SF Watch is an occasional series in which I note occurrences of reality imitating art in Science Fiction books I've read. Spoiler Alert!

Two Atlas Shrugged SFWatch stories in the space of a week - there must be something Randian in the air...

From www.strike-bike.de:

The 135 colleagues of the bicycle factory Bike Systems GmbH in the Thuringian Nordhausen, who keep the factory occupied since 10th of July 2007, decided to resume the production of bicycles in self-management. For this aim 1,800 binding orders on bicycles must be received till 2nd of October. So the collegues are working together with the anarcho-syndicalist union FAU (Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union – Free Workers-Union), which formed for this campaign the internetpage www.strike-bike.de.

A group of workers are occupying a bicycle factory, and wish to resume production along anarcho-syndicalist lines. This reminds me of the story of the Twentieth Century Motor Company in Atlas Shrugged, which became organised along "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" lines. Let's hope it turns out better for the bicycle manufacturers than it did for the motor manufacturers:

"The factory's production had fallen by forty per cent, in that first half-year, so it was decided that somebody hadn't delivered 'according to his ability' Who? How would you tell it? 'The family' voted on that, too. They voted which men were the best, and these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six months. Overtime without pay - because you weren't paid by tune and you weren't paid by work, only by need."
"Do I have to tell you what happened after that - and into what sort of creatures we all started turning, we who had once been human?"

SF Watch is an occasional series in which I note occurrences of reality imitating art in Science Fiction books I've read. Spoiler Alert!

The recent reportage on Boeing's new so-called Plastic Planes (although they are nothing of the sort, and that tells you something about the intention of the commentators) reminds me of the shrill and insidious scaremongering against Rearden Metal in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

Here are some quotes from the transcript of Dan Rather's report on the planes, followed by quotes I've taken from Atlas Shrugged.

Some senior engineers inside the company say this plane is being rushed to market and could be unsafe to fly
"But . . ." said Taggart, "but . . . but nobody's ever used it before!"

The problem is all the unknowns that are being introduced and then explained away as if there is no problem.
"Well, if it were any good, somebody would have used it, and nobody has."

"This should significantly improve the bottom lines." Well given that, one can certainly see when an aircraft manufacturer, particularly a large one, such as Boeing, would be very interested.
(Hank Rearden asking a friend what the newspapers write about him)
"What do they write about me?"
"Well, you know the stuff. That you're intractable. That you're ruthless. That you won't allow anyone any voice in the running of your mills. That your only goal is to make steel and to make money."

Boeing never did a truly independent review
... worry about an engineering disaster much like the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia.
"Jim," he said, "Rearden Metal seems to be a colossal kind of swindle."
"Uh-huh," said Taggart.
"I hear there's not a single expert who's given a favorable report on it."
"No, not one."
"We've been improving steel rails for generations, and increasing their weight. Now, is it true that these Rearden Metal rails are to be lighter than the cheapest grade of steel?"
"That's right," said Taggart. "Lighter."
"But it's ridiculous, Jim. It's physically impossible. For your heavy-duty, high-speed, main-line track?"
"That's right."
"But you're just inviting disaster."
"My sister is."

The brittle nature of the graphite and epoxy composite used in the 787 could mean trouble if the airplane crash lands.
"They said Rearden Metal is a threat to public safety. They said its chemical composition is unsound, it's brittle, it's decomposing molecularly, and it will crack suddenly, without warning ..."

But the verdict is out for some like Weldon on whether the 787 is as crashworthy as an aluminum planes.
"The National Council of Metal Industries," said Orren Boyle, "passed a resolution to appoint a committee to study the question of Rearden Metal, inasmuch as its use may be an actual public hazard."

Some engineers, like Weldon, are concerned that vast temperature differences on the ground and at high altitude will cause the metal mesh to expand and contract so much that it will damage the composite structure.
"Do you know that the stuff won't melt under less than four thousand degrees? ... Great? Well, maybe that's great for motor manufacturers, but what I'm thinking of is that it means a new type of furnace, a new process entirely, men to be trained, schedules upset, work rules shot, everything balled up and then God only knows whether it will come out right or not! ... How do you know, Miss Taggart? How can you know, when it's never been done before?"

And finally, one more entirely apt quote from the book:
"You'll have to look out for the air lines. We're working on a plane of Rearden Metal. It will weigh practically nothing and lift anything."

Does Atlas Shrugged belong in the Science Fiction category? Probably not, although it does have some SF elements. Most obvious is the invention of Rearden Metal itself, but it also shares the themes of human progress and imagination common to a lot of hard SF. Perhaps if we say that SF really stands for Speculative Fiction then I'll get away with it.

When I retired from scientific publishing, people asked me what I intended to do with my time. I've been baking my own bread in a bread-maker for many years now, and so I told them that I planned to take up proper, oven-baked bread making.

When I told them this, a friend recommended the Delia bread recipes. I had just bought some seeded brown flour, so this simple recipe seemed like a good place to start. Note that it's a simple wholemeal recipe, so the seeds no doubt threw things off a bit.

I only had a small loaf tin, so I used half measures. And my inexperience showed -- I had problems getting the amount of water right. I overdid it the first time, and had to add a tad more flour. And then some more water, because there was flour sticking to the sides of the mixing bowl. And then some more flour again. I think perhaps the dough consistency I ended up with was somewhat less than ideal...

But it ended up alright:

• Flour: 225g
• Milk: 150ml
• Boiling water: 150ml
• Instant yeast: 1 heaped tsp
• Salt: 1 tsp
• 1 egg
• A little bit of butter

Warm the flour for 5 mins in the oven, if you like that kind of thing. Then mix the milk and boiling water in a large mixing bowl -- the combination should be at about body temperature.

Dissolve the butter and salt in the liquid and then beat in the egg. Add the yeast to the flour, and then mix it in to the liquid. After mixing, the consistency should be more battery than doughy.

Cover the bowl, and leave to rise in a warm place for 1.5 hours. At this point the mixture should be thicker and a bit bubbly.

To make proper crumpets, you need a crumpet ring. But you can make pancake-shaped things instead that are just as nice if you don't. Get a frying pan to a medium heat, dab on a little bit of butter, and then pour in a ladel-ful of the mixture. Tip: control the heat so that lots of bubble-holes form in the surface, but be careful to not let them form too quickly.

I wanted to import all my Connotea bookmarks into my Del.icio.us account for a small experiment I was running. So I glued together the two APIs with a simple Ruby script.

The script uses the Ridiculous wrapper for the Del.icio.us API and my own www-connotea-ruby for the Connotea Web API.

I had problems installing Ridiculous from Rubygems, so I pulled it down from the SVN repository

    $ svn co svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/ridiculous/0.5
  

I downloaded www-connotea-ruby and extracted it

    $ tar xvzf www-connotea-ruby-0.1.tar.gz
  

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# contodel.rb
# by Ben Lund, Jan 2007

# Usage: ruby contodel.rb connotea_username:connotea_password delicious_username:delicious_password

require '0.5/ridiculous'
require 'www-connotea-ruby-0.1/lib/www/connotea'

c_user, c_pass = *ARGV.shift.split(/:/)
Ridiculous::USERNAME, Ridiculous::PASSWORD = *ARGV.shift.split(/:/)

c = WWW::Connotea.new(:user => c_user, :password => c_pass)

c.posts_for(:user=> c_user) do |p|
  success = false
  begin
    success = Ridiculous::Post.new.add(
      :url => p.link,
      :description => p.title || p.link,
      :extended => p.description,
        # Convert multi-word tags to underscore-separated
        # And convert all to lowercase to overcome case-insensitivity 
  
      :tags => p.tags.map{|t| t.gsub(/\s+/, '_').downcase }.join(' ') )
  end
  raise "Couldn't post #{p.link}" unless success

  #give the del.icio.us server a rest
  sleep(1)
end

Update: Via Stew, a script to go back the other way from Konstantin Baierer.

After Boing Boing, and according to the Which science fiction writer are you? quiz:

I am: Gregory Benford. A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist.

Since I've never read a single story by him, perhaps I ought to try.