Barometer | 28 March 2018

Not cricket

The Australian cricket captain Steve Smith was banned for a match and fined his match fee after a player was caught tampering with the ball by rubbing it with tape in the hope of making it swing more. How do you make a cricket ball swing?
— The science was covered in a paper by N.G. Barton in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1982, which claimed, after wind tunnel tests, that maximum swing can be achieved by keeping one side of the ball shiny and bowling it at 30 metres per second (67.5mph), with the seam at an angle of 20 degrees from the direction of the ball and a backspin of between five and eight revolutions per second. Contrary to the lore of the game, humidity makes no difference, though a bit of sandpaper on the non-shiny side certainly would.

Flying down under

Qantas began the first nonstop passenger flight from Britain to Australia, landing in Perth 17 hours after leaving London. How to travel to/from Australia by plane:
1934 First advertised service took 12 days, 31 stops and involved four different aircraft.   The plane, which took off from Brisbane, stopped nine times before even leaving Australia, with overnight stops at Cloncurry and Darwin. It also involved a train journey from Brindisi to Paris.
1938 First through flight by flying boat from Rose Bay, Sydney, to Southampton. Took ten days.
1947 First flight with land-based aircraft from Sydney to London. Took four days, with stops at Singapore, Calcutta, Karachi and Cairo, and two daytime stops, at Darwin and Tripoli.
1959 First jet service in Boeing 707 via New York (Sept) and India (Oct).
1989 First nonstop flight from London to Sydney, but only to deliver a new Boeing 747-400 — not a regular service.

Pupil performance

The Children’s Commissioner claimed that children in the north of England face a ‘double whammy’ of disadvantage and poor schools. How well do pupils perform across the country?

Source: Dept for Education