One of the great aesthetic legacies of the Soviet Union is the great wealth of magnificent propaganda posters it left behind. In this post, I present some personal favorites.

Propaganda Design & Aesthetics: Soviet Retro Posters

Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency is a necessity — students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

A mind-boggling investigation of the all-pervasive, constantly morphing presence of the Pentagon in daily life—a real-world Matrix come alive

Here is the new, hip, high-tech military-industrial complex—an omnipresent, hidden-in-plain-sight system of systems that penetrates all our lives.

From iPods to Starbucks to Oakley sunglasses, historian Nick Turse explores the Pentagon’s little-noticed contacts (and contracts) with the products and companies that now form the fabric of America. Turse investigates the remarkable range of military incursions into the civilian world: the Pentagon’s collaborations with Hollywood filmmakers; its outlandish schemes to weaponize the wild kingdom; its joint ventures with the World Wrestling Federation and NASCAR. He shows the inventive ways the military, desperate for new recruits, now targets children and young adults, tapping into the “culture of cool” by making “friends” on MySpace.

A striking vision of this brave new world of remote-controlled rats and super-soldiers who need no sleep, The Complex will change our understanding of the militarization of America. We are a long way from Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex: this is the essential book for understanding its twenty-first-century progeny.

The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives

Paul Kedrosky:

There are huge cross-currents on the Microsoft/yahoo deal after this week's earnings news from the two companies. What we discovered, in effect, was that what we have here are two drunks holding each other up.

Microsoft/Yahoo: Dead? Dithering? Drunks?

Vee is a command-line blog tool that is very portable across Unix systems. It provides an interactive as well as a batch interface to maintain a log of entries. Formatting is done using a module architecture that allows a high degree of customization. There are minimal flags and no set up is required.

Vee

Kevin Warwick wired his nervous system into the Internet and his wife; now he's out to become one with The Matrix

Self-Styled Cyborg Dreams of Outwitting Superintelligent Machines

Michael Pollan's latest book, as reviewed by New York Review of Books:

The symbiosis of the American food and pharmaceutical industries, to which Pollan refers, is the grotesque avatar of the primitive supermarket that I dreaded on the eve of the Second World War. "Is it just a coincidence," Pollan asks,

that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent...on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on health care has climbed to 16 percent of national income.

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Dorothy clearly knew, as the entry for October 4, 1802, indicates, that life would change irrevocably once her brother began to share his bed with Mary. The business of the wedding ring, which she wore on her finger for the night before he was married, and the trance into which she fell, “neither seeing nor hearing anything”, while the ceremony was performed at the church down the road, betray her abnormal state. Wilson disagrees with Dorothy’s biographers Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, who said that her words here are of “transparent truthfulness”: I half suspect that by “transparent” they may have meant “unwittingly revealing”, but were too kind to say so. Wilson is, rightly, more overtly suspicious of double motives and meanings, but I find it impossible to tell whether Dorothy knew how strange her emotion might appear to others, or whether she found it strange herself. Neither Wilson nor Gittings and Manton comment on the fact that Dorothy, in her letters, usually referred to the latest Wordsworth child as “our baby”. One wonders what Mary made of that.

Poor Dorothy Wordsworth

Data governance entails a universe of concepts, principles, and tools intended to enable appropriate management and use of the state’s investment in information. Part I on data governance presents an introduction that describes the basic concepts. Governance, and particularly data governance, is an evolutionary process. It begins with an understanding of the current investment and then manages that investment toward greater value for the state.

Managing Information As An Enterprise Asset

The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith at all. And now some atheists think they need a church.

If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?