Stephen Landry's Blog

A retired highered CIO interested in technology, education, edtech, outdoors, classical music, cigars, and bourbon. Currently teaching in higher education. The views expressed are his own. Reblog != endorsement. Twitter: @landryst

[dk-thrive]

Twilight to Sunrise Time Lapse Video. 75 minutes in 22 seconds, 5 am to 6:15 am. 64º F. June 6, 2026. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT (@dkct25).

[landrysg]

Why Are the Humanities Missing the AI Moment?

Turns Out Reality Bats Last on Disciplines Too

... In the humanities, and in the precincts of the social sciences most affected by what I’ll call the constructivist turn, [the feedback loop] has been (very) weakened, sometimes deliberately so. There is no straightforward analog to “the patient dies” for a discipline that has, in its most influential theoretical moments, talked itself out of the idea that there are external standards against which its claims could fail. The strongest constructivist arguments do not deny that the world exists; that’s a strawman of a real and more careful tradition. They make the more limited claim that the conceptual schemes through which we describe the world are themselves social products with histories, and those histories foreclose any clean claim to neutral description. ...

The picture so far is concerning enough: disciplines without strong reality-correction, staffed by people whose training selected for skillful motivated reasoning, accumulating bad ideas that don’t get tested against much outside the guild. ...

Sales departments produce motivated reasoning. Legal teams produce motivated reasoning. Newsrooms produce motivated reasoning. None of these are inoculated against it. What distinguishes them from the academic precincts I’m pointing at is that they still treat external correction as legitimate. The salesperson loses the deal and learns something. The newsroom prints a retraction. The legal team loses in court. The cultures of these institutions have not produced a sophisticated argument for why being held to external standards is itself a form of domination.

In significant precincts of contemporary academic humanities and humanities-adjacent fields, that argument has been produced. It has been produced at high levels of theoretical sophistication. It has been refined and extended for decades. In the average case and in the popularizer-level reception, it functions as a resource readily available to deflect external critique. Any claim that the discipline has gotten something wrong can be reframed as a positioned reading, as speaking from privilege, as naturalizing the dominant view. The criticism doesn’t have to be addressed on its merits because the meta-theory has already explained what the criticism is really doing. ...

[landrysg]

In England on the evening of June 5, 1944, the D-day invasion begins

Band of Brothers, Episode 01, “Currahee”, Take-off, Operation Overlord

[baygeethefirst]

[benjhawkins]

Smoking is bad for you don’t do it

[freiherr-von-naarenburg]

I prefer a Peterson

[thekhoolhaus]

25 years ago an unknown Chinese protester stood in front of a tank in defiance of the government. No one knows the identity of the man but he was given the nick name “Tank Man”. This is one of the most iconic photographs of the century.

[fluffynexu]

It’s actually been 27 years now since the incident known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred. The picture above, famously referred to as “The Tank Man” was actually taken on June 5, the day after the massacre. (Which honestly makes him the one of the bravest person, to go back and stand up to a regime after such a terrible event transpired)

So what happened? I’m gonna give the TL;DR version:

April 15, 1989. Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party Chief dies.

Many people, including  workers, laborer, students and some officials come to mourn. You see, those protestors were originally there to mourn, not protest.

Time passed and there were some hunger strikes, and protests, and a call for accountability and reform from the government.

Eventually, things went south, because the communist party doesn’t have time to deal with these sorts of “demands” and grievances.

Keep in mind, the people wanted not the end of the Communist Party, but for the party to stop with the official corruption, rule of law, and the gross monopoly of information and power.

Incidentally, China still suffers from all of these SAME problems to this day…

June 3, 1989. The massacre started at night to disperse the crowd. Many were shot, wounded, and killed.

June 4, 1989. Some of the parents of the protestors who never came home went looking for them. It was still total mayhem.

June 5, 1989. The iconic image of the tank man was taken. To this day, no one knows what became of this person.

Content Warning for video: blood

“Tell the world…”

I cannot stress how important it is that people remember and know about this event. Do you know how China responded? With lies and censorship.

Even now, in 2016, we do not have an official death toll on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese government doesn’t even acknowledge the event as a “massacre”. And they weaves these cover stories of “counter revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government”. Therefore, the violence was necessary to ~protect~ the people. (Or some bullshit like that)

The amount of lying and censorship in China is, quite frankly, scary amazing. Tumblr, which somehow managed to fly under their radar, found itself being blocked in that country.

After all, tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.

And those who remember the incident in China? …………well, you tell me.

Please at least REMEMBER this tragedy. Untold innocent lives were lost, and a nation has been fed a lie for almost three decades now from their oppressive af regime.

[learningtoacceptchange]

I have never seen this video before.

What the fucking hell.

What the hell.

[naanima]

Tiananmen Square happened when I was seven, and let’s just say children have a really interesting way of interpreting information.

I just remember thinking it was a happy event, because all these people were out on the street, and at first the army were interacting with these people. And it almost looked like a festival because people were singing and talking, and hopeful. And then tv coverage for the events got cut off.

The blocking of the live coverage had all the adults anxious, nobody said anything for ages, I just remember my grandmother saying, “Just be glad your father isn’t in China, now.”

And that stuck with me to this day. Because yeah, if dad had been in China then he would have been in Beijing studying, he would have been on those streets with those other students.

It was the first time I knew that something horrible had happened to all those people I saw on the television. I don’t even remember how I knew that the army must have shot at the civilians, I just knew. Because when you grow up in China, especially in the 80s you knew there were things you don’t say, that you can’t express in a public forum, because that can get you and your family in trouble. You just knew, and it didn’t fucking matter if your were a child or an adult.

To this day I don’t remember how I found out what happened in Tiananmen Square, because the news covered it up, but people found out. My grandparents knew, my uncles and aunts knew. Extended family visited my grandparents, I remember people telling my mother not to mention my father’s name because my father was a Chinese Beijing University graduate, who had gone overseas. Because there were people who died in the protests that my dad knew.

And it was all just so frightening because nobody was telling me directly what was happening, but I just knew that all the people on the streets was probably dead.

Looking back on it, Tiananmen Square instilled in a me a life long distrust of governments, but especially the Chinese government. I’m ethnically Chinese but I never want to return to China, not even for a holiday, and this has been my attitude even before Xi Jinping took power. Because Tiananmen Square was a peaceful protest that ended up with the army using heavy artillery against their own people. How can you trust in a system, in a government like that? Because if my dad had delayed further studies overseas by two years he would have been one of those students, one of those fucking kids on the streets that would have died.

And you know, when the Umbrella movement was happening in Hong Kong I was deeply panicked and just anxious because I kept on thinking all those people, all those kids are going to be killed. And when that didn’t happen it was such a relief.

When I found out years later that Chinese people a few years younger than me didn’t know what happened in Tiananmen Square I was so fucking angry. I can’t even articulate the rage and the sheer tiredness of it all.

Dad and I talked about Tiananmen Square a few times through the years, broadly, politically, and at times with sheer rage on dad’s part. I don’t even know what I wanted to say, but just fuck this fucking regime.

[potteresque-ire]

I was In Hong Kong when Tiananamen Square Massacre happened. Hong Kong was still a British colony then and had full freedom of press, and its reporters were there recording live footage while trying to stay as long as possible when tanks rolled in and shots were fired, when students lay in blood and their fellow students piled the injured bodies on those wooden plank carts to get them to the hospitals, while asking the Hong Kongers who were there to support the movement to please remember that night and spread the story of the massacre far and wide, because they already knew they would be silenced, if not imprisoned or murdered.

That night, and in the upcoming months, Hong Kong was in perpetual tears, and in literal shock.

Keep reading

[landrysg]

You Can and Should Blame Young People When They Act Like Lazy Cheaters, Actually

fear of "old man yells at cloud" has become a culture-devouring virus

... And this connects with what I’m constantly saying about education and how our romantic notions about it ruin everything: yes, we have to force students to be ethical and to not cheat, and this should not surprise us because the basic act of schooling is forcing students to do things. Coercion is at the heart of education.

Education is a form of coercion. We can dress it up in all the gentle constructivist language we like, we can do the Freire thing, we can pretend that every student is a tiny autodidact yearning only for the right “learning environment,” but the plain truth is that most people learn most of the things they learn because someone makes them. They read the book because there’s a quiz. They solve the problems because there’s a grade. They show up because absences have consequences. This attitude isn’t some monstrous betrayal of pedagogy; it is pedagogy, at least for the great mass of students. Civilization itself is the long, uneven process of forcing our worst instincts into contact with better obligations until habit and conscience start to take over. ...

[msmarymillspaulos]

We are fighting against three giants, my dear Sancho: injustice, fear and ignorance."

Miguel de Cervantes

[culturaloffering]

Happy Ginsday to all who celebrate.

[flippantsmeagol]

Milky Way rising above Agua Fria National Monument in Arizona. Watch the right side closely. Never seen that before.

[only-cat-memes]

[epicallyepicnerdery]

[robert-hadley]

Honeysuckle by William Morris

[serpentinesheldonserpentine]

Happy to find my regular mutuals in the “for you” tab.

[freiherr-von-naarenburg]

You’re a brave man. I have to do the same or I’ll miss good things but it’s scary over there.

[recolored-classics]

Impression, Sunrise (1872) by Claude Monet

[dk-thrive]

Mom and her babies. (1) Sleeping under Mom's wing. (2) Race to the Pool! (3) Mom said not to horse around. Time for breakfast. Single file little ones. 5:15 to 5:30 am. 55º F. June 3, 2026. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT (@dkct25).

[dk-thrive]

Trees & Birds at Twilight. 5:00 to 5:15 am. 45º F. June 2, 2026. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT (@dkct25)

[culturaloffering]

"A year later, it found children playing in the green kindergartens had less disease-causing bacteria – such as Streptococcus – on their skin, and stronger immune defences. Their gut microbiota showed reduced levels of Clostridium bacteria – associated with inflammatory bowel disease, colitis and infections such as sepsis and botulism."

Interesting. Let kids play in the woods.

[lesser-known-composers]

Georges Martin Witkowski (1867-1943) - Quatuor à cordes en mi majeur : Très vif

Quatuor Debussy