Tom Womack

I've collected the CIA data on composition of labour force by employment sector (agriculture / industry / services), composition of GDP ditto, total GDP and total labour force, and by means of two multiplications and a division produced a table, per country, of GDP per person employed in each sector.

Thirteen countries: the big five nearly-developed nations (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China), Peru because it had an incredibly small agricultural sector, Serbia because it had a very large industrial sector, Uganda as a developing nation, Thailand because we were talking about it on James Nicoll's LJ, the UK because I live there, the US and Canada because lots of people reading this live there, et la France, car c'est la France. Figures in thousands of US dollars per year at official exchange rate

Country	GDP per agriculturalist	GDP per industry worker	GDP per service worker
Brazil	5.6	33.6	16.6
Canada	82.9	124.0	73.1
China	1.4	10.6	6.8
France	53.9	86.0	110.7
India	0.7	5.5	4.3
Indonesia	1.6	11.8	4.4
Peru *	151.9 8.3	11.1 13.3	11.6 13.1
Russia	10.2	30.4	20.5
Serbia	6.9	8.9	44.7
Thailand	2	16.1	8.4
Uganda	0.3	4.9	4.1
UK	79.5	113.9	79.3
USA	184.8	78.5	95.8

* I believe the Peruvian National Statistics Office more than I do the CIA

Spreadsheet here.

I'm not sure I believe these answers, which means I suppose that I don't believe some of the input numbers. Western farmers are incredibly productive, yes; industry is almost always more productive per worker than the service sector, yes; but the Serbian service sector three times as efficient as the Brazilian?

It turns out, and fortunately this cost me neither sleep nor hair, but only because I have taken some care to acquire an attitude of relative calmness and to fiddle with computers only when there are no urgent deadlines requiring those computers in the near future, that it is possible for a motherboard to be incompatible with a power supply.

Specifically, on some Gigabyte motherboards, among them the MA78GPM-DS2H which I have, the USB ports don't work if you use an Enermax Pro 82+ power supply of the kind I just bought. Which is inconvenient, since on that particular system both the keyboard and the disc with the OS on were attached by USB.

The wattage of the PSU is not the issue here, mine was the 625W version, which would be enough to melt a USB stick let alone power it. It's not a matter of damaging the motherboard; when I put the old PSU back in it started working again.

I now have everything set up sensibly. It took me all morning. Particularly annoying was the moment that I discovered that the video card I was trying to install was half an inch too long to fit in the case I wanted to install it in, and so I needed to swap two motherboards round (that is, dismantle to total bareness two cases filled with fiddly electronics held in by multitudes of small screws and connected by python-like bands of cables, and reassemble the other way round). At least it's not covered in grease, you don't need a hammer to loosen it, little of it is particularly sharp, and there is no risk that it will disintegrate while I'm relying on it to keep me from driving into a lorry at 70mph: I am not one of nature's garage mechanics.

A discovery that may be useful to other people: the little hexagonal stand-offs for attaching motherboards to cases are not standard either in diameter or in top or bottom thread pitch between case manufacturers. So if you have mixed the bags that came with two cases, you have to try at least two screws in each stand-off to see which fit, and if you need to fit extra stand-offs you will have to try lots to find one which fits. The stand-off most inaccessible on the motherboard will, of course, be the one in which you have to try most screws.

It is reasonably clear that, having decarbonised world energy production, it will also be necessary to take CO2 out of the air; indeed, if the Siberian permafrost starts to thaw and turn into an efficient methane factory, it will be essential at the hang-the-cost mobilise-now level.

The straw-man carbon sequestration process is to grow plants, cut them down, put them in a sealed box, and throw it in the sea in a subduction zone. Let's see if this is cheap enough to do on a personal level:

The convenient subduction zones are just east of the Caribbean, just south of the Java-Sumatra island chain and just east of the Philippines - there are also ones just west of British Columbia, just west of Chile and along the Aleutian islands, but those aren't on shipping routes from Britain to anywhere that ships normally go, and I suspect the 'just' means they're within territorial waters.

It looks as if a used twenty-foot shipping container costs about its weight in scrap iron, which is a few hundred pounds, is reasonably sealed for these purposes and holds eighteen tons (ah, bother, it's 30 cubic metres, so it would float, and if you make holes in it then creatures will come in and eat the compost which defeats the point of the sequestration.

I have the strong impression that the compost made from collected domestic compostable waste in Cambridge is essentially free; use of small bulldozer for a couple of hours to load eighteen tons of it into the container, use of lorry to transport container to Harwich. Container shipping is currently extraordinarily cheap (though maybe that's only to Shanghai via the Malacca Strait, and to get over a subduction zone you'd need to ship to Bali, Manila or Caracas).

The show-stopper is convincing the crew of the ship to load your container on the outside and to push it over the edge somewhere just south of the southern edge of Indonesian territorial waters; container ships don't have the cranes on them to move the containers.

What have I missed? Aside that it looks as if it would cost about a thousand pounds to transfer twenty tons of compost to the bottom of the Philippine Sea, whilst www.puretrust.org.uk will buy and retire ETS carbon at £13 the ton.

Maybe if you bought an exceedingly rust-bucket container ship and a medium-sized escape boat, and sunk the whole ship and five hundred containers as a unit ... claiming it on the insurance afterwards would be wrong.

Betty died this morning, sitting in her room at the old-folks home after having her breakfast porridge, with one of the staff holding her hand because she'd been sounding rather ill.

She'd been unwell for most of the last year, but lucid to the end.

My last grandparent; I'll miss her a great deal.

A small lemon from Tesco costs 25p (£1 for four) and weighs 84 grams.

If you squeeze it, you get about 30 grams of liquid+pips, and about 25 grams of liquid, so making lemon-juice out of lemons is about 30% efficient, and lemon-juice made out of lemons bought from Tesco costs about a penny a gram; a bit more expensive than decent non-AOC cheese. Jif lemons cost 65p and contain 55ml of lemon juice, so it's cheaper to get lemons if you've already got a lemon-squeezer; a lemon-squeezer lasts forever and costs a pound and ninepence, so repays itself over buying Jif lemons after about the first pint of lemon juice.

Tesco 'fresh-squeezed lemonade' is £1.95 for a litre, and 17% lemon, so slightly more expensive than buying the lemons; on another hand, in the 'traditional home baking ingredients' part of the store you can (according to the Web site) buy 500ml of lemon juice for 97p. It's been dehydrated and reconstituted, but I don't know to what extent that spoils lemon juice.

Juice of one lemon and 25 grams of sugar, topped up in a pint glass with strong green tea and ice cubes, is a nice cooling drink for a summer day. 15 grams of sugar isn't quite enough.

[Poll #1449616]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wiltshire/8208838.stm

Scientists broke open a rock containing a 150-million-year-old squid and found still-liquid ink that they could write with.

I should have posted something about Worldcon earlier, but it's been winding down very slowly: there are still dozens of lovely people staying in Montreal and I never managed to get round to sitting at a computer for half an hour when the alternative was sitting around a dining-room or a restaurant or a pub table with people like the Nielsen Haydens, Dave Clements, Greer Gilman, Jon Singer, Alter Reiss, Ada Palmer, Ian Tregillis, Geri Sullivan, Cat Valente, txanne ... I think I've had ten restaurant dinners in twelve days, and some restaurant lunches besides.

I've been staying with Jo Walton since last Tuesday evening - I'd planned to jump on a plane immediately after Worldcon and go to Halifax, but, discovering that Halifax and environs weren't remotely public-transport-explorable and that I'd much rather imitate a sloth for three days and then make my way relaxedly to Montreal airport than fly out to stay in an awkwardly-located hotel which I hadn't booked yet six hundred miles from anyone I knew, I cancelled the flight. Anyone interested in C$405 of Westjet credit?

The programming at Worldcon was excellent; I wish I'd been on more of it, but I filled in my programming form as an unmitigated scientist so only got put on three science panels. Two of which were great successes - extemporising on the joy of astronomical stamp-collecting for twenty minutes while the projectors got set up for the other talks, and one at lunchtime on Monday with Jordin Kare, Ian Tregillis, Jon Singer and Peter Watts about the Fermi Paradox which had to be moved to a bigger room because they were running out of standing space at the back, and which could easily have lasted two hours. The one I'd expected to be mostly brain implants and turned out to be mostly computer security wasn't quite so good, the audience ran out of steam roughly as we did and had dropped to half its original size by the time we stopped.

Otherwise I did my normal convention thing, writing myself a schedule of panels to attend that left no time to eat and then waiting until I found someone (usually aardvark179) in the corridor eating with whom seemed more appealing than going to the next planned panel.

I didn't manage to face more than an hour of Worldcon parties on any night; the rooms are incredibly full, everything's very loud (maybe I need to get my ears cleaned with one of those mini-sized pool-cleaning squirters again), and the windows don't open, it just wasn't an environment where I could make conversation with new people. Two strangers in a group of six people the rest of whom I know is fantastic; ninety-seven in a group of a hundred distinctly less so.

Mostly after Worldcon I've been recovering - I climbed up and down the mountain with Sasha on Wednesday to see all the city outspread, but most of the big tourist attractions I've been to on previous visits. I'm used to the city being covered in dirty snow under lowering skies, so 29C with 80% humidity is quite a change; it's so green now. Yesterday I devoted the afternoon to reading: Bujold's excellent Passage and very good Horizon, and John M Ford (much-missed; there was a great panel appreciating his life)'s fantastic Scholars of Night.

I have ice cider in a sillily-shaped bottle, dulche de leche, rilettes de canard, and a quantity of maple-based sweets; actually very few books (some of them in French - Alire tried to sell me a subscription to Solaris, the Quebecois equivalent of F&SF, and I might even take them up on this if I enjoy the sample issue I bought), since my trip to the dealer's room was at a time when I feared I'd have to carry every book I bought around Halifax in a rucksack for three days.

Five days x seven hours of interesting lectures, opportunities for both wonder and snark - if you are advertising how soft and gentle your new widget is with proteins, tests on the protein equivalent of cast iron will not convince. Three hundred and forty posters presented by as many enthusiastic grad students - partied the way I never really got round to at grad school.

Not right that much free time - I didn't have time or Internet enough to book the next place to stay, so have had to pay rack rate at Best Western before heading to the Global Backpackers tomorrow. Disorganisation has its advantages; to celebrate the end of the rail strike Via Rail had 60% off tickets, so Toronto to Montreal via Kingston and Ottawa, ten hours in trains, is about £45.

In Toronto two more days; the parks on the islands in the harbour are still shut from the municipal services strike, which is a pity. Visit the Art Gallery of Ontario, watch Up, hire a bike and go along the lakeshore a bit ... Any other ideas? I went to Niagara Falls last time I was here, and the R.O.M. on Saturday.

I own shares in a number of investment trusts.

Over the last year or so, most of them have neither appreciated vastly nor paid dividends. However, many of them have credited me with some Subscription Shares; these are tokens given me for free, which give me the right to buy the underlying shares in the future, either on particular days (in one case 31/1, 30/4, 31/7 or 31/10), or in another case at any time in the month of May in any year from 2010 to 2014, or in a third case at any desired time up to a cut-off date, at a price fixed now.

The Subscription Shares are themselves traded, and are presumably a very conventional sort of derivative; JAIS shares, each giving the right to buy for 137p at any desired time between 1 April 2009 and 31 March 2010 JAI shares currently worth 159p, are currently worth a little more than 159p-137p, namely 26.5p. People are more optimistic about China; the right to buy a JMC share (currently worth 120p) for 143p in May 2010 or for 168p in May 2011, 2012 or 2013 is worth 22p.

The question is, what benefit does the investment trust get from handing out free derivatives of this kind? I suppose it's like a rights issue (IE, the investment trust gets money) but with the dilution spread out over time as people vacillate over exactly when to trigger their right to buy ten pound notes for £8.61.