of where you're going to stack all that elemental carbon you suck out of the atmosphere. But that would solve the problem, and yield a new, inexhaustible fuel source that could be transported easier than building electric lines that envirowackos oppose at every turn, we'd just truck it to electrical power stations and use it in place of coal, and that would result in no pollution EXCEPT CO2, and so all we have to do is haul CO2 out of the atmosphere faster than we burn it, and of course find someplace to stack it. Energy problem solved, pollution problem solved. But the AGW worshippers don't seem interested in anything that is not hideously expensive and would bankrupt the gov't. It is still to be suspected that all the AGW people really want is to sabotage the "evil" western gov'ts, and I've already taken an oath to defend the Constitution from enemies both foreign AND DOMESTIC, and will continue to do so until I die. I see that the AGW worshippers as enemies of this country.

I've seen the lab announcements, the supposed "breakthrus" in battery tech, but the stuff is still not on the market. I think its still 10 - 20 years away from being found in an electric car that we can recharge in 3 - 5 minutes, or replace spent batteries with charged batteries in that timeframe, so that we can take it cross country and make decent time. I mean, I'm driving to Las Vegas from Virginia in March, and wouldn't buy an electric car that wouldn't be able to do the same thing. So, I have to be able to go about 300 miles and recharge or replace the battery in about 3 minutes. Yes, that's not going to happen any time soon, even with a battery breakthru, 'cuz getting that kind of electrical power to "refueling" stations would involve a serious electrical power construction project. And, certain "green" approaches like wind and solar would still probably make that too expensive.

Our real way to beat the supposed problem, which I'm still not convinced is a problem, would be geo-engineering, which, unlike clensing the atmosphere of CO2, is doable both financially and practically. And at least one geo-engineering approach DOES clense the atmosphere:

http://www.physorg.com/news199005915.html

but you don't hear about that, either. The "worshippers" don't seem to want any geo-engineering solution, which makes the rest of us non-worshippers suspect that they are not sincere in their goals, and that they have hidden goals. Not all of them, but the leadership, the drum-beaters that I suspect have as a goal of bringing "the west" down in financial ruin. Its hard to conclude anything else when the worshippers are only interested in the most expensive solution, and just a few years ago were talking of spending $50T over the next 40 years to achieve it. Yeah, that was a global figure, but you know who would end up footing most of that bill... the USA, that's who. China / India won't even agree to cooperate, let alone do what the Europeans did - sign a treaty like Kyoto and then fail to live up to it. China / India won't even go thru the motions.

So, anyway, since we all know that its going to take 20 - 30 - 40 years to replace the petroleum infrastructure with something clean, how about stopping the opposition to petroleum, so we can have a chance at prosperity again, and with that prosperity use a portion of it for the research to either solve the problem, or show once and for all that it is not really a problem?

Never thought they could image a Steampunk version of Prof. Lunazzi's 3D screen - http://www.physorg.com/news156072878.html
Wait...using vapour and one LCD projector per voxel is "serious" not Steam age retro joke? What???

So are they going to give out another Nobel prize for this?

wow, those are interesting claims. data references please?

because my sources say speed cameras DO work, and on TWO DIFFERENT continents.

http://www.physorg.com/news140443278.html
http://alttransport.com/2010/10/7966/

nice try, Speed Trollster.

Its never too late to do something and its already too late to do something.

Its already too late to do things like reduce CO2 because there's too much already, we can't really stop using the energy that produces the CO2, and if we could, we still couldn't afford it.

Its never too late because there are many geo-engineering approaches that could / should work that are far, far less expensive than trying to give up using coal, oil, etc.

But when anyone mentions really cheap stuff like firing sulphur particulates into the upper atmosphere via artillery, an approach that supposedly would counteract warming, and be cheap enough for a relatively wealthy individual to finance, the global warming zealots don't want to hear it, fueling the perception that the "global warming movement" is a political ploy designed more to bring down the western nations economically than anything to actually do with improving the planet. Additionally, things like this:

http://www.physorg.com/news199005915.html

seem to be ignored, maybe even supressed, when they could clearly achieve the sort of CO2 reduction that proponents say is required. Again, it appears that proponents are more about financially breaking the industrialized countries, mainly the US, rather than achieving a real solution.

I believe that anyone who is REALLY interested in benefiting the planet, as opposed to simply throwing up a scarecrow designed to harm the West, and esp. the USA economically, would be interested in any and all approaches that might be helpful, and not systematically ignore things that are doable cheaply.

At http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-supernovae-universe-expansion-understood-dark.html the author proposes that the expansion of the universe may be understood without dark energy. Do you find this resonable?

How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?

It's an illusion that you can do those things as well as you think you can.

http://www.physorg.com/news170349575.html

"People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found."

I wasn't talking about multitasking or "several streams". I was talking about being able to focus and concentrate on a single thing indefinitely, i.e. until you are actually done with it. That's something the ADD crowd cannot do. Many of them wouldn't last one minute.

The next time you watch a news program, pay close attention to how often they change (flash) scenes. They suddenly switch scenes and put something else on the screen several times a minute, usually as frequently as every 10-20 seconds. They do this to accommodate the ADD types. It makes them feel comfortable and engaged. This has been the case for some time now.

How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?

It's an illusion that you can do those things as well as you think you can.

http://www.physorg.com/news170349575.html

"People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found."

It would probably have been calamitous but extinction level, maybe not. I mean most of those would probably have landed in the ocean anyway, with maybe a thousand or so dropping on land.

My understanding is that a major asteroid strike on the ocean could be catastrophic due to ozone depletion.* It's just a theory (because obviously we haven't tested it), but if true it would indicate that asteroid strikes are a bad thing no matter where they hit.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-asteroid-ocean-deplete-ozone-layer.html

* This depends on a single very large asteroid, so a bunch of smaller ones might not be as much of an issue. Unless they're fast moving.