Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Ok, so meteorite crater found. But scientists still wondered if that was the cause for the dinos’ extinction, writes Lisa Randall in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs . What such an impact does is hard to imagine, so it needs to be spelled out… step by step. How much “bang” could a meteorite have carried? At 3 times the width of Manhattan travelling at minimally 20 km per second, it packed more than a billion times the punch of the nukes dropped on Hiroshima: -           At the impact site, it would have set off extreme winds and waves; -           The impact would have set off earthquakes across the world. Those would have then set off monster tsunamis across the world; -           Trillions of tons of vaporized rocks at the impact site would get ejected and spread worldwide. As the red-hot debris fell back to earth, it would start fires trig...

Remember those terms from statistics classes back at school? Like mean, mode, median and other terms which all looked similar, but apparently were not the same? And how none of them, apart from average, ever seemed to get used anywhere in real life? Well, that was my experience anyway. And so I was amused to see a chart (well OK, bar-graph, since we are reliving statistics terms) that used the term “median”. As most of us don’t know, the median is the number above which half the entries lie (and hence, below which the other half lies). The chart confirms what most of us knew already: India is a young country governed by people on their deathbeds. What’s new info is that so are most other countries, though the age gap between the rulers and the ruled isn’t as much in the others.