Barometer | 18 October 2018

Twists and turns

Jeremy Hunt, taking a group of EU foreign ministers around the maze at Chevening House in Kent, likened it to Brexit. It is not surprising if he finds the maze at Chevening difficult, because it was deliberately designed by the 2nd Earl of Stanhope, a mathematician, to be a greater challenge than garden mazes which preceded it. Most at the time had a simple rule: if you kept your hand on one hedge you would eventually reach the centre. This was known as a ‘simply connected’ maze. Chevening, however, was one of the first ‘multiply connected’ mazes, which don’t have a simple rule to find the centre.

Procreating royals

The Duchess of Sussex is expecting a baby ‘next spring’. How long does it take a royal couple to produce a child after the wedding?

Carbon data

How is the UK getting on with reducing its carbon emissions? There are two ways to measure a country’s CO2 emissions — ‘territorial’ basis, which includes only those emissions within the country itself, and ‘consumption’ basis, which includes emissions spewed out around the globe in the cause of manufacturing goods and providing services for that country’s people.

Measurements in metric tons co2

 
So territorial emissions have fallen by 25% in 25 years but consumption emissions by only 9%. Source: globalatlas.com

Falling FTSE

The FTSE100 fell by more than 10%, which is generally regarded as a ‘correction’. How does that compare with other ones recently?