Biscuit

Biscuit is a term used for a variety of baked, commonly flour-based food products. The term is applied to two distinct products in North America and the Commonwealth of Nations and Europe. For a list of varieties, see the list of biscuits and cookies.

Variations in meaning

Southern Living

Southern Living is a widely read lifestyle magazine aimed at readers in the Southern United States featuring recipes, house plans, garden plans, information on soil erosion, and information about Southern culture and travel. It is published by Birmingham, Alabama–based Southern Progress Corporation, a unit of Time Inc.

History

The magazine was started in 1966 by The Progressive Farmer Company, the publisher of Progressive Farmer magazine. In 1980, the company changed its name to Southern Progress Corporation to reflect its increasingly diverse business, and in 1985, it was purchased by Time, Inc.for $498 million.Southern Living is now the largest regional lifestyle publication in the U.S.

Cooking

One of the major topics in Southern Living is food, and since 1979, the magazine has published a popular Annual Recipes book each year.

Homes

Southern Living regularly features floorplans, and over the magazine's history, a number of these have become popular home styles in the Southeast. Many of these plans are available for purchase as construction blueprints from the company's website.

Biscuit (bread)

A biscuit in the United States and parts of Canada, and widely used in popular American English, is a small baked good with a firm browned crust and a soft interior. They are made with baking powder or baking soda as a chemical leavening agent rather than yeast. They are similar to British scones or the bannock from the Shetland Isles.

Biscuits, soda breads, and cornbread, among others, are often referred to collectively as "quick breads," to indicate that they do not need time to rise before baking.

History

Earlier history

Although the American English and British English use the same word to refer to two distinctly different modern foods, early hard biscuits (North American: cookies), were derived from or as a storable version of bread.

The definitive explanation for these differences in usage is provided by Elizabeth David in English Bread and Yeast Cookery, in the chapter "Yeast Buns and Small Tea Cakes" and section "Soft Biscuits". She writes,

Early European settlers in the United States brought with them a simple, easy style of cooking, most often based on ground wheat and warmed with gravy.

Martha Stewart

Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra; born August 3, 1941) is an American businesswoman, writer, and television personality. As founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, she has gained success through a variety of business ventures, encompassing publishing, broadcasting, merchandising, and electronic commerce. She has written numerous bestselling books, is the publisher of the Martha Stewart Living magazine, and hosted two long-running syndicated television shows, Martha, which ran from 2005 to 2012, and Martha Stewart Living, which ran from 1993 to 2005.

In 2004, Stewart was convicted of charges related to the ImClone insider trading affair and sentenced to prison. There was speculation that the incident would effectively end her media empire, although Stewart began a comeback campaign in 2005 and her company returned to profitability in 2006. Stewart rejoined the board of directors of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in 2011 and became chairman of her namesake company again in 2012.

Mathematical fallacy

In mathematics, certain kinds of mistaken proof are often exhibited, and sometimes collected, as illustrations of a concept of mathematical fallacy. There is a distinction between a simple mistake and a mathematical fallacy in a proof: a mistake in a proof leads to an invalid proof just in the same way, but in the best-known examples of mathematical fallacies, there is some concealment in the presentation of the proof. For example, the reason validity fails may be a division by zero that is hidden by algebraic notation. There is a striking quality of the mathematical fallacy: as typically presented, it leads not only to an absurd result, but does so in a crafty or clever way. Therefore, these fallacies, for pedagogic reasons, usually take the form of spurious proofs of obvious contradictions. Although the proofs are flawed, the errors, usually by design, are comparatively subtle, or designed to show that certain steps are conditional, and should not be applied in the cases that are the exceptions to the rules.