Jeffrey's Thoughts

Ways to peel a clementine

I was chatting with some people the other day when we stumbled upon the conversation of peeling a clementine. I know, pretty exciting stuff. I wanted to show off how kooky / crazy I was, so I mentioned that I sometimes peel clementines with a chopstick. They didn’t believe me. So, this post is dedicated to some alternative ways of peeling a clementine.

I’m going to be rating each approach on 3 different categories: speed of peeling, cleanliness, difficulty of approach

1. Cutting the clementine like an orange

Speed: Fast

Cleanliness: Varies depending on where you cut

Difficulty: Easy

2. Peeling the clementine with a knife

Speed: Medium

Cleanliness: Clean, I peeled the whole fruit with the knife, but you can choose to peel with your hands after the initial cut

Difficulty: Easy to medium

3. Peeling a clementine with a chopstick

Speed: Medium

Cleanliness: Clean-ish, still peeling most of the fruit with your hands

Difficulty: Easy to medium

4. Peeling a clementine like normal

Speed: Medium to fast

Cleanliness: Depends. Usually, my nails get a bit dirty

Difficulty: Easy

5. Peeling a clementine with a spoon

Speed: Medium

Cleanliness: Clean-ish, still peeling most of the fruit with your hands

Difficulty: Easy to medium

Results

For me, using a utensil to start the initial peeling step is useful because it lets me keep my thumb slightly cleaner, and it doesn’t add very much time. For others, they don’t really care about their nails getting dirty, so peeling by hand is the preferred approach. I enjoyed the ease of cutting the clementine like an orange and may do it in the future as my preferred approach, assuming I have the utensils around.

Note: You can choose to use the utensil to peel the entire clementine instead of switching to your hands, but that adds a lot of time

Readers’ suggestions

6. Peeling a clementine with your teeth

Speed: Slow

Cleanliness: Clean, but the peel tastes bad

Difficulty: Medium

Imperfecto review

I went to a Michelin star restaurant today with my family because I won a push-up competition. My brother, dad, and I competed to see how many push-ups we could do in a row and I completed 57, my brother completed 56, and my dad completed 33. So, I decided the prize would be to eat at Imperfecto.

My dad and I arrived early, so we walked around the neighborhood for a bit. It’s pretty close to George Washington University, and the people and the buildings looked friendly. Our reservation was early so when we entered, there weren’t very many tables filled. The server was attentive and knowledgeable about the menu and we ate well. My brother and his wife were not impressed by the taste of the food, but agreed that the restaurant looked stylish, the food presented well, and the service solid until the restaurant started filling up.

Here’s what I ate:

Story idea – plants that whine

You know how household pets like cats and dogs whine for food when hungry? What if plants did the same thing? Wow, would we live in a noisy world or what? What. I am not very good at raising plants, so I know that mine would be regularly whining for water. But I could imagine large plots of land with a variety of different plants all crying out like a choir full of babies. If plants could talk, the world would definitely do more about climate change than what we are doing now, haha.

September 24th, 2023 – Uber rides

This weekend, I went to a friend’s wedding in New Jersey, and in order to get to and from the venue, I took a couple of Uber rides. I don’t usually talk to the driver, but these two drivers were initiating the conversation, so I was fine with chatting with them. The vibe of the rides was very different.

The first ride to the wedding was really upbeat and positive. He was excited to hear about everyone’s success stories. He seemed to love his job and enjoyed waking up every day to drive someone new and hear of more exciting stories. The one story he told me was of a passenger who played blackjack on cruise ships and was successful enough to pay for their two children’s college education. Even though the person counted cards, since he was so generous to the workers, the cruise ship was ok with playing there.

The second ride was leaving the wedding reception. We initially talked about Indian weddings since he noticed that I was wearing some Indian style clothing and because he was Indian. Afterward, he started asking me about my relationship status and my relations with women. Since I don’t have much experience in that category, he started talking about his experience. Apparently, “there is a lot of pussy” in America. Additionally, he mentioned that Dominican girls have really nice asses. I asked him how he knew and he told me that he had sex with a Dominican girl just the other day. However, this specific girl didn’t want him to touch her titties since they were fake. He suggested that I should get out there more and have sex. He also mentioned that there was an event called Hobocon (I wasn’t able to find it online, but I was told it was a convention in Hoboken). He mentioned that there were a lot of scantily clad ladies at this convention and that I should’ve seen it.

I don’t stop by New Jersey very often, but based on these two rides, I would say that there are definitely a lot of interesting people and activities.

Story idea – Generative AI hallucinations

I read on the news a couple months back that there were instances where ChatGPT would hallucinate and make up “facts” that never happened, such as court cases and studies. I thought it would be interesting if these “facts” were actually real, but they were actually sourced from an alternative dimension. Like the Generative AI was so advanced that it was able to scour the internet across different dimensions to find the exact information you desired.

Superpower idea – historian

If it was possible for you to get a history of an object by touching it, would you want it? I probably would get information overload unless there was a way to turn the power on and off. It would be super useful in crime scene investigations and just understanding what happened in history.

I imagine that the experience is that the power turns on if I touch the object without gloves on or something similar to that. If I take off my gloves and touch the object, then I’ll faint and enter a dreamlike state where I’m reliving what the object has gone through. Ideally, I’ll be able to specify a time range, be able to fast forward and rewind – similar to watching a YouTube video. After I’m done watching, I’ll wake up.

Animal languages

You know how for people, language changes over time? Some languages rise and fall. People study languages in school. Communities develop new words, and old words are repurposed for the times.

I was wondering if the same thing happened in the other animals in the animal kingdom. Could a dog in the 1500s be able to communicate with a dog in 2023? How many different languages are there for a species? Perhaps body language is universal and is generally understood in any time period, but it would be interesting if the dogs, cats, fish, etc. developed slang terms and modified their language drastically as compared to a few hundred or a few thousand years ago.

Superpower idea – swap places

I think it would be a cool power to be able to swap physical locations with anyone in the world. Like if I’m in New York and I need to go to London, I’d find someone in London that wants to be in New York and then swap places. It would be really convenient for travel and the other person gets a free trip as well. Of course, you could use the power without consent of the other person, but that would be erring towards villain territory.

Story ideas – introduction

Over the past few years, I’ve come up with some story ideas that I think would be neat. I might end up writing short stories for them, but I haven’t put in the time to do so. Anyways, I wanted to share some of these ideas, so if other people are able to write a story about them, they can. All I ask is that you give me some credit if you do so.

Video streaming services thoughts

I’ve talked to a few people about the strikes that are going on about actors and writers not getting paid enough. I’m not sure how any of the deals are structured between the video streaming services and the production companies and between the production companies and the actors and writers. From what I’ve heard, residuals from TV shows and movies were a reliable source of income. But nowadays, less people watch TV and residuals don’t seem to exist in the video streaming services. After giving it some thought, I feel like residuals could definitely be implemented in the video streaming services.

For one, the music streaming services already have a model to pay out content creators based on how often the content is played. If that is too simplistic, then a different approach could be figuring out how much time a user spends on content and distributing a percentage of their subscription fees or ad revenue to those creators. I think that the video streaming services have the data they need to implement this type of system. If not, they could implement it if they desired. It would definitely be a bit more complicated than the current system and the video streaming services would not earn as much profit. But, it may be fairer to the people involved in the production of the TV shows and movies.

Scenario 1: I pay a $10 monthly subscription to Netflix and I watch 1 hour of Love Island and 2 hours of Indian Matchmaking for the month. After Netflix takes a $1 cut from the subscription fee, the Love Island production company would receive $3 from me and the Indian Matchmaking production company would receive $6 from me.

Scenario 2: I watch TV shows and movies for free, but they have ads. I watch 2 hours of movie A and 2 hours of TV show B for a month. Let’s say that there is an average value of an ad and let’s say that it is equal to $0.10. I get shown 2 ads in movie A and 3 ads in TV show B. That sums up to be $0.50 for the month. After the video streaming service takes a $0.05 cut, the movie A production company would receive $0.18 from me and the TV show production company would receive $0.27 from me.

I had a brief thought that I would start a video streaming service with this type of payout scheme, but then I thought that I would need to figure out a differentiating factor for the user experience. This would be good for the content creators, but I don’t think it would make much of a difference for the people watching the videos. And besides, who needs any more streaming services to subscribe to, amirite?

I wonder how YouTube and other video platforms handle payouts to content creators. I know that the content creators get paid based off of ads and other factors, but if the users viewing the content are on a paid subscription that doesn’t have ads, do the content creators get paid the same or a different amount for that viewer?