Chris Lansdown

There is a sense in which it is possible to have negative knowledge.

A pattern I’ve observed is people who are relatively high in intelligence but low in social skills often have trouble finding other highly intelligent people with whom they can converse as equals, thus having something to offer, and so they find people who

On the tenth day of November in the year of our Lord 1985, the seventh episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired.

The term AI, short for Artificial Intelligence, is a marketing term rather than a serious description of anything.

On the third day of November in the year of our Lord 1985, the sixth episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired.

In the excellent movie Interview with the Vampire, there is a fascinating scene where the 500 year old vampire Armand explains to the recently made vampire (and main character) Louis that there are not, in fact, many old vampires.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is an excellent story which is fascinating for many reasons.

As I’ve been re-watching episodes of Murder, She Wrote, I’ve begun to notice that in most episodes, while it would be quite accurate to call them murder mysteries, they’re usually not detective fiction.

When I was young, it was common for people to blame Christianity in particular or religion in general for the existence of scolds.

It seems to me that the institution of family gatherings has been on the way out for a long time in America, and as so often happens, people tend to mistake the last stages of a thing dying for when it started dying, because it is in the last stages of it…

One of the things which struck me when I recently read The Communist Manifesto (plus two earlier drafts of it in FAQ form) was that Karl Marx seemed to believe that the industrial revolution meant the end of scarcity.

On the twenty seventh day of October in the year of our Lord 1985, the fifth episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired.

When it comes to the monotheism of the Jews, one hears some amazingly stupid things from atheists.

For the last thirty years or so, I’ve been watching people complain about the progressive capture of institutions, turning them from what they had been into instruments of progressive propaganda.

Disney Star Wars is an endlessly fascinating thing not because it is such a colossal failure, but because it was such a predictable colossal failure that managed to be even worse than one would have expected it to be.

Anyone who pays attention to the stupid things said by actors these days is aware that actors saying stupid things has far less effect on how movies perform than they used to.

In my post about people who think LLMs are intelligent, I said that I think that these people are like the people who trust TV news commentators or newspapers.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are the things which are often called by the marketing term “AI.”

On the twentieth day of October in the year of our Lord 1985, the fourth episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired.

I’ve now heard of several SciFi stories which feature an “all male” race.

While it is true and important that ideas have consequences, I think a lot of people misunderstand the history of the 20th century because they forget that context has consequences, too.

On the thirteenth day of October in the year of our Lord 1985, the third episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired.

Agatha Christie is widely—and justly—regarded as a master of plotting mysteries.

Authenticity is all the rage these days, at least on the internet, but while most people have at least a reasonable grasp on what inauthenticity is, I think that the concept of authenticity is often misunderstood.

On the seventh day of January in the year of our Lord 1990, the twelfth episode of the sixth season of Murder, She Wrote aired.

I recently game across a fantastic tweet: pic.twitter.com/f9Jtw07csi — Mac Smith (@MacSmithArt) April 15, 2026 If it disappears, the text is: Scooby-Doo is a devastating commentary on the prejudices of the Moderns.

There’s an interesting book, published in 1930, called Masters of Mystery.

There is a popular view on the subject of trying to reduce the amount of fat on one’s body, which is that the first law of thermodynamics states that if you eat fewer Calories than you burn, you must lose weight.

Mobile games—the kind played primarily on phones, though also on tablets—have a very, very strange property that they allow an effectively unlimited amount of money to be spent on them, and a few people—perhaps one in 100—do spend extraordinary amounts of…

It’s a bit sad how the title of this post could easily be a running series if I wanted to devote the time to writing it.

I recently came across something I had no idea existed: on what looks to be a Christmas episode of a variety show, Werner Klemperer and John Banner performed Silent Night.

I recently bought some archival-quality bookbinder’s glue (amazon link) and some navy blue polyester satin ribbon and started adding bookmark ribbons to some of my hardcover books that didn’t come with them.

I’m just putting this here so I can find it again, I don’t have anything to say on it yet, though it is quite interesting: She nodded understanding, visibly bracing herself again towards a world of shrewd daily business which had not ceased with the ending

I’ve finally started reading Miguel de Cervantes’ famous novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.