| William J. Clancey: Home > Essays |
Daily reports written during my stays in the FMARS on Devon Island and MDRS near Hanksville, UT (1998 - 2005)
Coming Home Again -- Sunday, April 3
Reactive Behavior -- Tuesday, April 5
Communication -- Wednesday, April 6
The Golden Rule -- Monday, April 11
Planning -- Wednesday, April 13
St. Matthew's Commencement Address
An invitation to help humanity create colonies on Mars. Presented
to 6th Grade class in St. Matthews church, San Mateo, CA June
2002.
The Next Voyager Record: A Qatsi
Perspective
Essay about art, aliens, and ET -- explaining how we might create
a new kind of time capsule based on Reggio and Philip Glass's
audiovisual collaboration. Presented at Musée d'Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris, February 2003.
The Target Stores Urban Legend
How public opinion is manipulated by inciting emotional reactions,
which play to and reinforce biases, and subsequently inhibit thinking.
How to be a Politically Correct
Human Being
My response to another chain email.
Return from San Marino
Adventures flying from Italy back to San Franciso, June 2001
Rapelling in Lomatium Canyon
A family letter about our weekend near Moab, UT, April 2002
Two Drunks
A brief encounter
Le Deux Composé
An imaginary encounter
Tool Kitsch
A reflection on selling everyday fix-it tools in a plastic box
Why Pluto is Now Not a Planet
A Wall Street Journal editor claims scientists are being unnecessarily
precise in recategorizing Pluto as a dwarf planet. His mockery of
scientific naming is ignorant and alarming, showing no grasp of
how scientists explain natural phenomena.
Automating CapCom
A first-person report on our field test at the Mars Desert Research
Station in April 2002.
Living on Mars Time
Working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA in February
2004, I realized I didn't really understand what it meant that
Mars had longer days.
Don't Confuse Geologists with
Their Tools
Reporters and researchers alike use grandiose metaphors to make
their subject matter more alluring. So instead of calling the
machines we send to Mars tools, the press releases call them "robotic
geologists." Whatever will we call a machine that could actually
decide which rocks to pick up, let alone write a paper about finding
water on Mars?
Okay, so I'm a MetaScientist: New
Kinds of Tools for the New Kind of Science
Reflections on why my work during a scientific expedition is not
called "science."
You are conscious when you dream
Synopsis of my theory of the nature of dreams. Written in 1999
for Why: Questions in Science, a new journal that unfortunately
never came to fruition.
Can a computer count? What
the mechanism of consciousness reveals about forms of intelligence
Summary of my Contact 2000 presentation, in response to
a question posed to me, "What is consciousness good for?"
Robotic geologists (Martian
Chronicles 7, 2000, http://www.marssociety.org/youth)
One-page summary of how our work at Haughton Crater is helpful
for inventing tools for Mars geology. The editors chose the title,
which I think is very strange, like calling your Cuisinart a "robotic
chef." See my related essay above.
Voyages of Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers
Invited
presentation for the CONTACT 2008 Conference, NASA Ames, April 2008.
How working with a rover changes the nature of field science.
The Mars Room: Musée
d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (November 2001)
A scientist-artist collaboration to bring the public into
dialogues about Mars.
Mars, A Place to Go
Invited essay illustrated by Mars simulated image from HMP-1999;
Appeared in Bonami, F. & Obrist, H. U. (Eds.), Sogni/Dreams,
pp. 30-31. Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L'Arte (Venice
Biennial of Visual Arts).
How would
you feel after 500 days on Mars?
Haunting photographs from Haughton-Mars Project 1999 Expedition,
with captions from Lopez's Arctic Dreams.
Ethnographic
Gallery from HMP-1999
Sixty photos with poetic captions composed during the Haughton-Mars
1999 Expedition. Illustrates the romance of our last camp on the
Haughton River.
Other Arctic Photographs
From my intial trip in 1998 through 2001.