Misc

Bookshop proprietor Shioriko Shinokawa (Ayame Goriki) and her partners in deduction Hajime Shida (Katsumi Takahashi) and Daisuke Goura (Akira). Image © 2013 Fuji Television Network. tl;dr: Antiquarian Bookshop Biblia’s Case Files is TV comfort food for the holidays, a cozy Japanese mystery series with a bookish heroine. I’m still watching a fair amount of anime, but recently decided to use my Crunchyroll subscription to check out a Japanese dramatic series instead. Four days and eleven episodes later I’ve just finished up the first and only (thus far) season of Antiquarian Bookshop Biblia’s Case Files (ビブリア古書堂の事件手帖, Biblia Koshodou no Jiken Techou), a series featuring a demure young proprietor of a used bookstore who uses her encyclopedic knowledge of books and book selling to solve a variety of (mostly) minor domestic mysteries. It’s relatively slight but entertaining, the perfect thing to watch over the holidays when you want to relax and enjoy something that won’t spoil your digestion. ...

Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) and Charlie Isaacs (Ashley Zuckerman), physicist protagonists of the WGN America television series Manhattan tl;dr: Manhattan is a quality TV show about the people racing to build an atomic bomb, and their families. It’s well worth watching, but you’ll enjoy it more if you remember you’re not tuned to the History Channel. ...

Continuing my intermittent series of recommendation posts, today we’ll put aside more intellectual topics and focus on entertainment, albeit with a bit of a serious side. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of taking a young fan to Otakon at the Baltimore Convention Center. Like Comic-Con in San Diego, Otakon features lots of people dressing up in unusual costumes (the technical term is “cosplay”); however unlike Comic-Con, which at this point is dominated by the promotion of high-profile Hollywood blockbusters, Otakon and its sister conventions (including CHS Otaku Fest, right here at Centennial High School in Ellicott City) focus on the less well-known parallel world of anime (Japanese animated movies and TV series) and manga (Japanese comics).1 ...

As you’ll know if you read my last post, I decided to stop blogging for a while to save wear and tear on my shoulder. However as it happened I got a phone call from Nuance, the makers of Dragon Dictate for Mac, who were trying to get me to upgrade to the new version of the product that I purchased a few years ago. It was a reasonably good deal and I thought it was worth trying out, so I took advantage of the offer. ...

In part 4 of this series I discussed the general problem of estimating growth rates for periods less than a year, and using Howard County’s population in the 21st century as an example calculated estimated monthly, week, daily, and even hourly growth rates for the county based on the Census population figures for 2000 and 2010. The problem with those calculations is that it’s hard to get a sense for the relative magnitude of the growth rates. For example, how much different is a growth rate of 0.12256% per month from a growth rate of 1.4807% per year? It would be nice to express the growth rates according to a common time period, just as (for example) we use “miles per hour” to refer to the speed of our cars even when we’re just driving 2 minutes to the grocery. ...