Personal background |
I'm a cultural anthropologist teaching in (of all places) Japan's first and only School of Cartoon & Comic Art, at Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto, Japan. I've done research on the place of comics in the lives of Japanese girls and women, and have also translated several thousand pages of Japanese comics into English. In addition to teaching various courses on the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and international aspects of comics, I am currently translating a number of "classic" English-language comics into Japanese, with the hope of broadening the scope of interest of Japanese readers of comics. |
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
As a child, I longed to become an astrophysicist, and have never lost my love of things extraterrestrial. I'm the father of a boy (ten years old as I write in early summer 2002), and I have great hopes for his future, and for the futures of my cartoonist-in-training students, but it is sometimes difficult to be hopeful when one sees the apparent determination with which our species rushes towards extinction. The effects of global warming have become obvious even to laypersons, and nothing in the news gives me reason to think those effects will ever be reversed. I'm certainly no cultist who imagines aliens will come to save a select few of us Earthlings ("Beam me up, E.T.!"), but I sometimes wonder if our only hope is not to come into contact with a more advanced species who might be able to help us save ourselves from ourselves. An irrational hope, perhaps, and certainly an irresponsible one, but as I watch the SETI data painting patterns on my monitor, I sometimes find myself embracing that hope with a certain sense of urgency. |
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