via autoblog

While there are no reliable figures for the number of butlers in the U.K., the London-based Work Foundation estimates there are about 2 million people in domestic service in the country, the most since the Victorian era.

Traditionally, the butler is the head of the household, responsible for the hiring and firing of other domestic staff.

Modern butlers have the additional task of mentoring their employers in the rules of English etiquette, such as referring to the “lavatory” when the boss uses the word “toilet,” or remarking upon how much better linen looks on a dining table instead of paper napkins.

“There is a way of behaving in certain circles, and the newly wealthy may not fully understand those ways,” said Dawkins of the butlers’ guild. “Employers look to the butler not only to serve but to show them what should and shouldn’t be done.”

The plain wooden toothpick is among the sim­plest of manufactured things. It consists of a single part, made of a single material, and is intended for a single purpose, from which it takes its name. But simple things do not necessarily come easily, and the story of the mass-produced toothpick is one of preparation, inspiration, invention, marketing, competition, success and failure in a global econ­omy, and changing social customs and cultural values. In short, the story of the toothpick is a par­adigm for American manufacturing.

via Arts & Letter Daily

Change for a million? That’s what a man was seeking Saturday when he handed a $1 million bill to a cashier at a Pittsburgh supermarket. But when the Giant Eagle employee refused and a manager confiscated the bogus bill, the man flew into a rage, police said.

The chocolate chip cookie was accidentally developed by Ruth Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn near Whitman, Massachusetts, in 1933. The generally accepted story goes: Mrs. Wakefield was making chocolate cookies but ran out of regular Baker’s chocolate and substituted pieces of semi-sweet chocolate broken apart using a machete, assuming it would melt and mix into the batter. It did not, and the cookie with chips of chocolate was born. (The restaurant, housed in a former toll house built in 1709, burned down in 1984.) Mrs. Wakefield sold the recipe to Nestlé in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips. Every bag of Nestlé chocolate chips in North America has her original recipe printed on the back. Today, the chocolate chip cookie is one of America’s favorites.

But according to Carol Cavanagh, of Brockton, Massachusetts, whose father, George Boucher, now residing in South Dennis, Massachusetts, was the head chef at the Toll House Inn, from its opening to its closing, the true story of the cookie’s creation goes like this: Ruth Wakefield was known for her sugar cookies, which came free with every meal, and were for sale in the inn’s lobby. One day, while mixing a batch of sugar cookie dough, the vibrations from a large Hobart mixer against the kitchen’s wall, caused bars of Nestlé’s baker’s chocolate on the shelf above to fall into the mixer, where it was broken up and incorporated into the dough. Ruth thought that the dough was ruined and was about to discard it, when George Boucher stopped her and talked her into saving the batch. His reasoning was out of frugality rather than a prediction of the cookie’s future popularity. Logically, the accepted story of the cookie’s origin doesn’t hold up since Ruth Wakefield was an accomplished chef and author of a cookbook, so would have known enough about the properties of chocolate, and that it wouldn’t melt and mix into the batter to make chocolate cookies, while baking.

The Simpsons writers often play on mathematical cultural stereotypes, extracting humor by exaggerating both the mathematical illiteracy of the U.S. public and the nerdiness and self-aggrandizement of the mathematically gifted. In a characteristic exchange, in the third-dimension episode, mad scientist Professor Frink tries to explain to Police Chief Wiggum the nature of the three-dimensional space through which Homer Simpson is wandering.

What I find rather odd is that the site, Science News Online, displayed an ad for season 2 of The Hills when I read the article. I did not think that vain pseudo-reality TV on MTV and science mixed. Little did I know. Little did I know.

Die is Cast has amazingly thoughtful photo gallery – it features the carpets of the casinos of the world.

via neurastentia

Read the BBC News article on this matter.

(Kevin McKidd in Trainspotting)