I’m giving two talks at the Ideas Festival this weekend, both paired with blogger and economist Andrew Leigh. At 11:45 today it’s

Who will serve?
Who will be the worker of the future, where will they come from and how old will they be

at the Cremorne Centre, QPAC, Southbank

and at 1:30 tomorrow Gross national happiness in the Recital Hall.

It’s been great so far. I missed Cory Doctorow’s talk, but I got the chance to meet him and discuss DRM and related issues. More on this soon, I hope.

I’ll be at the Brisbane Festival of Ideas today, talking about Consumption as a Lifestyle Choice, 2pm Cremorne Theatre in the QPAC building at Southbank. There’s lots more, so go along, listen, enjoy and maybe have your own say.

As was pointed out in the comments to my karate post, the observation that most traditions are invented is getting somewhat traditional itself, going back as it does to the exposure of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery.

So maybe it’s time to turn all this around, and make the point that we are now living in a society that’s far more tradition-bound than that of the 19th Century, and in some respects more so than at any time since at least the Middle Ages.
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The Feynmann processor: an introduction to quantum computation by Gerard Milburn. Like (I expect) most of us, I’ve never understood anything about quantum computation and have been vaguely suspicious that the whole project involves some kind of spurious informational free lunch. On the other hand, having read Feynmann’s excellent QED, I’m reasonably comfortable with the basic ideas of quantum electrodynamics (though I’ve never got on top of the nasty integrals required to actually work anything out). Feynmann’s discussion in terms of probabilty amplitudes steers clear of all that Heisenberg-style mysticism that seems to make the whole subject incomprehensible.

Anyway, this post by John Holbo at CT, and particularly this comment, led me to a Wikipedia article which made it clear how you quantum processing could yield impressive gains without any magical mumbo-jumbo, so I went on to look for more, and found this book in the library. It’s very easy going for a general reader, and makes things pretty clear, though I took a couple of readings to get the details straight.

As it happens, Gerard is at UQ and got a Federation Fellowship at the same time I did, so I’ll probably be pestering him for more info on all this.

The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. Another Christmas present I’m only just getting to. I quite liked People in Glass Houses, but I’m finding this one slow going, despite its Miles Franklin Award.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. It’s told from the view point of an old (or, as we now have to say older) woman, whose sister committed suicide, leaving behind a controversial novel (also called The Blind Assassin) that became a bestseller (maybe not really hers, but I haven’t finished the book yet) . I got it for Christmas, but have only just managed to start on it – very good so far.

The only other thing of Atwood’s I’ve read was The Handmaid’s Tale. I enjoyed it, but was miffed by the various literary types who raved about it when they would scorn to mention, say, Ursula Le Guin. That reaction goes in spades for Doris Lessing’s ventures into SF. Writing this, it strikes me that the inner novel The Blind Assassin also has an SF theme.

Andrew Norton points to a newly-released book by one Ryan Heath (aged 25), entitled Please Just F* Off: It’s Our Turn Now. This perfectly sums up the entire genre, and I’m pretty confident we can read Ryan’s entire life history in the title.

At age 8 at recess time, he would have been making this forceful request to his schoolmates at the swings in the playground. As the end of recess approached he would have been still on the swings, smugly ignoring others who had waited their turn more politely. Now, he’s trying to claim the spots occupied by Boomers in the media and elsewhere, ignoring (as Paul Watson notes in comments) the long queue of X-ers waiting for their turn. In 2030, if his ploy has succeeded, he’ll be denouncing slackers, dole bludgers or whatever catchphrase is currently being applied to degenerate youth and opining that ‘the younger generation wants it all handed to them on a plate’.

One of the journalistic tropes I most dislike is the generation game. It’s essentially a young person’s game, so lately we’ve mostly seen people under 45 (the so-called generations X and Y) putting the boot into those aged between 45 and 60 (Boomers). The results have been reliably silly, and also repetitious – the complaints and responses are little changed from 30 to 40 years ago, when boomers were mouthing slogans like “Never trust anyone over 30” .

But the game is even sillier when played by those old enough to know better, like Richard Neville. In Salon, Gary Kamiya gently skewers the latest of the genre, a book claiming that the Boomers are a “Greater Generation” than the one that fought World War II by virtue of their struggles for civil rights, equality and so on. Crucial quote

Leaving aside the obvious definitional and chronological difficulties — many of the boomers’ achievements were set in motion by men and women from the Greatest Generation — is it really fair to say that a group consisting of millions of people “did” anything?

As I’ve said before, I look forward to a time when the idea that you can classify a person by the date on their birth certificate is accepted only in the astrology columns.