Lovely stuff. Back in my undergrad degree, the professor who taught basic fluid mechanics loved to use the Magnus effect as an example. I think his explanation

Lovely stuff. Back in my undergrad degree, the professor who taught basic fluid mechanics loved to use the Magnus effect as an example. I think his explanation would have been much improved by some FEA like we see here. COMSOL's a cool package, incidentally. It makes FEA much easier for people who don't have much experience of it, but do know a fair bit about the physical phenomena they're trying to model. I had a few gripes with the system back when I used it for modelling thermal degradation in motors, but overall it was very impressive.