The famed Chinese cultural divide — wheat-centric in the north, rice-centric in the south — plays out even in today’s coffee shops, suggests this new study: “Moving Chairs in Starbucks: Observational Studies Find Rice-Wheat Cultural Differences in Daily Life in China,” Thomas Talhelm, Xuemin Zhang, and Shigehiro Oishi, Science Advances, Vol. 4, no. 4, April […]
Tag: Starbucks
How Starbucks turns old coffee and old muffins into laundry detergent
“Starbucks turns coffee grinds and old muffins into laundry detergent“, says a second-hand report in the journal Focus on Surfactants [volume 2013, issue 3, March 2013, page 3]: “The method involves using a mixture of fungi to help break down the carbohydrates in the stale baked goods into simple sugars. The blend is then fermented […]
They tracketh the Starbucks mermaid
The Got Medieval blog attempted, in piecemeal fashion, to track the origin on the Starbucks coffee company’s mermaid-ish logo: Here is the official history of the Starbucks logo, as found on Starbucks.com’s FAQ page.*** […] We pored over old marine books until we came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: […]