There is no place like ether

The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. The project represents a major collaborative endeavor in preservation and electronic access to historical texts.

via Cornell University Library Making of America Collection.

Are we made of junk? Thierry Bardini believes we are. Examining an array of cybernetic structures from genetic codes to communication networks, he explores the idea that most of culture and nature, including humans, is composed primarily of useless, but always potentially recyclable, material otherwise known as “junk.” Bardini unravels the presence of junk at the interface between science fictions and fictions of science, showing that molecular biology and popular culture since the early 1960s belong to the same culture-cyberculture-which is essentially a culture of junk. He draws on a wide variety of sources, including the writings of Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs, interviews with scientists as well as “crackpots,” and work in genetics, cybernetics, and physics to support his contention that junk DNA represents a blind spot in our understanding of life.

Amazon.com: Junkware (Posthumanities) (9780816667512): Thierry Bardini: Books.

Synergetics: Richard Buckminster Fuller, Arthur L. Loeb, E. J. Applewhite.

I, Cyborg: Kevin Warwick: Books.