Mangology: The Study of Eating a Mango

Mango season is a time I look forward to each year. A time when the sumptuous tropical fruit can be bought at roughly C$1 for two. I love eating mangoes - they're my favorite fruit.

But there's an art to preparing and eating a mango. Where points are graded upon several factors (awarded 1 - 5 points in each category):

1. Convenience: Opposite of degree of difficulty
2. Performance: How fast you can prepare and eat the mango
3. Cleanliness: How cleanly mango consumption can be performed
4. Maximization: How much mango meat you can eat off one mango
5. Aesthetics: How pretty it looks
6. Servability: How well it can be served or shared

I've tried several different methods of cutting mango, and here're a summary of a few of these - along with my recommendation.

A) The Porcupine

This is the way my mom would prepare mangos for us to eat when we lived at home.

Steps

a) Cut both hemispheres of the mango off the pit.
b) On each half, incise hash marks down to the peel, without puncturing.
c) Flip the mango half (well, technically less than half) inside out for the meat to pop outwards.
d) Eat the individual pop-out cubes.
e) Cut or peel off the skin on the remaining pit slice and eat the meat off the pit directly.

Grading

1) Convenience: 2
Not difficult, but not convenient - especially the eating part. And you'll also be limited to staying around at the sink until you finish eating.
2) Performance: 2
Not really a time-saver with all precision cutting and picking at the mango meat off the flipped out halves.
3) Cleanliness: 1
By the end of this, you'll have mango juice all over your face from digging into the porcupine quills - and probably hands that need cleaning from eating the pit. Not to mention there's likely to be lots of dripping and a stream of mango juice down your forearm.
4) Maximization: 3
Difficult to eat cleanly, leaving lots of leftover meat on the peel - lest you should spend more time scraping it with your teeth.
5) Aesthetics: 5
Full marks for presentation, as far as amateur mango-cutting goes.
6) Servability: 2
Unless you're sharing a mango with one other person, this isn't the way to go. No one will want your sloppy seconds here.

Total Result

15 points out of a possible 30


B) The Slice-n'-Dice

This is one way my coworker serves mango pieces at the office. His family grows mangos in Southern Taiwan.

Steps

a) With a fruit peeler, take off the mango skin.
b) With naked mango in one hand, and fruit knife in other hand, shave off large slices of the mango into a bowl.
c) Further cut the slices into smaller cubes.
d) Suckle and nibble at the pit until it's cleaned.
e) Wash hands and eat the bowled pieces with a fork.

Grading

1) Convenience: 3.5
Not as easy as it seems to cut off large slices, but eating with a fork sure is convenient.
2) Performance: 3
Takes time to peel and slice the mango. Eating may be easier, but certainly not faster.
3) Cleanliness: 3
The first stage isn't too clean with the peeling and slicing, but eating afterwards doesn't get much cleaner.
4) Maximization: 5
Shaving the mango reduces wasted meat.
5) Aesthetics: 3
A bowl of mango chunks. There are prettier things.
6) Servability: 5
Small pieces make sharing easy. Probably the best way to go if you have one mango and many mouths.

Total Result

22.5 points out of a possible 30


C) The Big Simple

After several runs of trial and error, this is the method I settled on. Maybe many people already eat this way, but I came up with this way of eating myself.

Steps

a) Cut both hemispheres of the mango off the pit.
b) Half each hemisphere again (to have four quarters).
c) Eat each quarter by peeling back the skin and eating it like an orange slice.
d) Cut or peel off the skin on the remaining pit slice and eat the meat off the pit directly.

Grading

1) Convenience: 5
Four cuts and you're just about done.
2) Performance: 5
From start to finish, I can wolf down a mid-sized mango in about 2 minutes.
3) Cleansiness: 4
Hard to avoid getting dirty hands eating around the pit, but the quarters can eaten without direct contact with mango meat.
4) Maximization: 4
Peeling the skin off the mango leaves a bit of fiber on it - still, not too bad.
5) Asthetics: 2
It gets marks for being simplistic. Sort of a New York versus Paris.
6) Servability: 4.5
Easy to share with up to 3 other people.

Total Result

24.5 points out of a possible 30

I don't normally care for asthetics when I eat a mango. So, discounting that category, the Big Simple gets 22.5 out of 25. And hence, I recommend The Big Simple for its optimized and simplistic nature.

Mango on!

Not New, but Improved

Finally I've made a few changes to my blog layout, and it now uses Page Elements. And finally, I've added titles to my postings as well. I'm not sure if I'd go back and add titles to my past posts, but I may just do that on one windy typhoon day if I run out of things to do.

Another late night, and it's time for bed.

Quote: National Post

Vancouver Police Chief Jamie Graham raised the spectre Friday of a retaliatory attack in the wake of the Fortune Happiness Restaurant shooting, in which two people were killed and six others injured.

Graham called the restaurant attack "cowardly."

Here's something I never understood. In the news, whenever someone commits a crime such as a kidnapping or murder, they call that person or the act "cowardly". How is that "cowardly"? I think it takes a lot of guts to go into a restaurant full of people and shoot up the place. What do people expect the assailants to do to make it less cowardly? Call their targets out for a dual?

We are taught to observe the rules of the road. So, what do you do when the rules of the road are broken or redefined by rogue operators of rogue vehicles? You take the law into your own hand. I don't write tickets or give warnings. I just do my best to give such people a hard time in the 3 seconds we encounter each other on the road. Call me a vehicular vigilante.

Scenario 1: On smaller single-laned streets (one in each direction), drivers like to give themselves room from parked cars by driving in the middle of the street, half-and-halfing it over the solid yellow dividing line. If there are on-coming scooters, they expect the scooters will steer clear of them.
Scenario 2: Scooterers often use the opposite-direction lane overtake cars, such as those stopped at a red light, to get to the front of the line.
Scenario 3: When a red light turns green, cars and scooters waiting to make a left turn will often try to beat the incoming traffic. Scooters have a better chance of doing so because they accelerate faster.

My solution to Scenario 1 and 2 are the same. When I see someone ahead of me cross into my lane from the opposite direction, I ride closer to the middle line. Playing chicken usually establishes my territory and forces them back into their own lane.

For Scenario 3, if I'm at a red light and I see people at the other side of the intersection getting ready to make a left turn, I usually peel out of the stop position as soon as the light goes green. This gets me to the middle of the intersection before they get a chance to squeeze in a turn. If someone insists on turning, I let'em have it with my left thumb on the horn.

I have no problem making good use of my scooter horn either. It's there for a reason. Besides, mechanical and electric devices have shorter lifespans if they're underused.

Finally, the cut I had at the side of my mouth is healing. There are few minor cuts worse than having a cut right at the edge of the mouth; because every time I open my mouth again to eat, brush my teeth, or yawn, it splits open again. Not very fun.

I had a canker sore on my frenum (the web under the tongue) not too long ago. That's not much fun either.

So, ummm... my advice to you all would be to avoid getting cuts at the side of your mouth, and don't get canker sores on your frenum.

Last night, in the 1+km scooter home in the rain, I saw the results of 2 car accidents.

One I couldn't really tell what happened. Two cars were stopped in the middle of an intersection parallel to each other - but I saw no apparent damage. The police were there doing there post-accident checks.

The other accident looked like it involved just one car. Again, I couldn't really tell from the aftermath what happened. This car was also in an intersection, with its front right wheel and half the axle torn off and sitting about 5 meters away.

Geez. What are these people doing?

On Sunday, my sister and I went with a group to Taipei's Yang Ming Mountain (陽明山) for a day of rock climbing. We probably started climbing around 10am and wrapped up after 6pm. I gotta say, it felt really good to be out there. The weather was mostly pretty good, with a brief bit of rain. Plenty of grinding, sweating, and fun company. But most of all, it was just nice to be out away from the pollution spending the day where mosquitoes have good appetites.

The first picture kind of shows our climbing set-up. The second photo is of my sister. She did the climbing there, but I'm credited with taking what I thought was a pretty good photo.

On Saturday, I attended a Science Creativity competition held by my company's Education Foundation. It's an annual competition with a cash prize/scholarship of 100,000 NTD to the winning team of four highschool students. The challenge was to create an automated structure with 4 stages, show two displays of Physics and two displays of Chemistry. So students, in the area provided, would create systems of moving parts, pullies, cascading dominos, ingredient mixing, burning things, etc using as much creativity as possible - subsequently judged on their efforts. But I was actually pretty disappointed with the results. Team after team had failing experiments, with links between each Physics/Chemistry stage that would break instead of falling through to continue the action to the next stage. I felt like these teams didn't think their experiments through, and didn't prepare and practice enough to be successful.

Nevertheless, it reminded me a lot of going to the Technolymics back in highschool. Those were fun times. Hopefully these kids learned a few things along the way too.

I took this picture a couple weeks ago. It caught my eye last summer when I was scootering around my neighbourhood on a weekend around noon. Only around lunch does the shadow of the overhanging electrical wires cast down upon the splattering of bird poop on the street below. Fun, huh.

Oh, What a Night!

Last night, I went to a company Innoluxin Zhunan (竹南), about 15 minutes by car (by highway) or 40 minutes by scooter (regular roads), for foosball. Zhunan is one area I'm not familiar with (having only been there once almost 3 years ago), though I happened to have lunch across the street from Innolux just at lunch yesterday-- a little coinkidink.

Since it's illegal for scooters to take the highway (for safety's sake), my path was as you see to the right here. This is what you'd do: take 寶山路 (Bao Shan Road) straight towards downtown. Then turn left onto 食品 (Shi Pin Road), follow the curve right, go up and down a bridge, double-back along a lane next to the bridge and turn right onto 中華路 (Zhong Hua Road). Then take Zhong Hua road, a big street, all the way until the destination. About 18+ km in total.

And yet, while that all seemed simple enough, that's not how it turned out. The second map is the route I actually took. Working off 5 hours of sleep, I forgot about the bridge, and somehow turned left at the intersection before it. But I didn't notice anything wrong, even as the road I was on twisted and turned (unlike Zhong Shan Road should have). I started to question myself as I felt I was heading into the mountains, but since I didn't stray from the main road of what I thought was Zhong Hua Road, I kept going. Until... I ran out of road. All I had were motorways and highways. I went one way, then felt it was wrong, and went the other way. In the end, I decided to follow the road signs that said 竹南 Zhunan... which took me onto Taiwan's largest highway. Happily it got me where I wanted to go, and made for a fun story. My detour only took an extra 10 mins for a total of 50.

This morning, I woke up to the sound of my radio alarm at 8am. Got changed, and went to the swimming pool. After a quick rinse, I did a few stretches, and looked up at the clock hanging from a post at one end of the pool. 7:21am. Exsqueezeme? In Adrian Monk style: Here's what happened. Last night as I was setting my alarm, I accidentally pressed the wrong buttons, thereby changing the hour of my alarm clock one hour earlier. The result was me finishing my 1000m and getting to the office by 8am.

Tonight, we need to be out of the office by 7pm because there will be a carpet cleaning and disinfecting (happens a couple times a year). So I'll probably go bowling and maybe have some MJ at my coworker's place.