The 2010 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica will be the last printed version. It will focus on its online version from now on.

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

The Wikipedia entry for it has already been updated.

The Times Magazine has a fascinating article on how companies use your habits to learn things about you that you may not have realized they could figure out. In the article they use an example of how Target can figure out if someone is pregnant based on what products they purchase:

The only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

Now that you’ve identified a pattern, what do you do with it? As Spider Man said, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

Which leads to, probably, the quote of the article:

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

The key is to intermingle baby related coupons with coupons for other unrelated items, which look to the pregnant consumer as totally random.

In a survey, 75% of Americans admit to using their mobile phones while in the bathroom.

Blackberry users are most guilty of talking and tinkling, the survey found.

That doesn’t mean that Droid and iPhone users are off the hook. They’re more likely to browse a social network or use an app while on their potty break. That “Angry Birds” theme you thought you heard in the next stall? Yeah, you probably heard it right.

The other 25% lied.

Research from the University of Notre Dame indicates that walking through a doorway between rooms may be the cause of short term memory lapses.

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.

“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”

I would have posted this sooner, but I walked through a doorway after reading it and…poof…it was gone.

Four researchers spent four years figuring out how cats drink.  The result:

While a dog curls its tongue like a ladle to collect the water and then pull up what it can, a cat curves its tongue under and slightly back, leaving the top surface of the tip of the tongue to lightly touch the liquid. The cat then raises its tongue rapidly, creating an upward mini-stream of water. The cat snaps its mouth shut and the water is captured before the countervailing force of gravity pulls it down.

At least no grant money was wasted on this breakthrough.

A team of researchers have proven that no initial Rubik’s Cube scramble needs more than 20 moves to solve. This is known as “God’s Number”. How did they solve all 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible positions? They used about 35-years worth of CPU time donated by Google from their server’s idle time:

Finally, we were able to distribute the 55,882,296 cosets of H among a large number of computers at Google and complete the computation in just a few weeks. Google does not release information on their computer systems, but it would take a good desktop PC (Intel Nehalem, four-core, 2.8GHz) 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 CPU years, to perform this calculation.

They don’t mention anything about the Josh Madison method of taking the damn thing apart and putting it back together correctly (getting the last piece in is a pain-in-the-ass).

Researchers at the University of Manchester have published a guide to the perfect handshake.

Beattie’s steps to the perfect handshake, for both men and women, are: use the right hand; a complete grip and a firm squeeze (but not too strong); a cool and dry palm; approximately three shakes, with a medium level of vigor, held for no longer than two to three seconds.

What exactly is “a medium level of vigor”?

Scientists have discovered that a protein is needed to make a shell, and this protein is only found within a chicken, thereby answering which came first.

Professor John Harding, who also took part in the research, told Metro the discovery could have other applications.

“Understanding how chickens make shells is fascinating in itself, but can also give clues towards designing new materials.” he said.

Which is good, because in spite of HECToR’s hard work and the “scientific proof” it yielded, the study offered no explanation as to how the chicken got there in the first place.

Researchers at UC Berkeley are working on clothing that can generate electricity from simple body movements.

Researchers are envisioning hikers powering up their digital cameras while trekking up a mountain or a jogger charging up her cellphone in mid-run.

Perhaps they should check up on this guy, and this girl.

A study looked at the portion size of 52 paintings of the last supper (painted between 1000 and 1700’s) and found they are getting bigger. Professor Brian Wansink, who lead the research:

“We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history’s most famous dinner.”

Researchers studied the Times most emailed article list and found some surprising results:

People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.

And now I’m jonesing for someone to actually write an article that demands the headline, “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault”.

A study finds that New York is dead last in happiness. Connecticut and New Jersey follow.

All we need is a talking painting and a river of ectoplasm and we’ve got a real-life “Ghostbusters II”.

The little metal object that scientists used as the original standard kilogram weight is slowing changing. As a result they’ve had to come up with a new one, as well as a new way to measure it. It’s taken at least 30 years to perfect the new scale, but they think they are five to six years away from finishing it.

Geoff Brumfiel for NPR:

The scale is so sensitive that it can detect changes as small as ten-billionths of a kilogram. “If you pulled a hair out of a person’s head and then weighed them, we could tell the difference,” Steiner says.

The dye used in M&M’s has been found to be helpful to patients suffering from spinal injuries.

CNN:

Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center found that when they injected the compound Brilliant Blue G (BBG) into rats suffering spinal cord injuries, the rodents were able to walk again, albeit with a limp.

The only side effect was that the treated mice temporarily turned blue.

I was never happy with blue M&M’s since that color really can’t be found in nature, but this news makes it OK to tolerate them.  Any ongoing studies on the green ones?

A previously unknown image of Phineas Gage has been found.  Gage, in 1848, was working as a construction foreman when a freak accident sent an iron rod clear through his head.  He survived for 11 years, but had major personality changes.  It’s the stuff of textbooks.

Thomas H. Maugh II writes for the LA Times:

The daguerreotype has been in the possession of Jack and Beverly Wilgus for 30 years, although they do not know its origin. They thought it was an image of a whaler holding his harpoon, but whaling experts viewing it online told them it was not. Then an anonymous tipster suggested it was Gage.