Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller: The Art of Design Science (1999)

“‘Bucky’ was one of the most revolutionary technological visionaries of this century. As an architect, engineer, entrepreneur, poet, he was a quintessentially American, self-made man. But he was also an outsider: a technologist with a poet’s imagination who already developed theories of environmental control in the thirties (“more with less”) and anticipated the globalization of our planet (“think global – act local”).

This visual reader documents and examines Fuller’s theories, ideas, designs, and projects. It also takes an analytical look at his ideology of technology as the panacea. With numerous illustrations, many published here for the first time, as well as texts by Fuller and the editors.

The publication presents Buckminster Fuller’s creations as a dazzling expression of this unconditionally optimistic technocrat whose vision of driverless Spaceship Earth led him to examine the principles of maximizing effects in the most diverse sectors of design and construction.”

Edited by Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein
Translated by Steven Lindberg and Julia Thorson
Publisher Lars Müller, Baden, 1999
ISBN 3907044886, 9783907044889
528 pages
via ExP

Review: John Martinson (Geographical Review 2001).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (no OCR, 68 MB)

Gabriel Tarde: The Laws of Imitation (1890/1903) [French/English]

“Among the phenomena that early arrested his attention was imitation. From his office of magistrate he observed the large part that imitation plays in criminal conduct. Does it play a smaller part in normal conduct? Very rapidly M. Tarde’s ardent mind ranged over the field of history, followed the spread of Western civilisation, and reviewed the development of language, the evolution of art, of law, and of institutions. The evidence was overwhelming that in all the affairs of men, whether of good or of evil report, imitation is an ever-present factor; and to a philosophical mind the implication was obvious, that there must be psychological or sociological laws of imitation, worthy of most thorough study. [..] Tarde perceived that imitation, as a social form, is only one mode of a universal activity, of that endless repetition, through­out nature, which in the physical realm we know as the undulations of ether, the vibra­tions of material bodies, the swing of the planets in their orbits, the alter­nations of light and darkness, and of seasons, the suc­cession of life and death. Here, then, was not only a fundamental truth of social science, but also a first principle of cosmic philosophy.” (from the Introduction)

Les lois de l’imitation: étude sociologique
Publisher Félix Alcan, Paris, 1890
432 pages

English edition
Translated from the second French edition by Elsie Clews Parsons
With an Introduction by Franklin H. Giddings
Publisher Henry Holt and Company, New York, September 1903
404 pages

announcement (The New York Times, 1903)

google books [French]
google books [English]

PDF [French]
PDF [English]
PDF (more formats) [English]

FBI Files on Albert Einstein (1932-1955)

Released through the Freedom of Information Act.

Publisher Federal Bureau of Information, undated
FBI Records: The Vault series
1449 pages

publisher

PDF