Geek Dinner: Happy Habanero

brad — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:59:54 +0200

Last night I attended my third Geek Dinner (aka Happy Habanero), which was held at Mel's Village Kitchen in Rondebosch (somewhere on this map). The food was delicious, although I think their vegetable soup had beef stock in it, because my tummy did the funny growling thing that it does when there is actually meat in something that looks like it is just vegetables.

Jonathan gave a cool talk about Game Theory and Tragedy of the commons, which We (the lift club) discussed at length during our drives to work in century city. It basically boils down that when faced with a situation where you can gain (at the expense of others) there is no logical reason not to take that gain, there is, however, an ethical reason not to (see ubuntu/community/being nice to others). Regulation tends to take away from the benefits of the commons, for optimisating one use/situation. The trick would be to either increase the ethics of the users of the commons (but you still face a loss for defectors), or introduce penalties which drive defection down (e.g. Morning radio that re-iterates the message, or broadcasts plates of people who defect, or somehow associating negative effects to defection, like walking into a coffee shop and the owner says "you pushed in on the N1 this morning, and I am going to reserve my right to serve you, please could you leave the premises").

Jonathan gave a short speech about "Living like a capetonian", which basically boiled down to "get out there and enjoy the place you live, cook good food, and be social, do some things that are not enjoyable, because they will make you enjoy stuff more". I enjoyed it (although being a CT noob, we try to go and visit places people talk about, but we could do more of it, and we mustn't become complacent!).

Ian gave a short overview of problems with the current GMO process, in that there is no approval process for GMO foods because (for e.g. in SA) they have been granted the status of being the same as non-GMO, so it gives them a innocent until proven guilty stance. It comes down to consumers not buying it if it is an inferior product, or retrospective studies which find poisons etc. in the food, before it would be removed from the shelves. This again presents an interesting connundrum, where do you draw the line of what is/what is not GMO (for e.g. selective breeding is a form of GMO), and what things do you put in place to protect consumers. Until now consumers bought the things they needed, and products were successful based on how good they were. With vested interests, and continuously declining government ethics (across many countries), we can no longer assume if something is on the shelves then it is good for us (or, not perversely bad for us or our environment). I don't think he made his point strong enough that he was not against GMO, that he was against it's current wild west, bribe and plunder approach of the industry, because some people in the back attacked him for condemning GMO (which he never did).

Finally, Timothy Allen did Slideshow Karaoke, from slides made by me, covering "The mating rituals and sexual habits of Tachyglossus aculeatus (of the order Monotremata)". I built my slides from the fantastically hysterical "Their cousin called monotreme". You can download my slides: Echidna.odp in the ISO standard format for presentations. Henk Kleynhans pointed out that Echidna only mate using one head of their four headed penis, I am not sure if this is per mating, or over the course of their life (Do they only mate four times?).

There was wine sponsored by Perdeberg Winery, which was nice (I assume), since people definitely got quite chirpy. A nice evening was had by all, I think.