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Artist/Astronomer Exhibits Photos Of Spy Satellites
daemonburrito writes "Trevor Paglen, the photographer and co-author of 'Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights' and 'I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me,' has an exhibit showing in Berkeley of 189 photos of secret US satellites (exhibit page here). Wired says, 'In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time.'"
Did TFA get slashdotted, or did the DoD bomb Berkley?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
This fruitloop thinks he discovered 189 secret, artificial satellites in orbit? How does NASA plan its launches around them? How are commercial and GPS satellites launched without hitting them? How does Russia work on the ISS without noticing them? How is Europe going to get those Galileo sats up there with these "secret" ones flying around?
Oh, and what's up with the Catholic Church analogy? It doesn't even make sense for this.
How does he know it is the US controlling a given satellite? I wonder if any DoD guys looked at the exhibit and said "Hey! That's not one of ours."
Pointless. Some genius w/a camera takes pics of satellite tracks. Living in a semi-rural area, I can track eye visible satellites w/a bit of patience. I was hoping for something along the lines of a 16" (or larger) telescope getting pics like are seen often on http://www.spaceweather.com/ they even have a "simple" tracking program. http://www.heavens-above.com/ is a neat tool/toy as well. And if you REALLY wanted to know wtf that codename for that blob of light stood for , hit http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/index.html there's a search function. At one point, there was even one of the UFO "tracking sites" that had some interesting blurry shots of what were prob someone's elint arrays.
I've argued pretty much what you have about Galileo, that he was brilliant as a scientist in an era when the rules of science were less formal, but was lousy on people skills and pissed off a lot of people who didn't just go around 'inquisiting' everyone, then the Roman Catholic church swung into a more fearful than average phase, he lost the protection of a pope that was willing to cut him extra slack, and he had no other moderates and reasonable men left in the church who wanted to stick their necks out for his particular case. His enemies towards the end included plenty of people who either weren't worried about his effect on church doctrine or would have been willing to let him publish despite their concerns, but they were sticking up for more reasonable people, for example, during that same era, there were people in the church making sure Tycho and Copernicus and half a dozen others weren't charged with anything and that C.'s mom wasn't tried for the allegations of witchcraft brought against her by locals.
There was also a lot of dealing with anatomists at the time, and again, some people in the church hierarchy were trying to distinguish between people who were 'just' autopsying naturally obtained corpses, and ones who didn't care how the subject crossed the line into death, and were subsidizing possible murder for hire. Respect for natural science was low, but did that follow from church doctrine or because some natural scientists were behaving like something out of Shelly?
With Bruno, what I'd like to know is, the R.C. church has repeatedly claimed that Bruno got such harsh punishment because there was more to it than just Theological differences. Now this could be a claim that Bruno wasn't just talking about life on other worlds and raising questions about whether such life had a need for a savior and such, but was doing something Occult, or supporting a specific 'cult' such as the Cathars. Bruno certainly could have gotten the pyre for what the rest of us would call a Theological difference and the church could be splitting hairs over what's variant theology and what's occult practice. I'm not saying the Roman Catholic church has never trivialized competing religions or called them just cults. But it would be nice to have someone translate the original texts here into a language I'm more comfortable with, and do a big book on it for modern readers, maybe as part of a Bruno bio.
Who is John Cabal?