Roland Jackson
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rolandjackson.bsky.social
Roland Jackson
@rolandjackson.bsky.social
3K followers 200 following 180 posts
History & politics of sci/tech, & Cumbria. Author: The Ascent of John Tyndall #histsci; Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State #c19. Chair Cumbria County History Trust & Trustee Lowther Castle & Gdns. Web: https://www.rolandjackson.co.uk
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rolandjackson.bsky.social
Roland Jackson @rolandjackson.bsky.social · Nov 12
People are flocking to Bluesky so here's an attempt to connect people interested in #Cumbrian #History (not many visible currently) and the landscape and culture of #Cumbria and the #LakeDistrict. Let me know who I've missed, or if you want to be removed (if I can work out how!).
go.bsky.app/Tew7cxp
Reposted by Roland Jackson
vch-home.bsky.social
#ICYMI - we are celebrating the publication of our 250th #BigRedBook, and our first publication for the historic county of #Westmorland.

In September we had an event to mark this and to place the volume in the context of the series and to showcase the extraordinary work behind it. #Skystorians
Celebrating Local and Place-Based History: Westmorland and the 250th VCH ‘Big Red Book’
People, Place and Community Seminar
www.history.ac.uk
October 30, 2025 at 10:54 AM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
That's a first! A bone-eating worm named after Eunice Foote! (See ref. 5)

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
Correction: The evolution of bone-eating worm diversity in the Upper Cretaceous Chalk Group of the United Kingdom
journals.plos.org
October 12, 2025 at 8:11 AM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
The Cumbria County History Trust has just launched the first 'Red Book' in the Victoria County History of Westmorland, covering the Kirkby Lonsdale area.
We'll be on Radio Cumbria c.1215/1220 today. Link available after c.2pm today, c.2hrs 15 mins in:
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
Dr Sarah Rose holding the Kirkby Lonsdale 'Red Book' Press release for Kirkby Lonsdale 'Red Book'
October 9, 2025 at 11:15 AM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
I think Fringed and Field Gentians #GentianFamily but admittedly in Switzerland hence bonus Edelweiss. All found within sight of the Matterhorn #WildflowerHour
Looks like Fringed Gentian Field Gentian Edelweiss
August 24, 2025 at 7:10 PM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Grass of Parnassus, flower of Cumberland #Cumbria, high up in Newlands #WildflowerHour
Grass of Parnassus flower
July 13, 2025 at 7:02 PM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Looking up and down Coledale, with a finish of course in the Coledale Inn #Cumbria #LakeDistrict
Looking up Coledale with Eel Crag, a glimpse of Grasmoor and Grisedale Pike Looking down Coledale towards Skiddaw, Lonscale Fell and Blencathra
June 19, 2025 at 1:26 PM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Views from Green Gable #LakeDistrict #Cumbria
Buttermere and Crummock from Green Gable Ennerdale from Green Gable Gable Crag from Green Gable Looking from Green Gable towards Langdale and Esk Pike with Sty Head Tarn and Sprinkling Tarn
June 18, 2025 at 4:00 PM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
An interesting paper arguing that the anthropogenic effect of burning fossil fuels could in principle have been detected in the late nineteenth century www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....
#histsci #c19th
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
June 17, 2025 at 7:58 AM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Looking down the Glencoyne valley to Ullswater, and a red deer in the bracken just above the lake ##LakeDistrict #Cumbria
Looking down the Glencoyne valley with Ullswater below and Pennines in the far distance A red deer in the bracken with trees behind
June 6, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Roland Jackson
gregpriest.bsky.social
At long last, my PhD dissertation—Charles Darwin’s Science of History—has been filed and approved. I graduate shortly.

The abstract is below.

🌱🐋🦋🦫🗃️🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci
Abstract The natural sciences and history seem to represent alternative, even antithetical, ways of understanding the world. The natural sciences seek recurring patterns in nature and explain them using general laws. History concerns itself with unique events and explains them using narratives of how they happened as they did. This dichotomy has come to seem natural, even inevitable. But it is neither. Charles Darwin believed that it is possible to integrate the natural sciences and history into a unified program of inquiry that can explain stable and recurring patterns in nature using contingent historical processes rather than general laws. And he devoted his career to building such a unified program. In this dissertation, I examine the development and character of this science of history.Darwin did not begin his scientific career pursuing this project. When he first began to build a science of living nature, Darwin’s goal was to discover and characterize the necessary and invariant laws that govern and explain the living world. He had internalized a conception of science that had been formulated by John Herschel, Charles Lyell, and Charles Babbage. They had seen scientific explanation as consisting in showing phenomena to be the necessary results of universal laws, taking as their model Isaac Newton’s laws of motion. Darwin in his turn consecrated himself to the ambition to do for the living world what Newton had done for the heavens: he would discover and characterize the laws of life. Within a decade, however, Darwin would come to abandon his ambition to subsume the living world under a regime of invariant laws. He came to reject the simple, linear conception of causation on which his Newtonian program had been founded in favor of an understanding of evolutionary causation as ineluctably complex. He also came to realize that history has causal power in the living world, both constraining and creative. Darwin ultimately concluded that, to do justice to the profound complexity and historicity of the living world, he would have to integrate the natural sciences and history into a unified program of inquiry. This required him to rethink what laws of nature are and to reconceive the goals of scientific explanation. He came to understand explanation of living nature in more pragmatic terms, as making phenomena intelligible to working naturalists and providing them a conceptual framework to organize and drive their scientific work. Most fundamentally, he concluded that explanations in the sciences of life must take history seriously, not as a fixed stage on which evolution unfolds, but as a critical component of biological explanation. In order to create explanatory tools better adapted to his revised conception of science, Darwin returned to several ideas he had encountered as a young man and reimagined them through a historicizing lens. These included the natural theological notion of contrivance, the biblical and literary image of the tree of life, and the imaginary demon that the mentors of his youth had created to define a regulative ideal for scientific knowledge. Darwin did not merely appropriate these older ideas. He reconceived them by viewing them through a historicizing lens to make tools for making sense of the phenomena of living nature. Darwin’s science of history did not long survive him. His vision of a unified program of inquiry fell into an eclipse after his death, even among scientists who have considered themselves to be his greatest champions. And that eclipse has not yet ended.
June 4, 2025 at 3:16 PM
Reposted by Roland Jackson
vch-home.bsky.social
Our friends at VCH Cumbria work on Lancashire north of the Sands, a small corner of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and all of Cumberland and Westmorland.

Their work depends on volunteers and donations.

To support them, follow the link:
Support Us | Cumbria County History Trust
The Cumbria County History Trust is a charity that aims to produce a permanent record of the history of Cumbria from the prehistoric to the present.  We work through the Victoria County History of Cum...
www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk
May 15, 2025 at 9:22 AM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
In the end, we didn't think we could make that definitive extrapolation, but it's clear that Eunice Foote showed evidence for the warming effect of atmospheric CO2...in 1856!
May 2, 2025 at 6:24 AM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Today in #LakeDistrict sunny paradise it is Newlands and swimming under waterfalls (extremely cold)
Newlands valley Newlands valley Miners' Crag at the top of Newlands valley Waterfall swimming pool in Newlands beck
April 10, 2025 at 7:00 PM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Today in #LakeDistrict paradise weather it's Blencathra, and the first swim of the year, but the heating is not switched on in Scales Tarn
Scales Tarn from above Sharp Edge on Blencathra Scales Tarn Scales Tarn
April 8, 2025 at 11:53 AM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
One for the #LakeDistrict connoisseur, Steeple today.
Steeple on the right, from Pillar Steeple with Ennerdale behind Close-up of Steeple with Great Bourne in the background Ennerdale from the (long) descent off Steeple
April 7, 2025 at 5:04 PM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Another day in #LakeDistrict paradise, this time with a homage to the spectacular climbing ground of Pillar Rock (completely deserted today)
Pillar Rock from directly below in the morning sun The complexity of Pillar Rock and Shamrock (on the left) revealed bother early sun Starting the Shamrock Traverse onto Pillar Pillar Rock High Man from above, with its 'interesting' descent options
April 7, 2025 at 4:49 PM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Stunning weather in the #LakeDistrict today. Buttermere, Crummock, Ennerdale, and a deserted Grey Crag.
Buttermere from the slopes of Red Pike Crummock from Dodd under Red Pike Ennerdale from High Crag Grey Crag in Birkness Combe. Deserted by climbers despite the weather
April 6, 2025 at 5:37 PM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Hmm. Meta has apparently stolen lots of my stuff too. But I do wonder what it made of my well-known publication 'The binding of 2,4,6-trinitrophenyl derivatives to the mouse myeloma protein MOPC 315'.
andrewcopson.bsky.social Andrew Copson @andrewcopson.bsky.social · Mar 20
Discovered Meta have used pirate copies of (at least) 4 of my books and 3 articles in order to train its AI. I’m glad they got good content on secularism and humanism ☺️ but of course this does raise ethical issues! You can check what they have used of yours here: www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.
www.theatlantic.com
March 20, 2025 at 5:09 PM
Reposted by Roland Jackson
vch-home.bsky.social
Huge excitement in the office today at the arrival of the page proofs from @boydellandbrewer.bsky.social for a very special publication.

Lonsdale Ward will be the first ever volume we have produced for the historic county of Westmorland, and will also be our 250th #BigRedBook. 🗃️
Crop from the title page: The Victoria History of the Counties of England, A History of Westmorland Volume I. Map showing the area covered by the volume. The small towns of Burton-in-Kendal and Kirkby Lonsdale to the south, with Lancashire beyond. To the east is the West Riding of Yorkshire and to the west, Kendal Ward of Westmorland. The area covered is the Lune valley and - on a map, at least - forms a flat bottomed triangle. In case any geographers are watching, we'd love to know how t write Alt-Txt for maps... Illustration from the proofs: three sheep atop a rocky outcrop. The outcrop is known as 'Fox's Pulpit' after the Quaker, George Fox, who preached at this spot, 300 metres up, for 3 hours, in 1652. The Anglicans had a chapel up there before that. No, we really don't know why: the medieval chapel was in a much more hospitable spot at the bottom of the valley.
March 11, 2025 at 3:21 PM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Derwentwater regatta underway #Cumbria #LakeDistrict
March 8, 2025 at 9:40 AM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Perfect weather for the Derwentwater regatta this morning #Cumbria
View looking west across Derwentwater with Catbells and Causey Pike ridges
March 8, 2025 at 7:28 AM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Did you know that the Nationwide's name can be traced to an event in Millom? #Cumbria
www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/millom-co-op...
Millom Co-op and the Nationwide (Background: Millom) | Cumbria County History Trust
How the closure of Millom Co-op in 1969 sent shock-waves through the Co-operative Movement – and led the Co-operative Permanent Building Society to change its name.
www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk
February 28, 2025 at 12:03 PM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
For some reason I missed this, but it's a lovely obituary of a wonderful person, with whom I was privileged to work over many years.
hetanshah.bsky.social Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · Feb 14
By the way if you aren’t familiar with Simon Burall and his pioneering work on public engagement and deliberative democracy this obituary by @tom-clark.bsky.social is a good place to start
www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Simon Burall obituary
Campaigner who sought to remedy democratic deficits by embedding the voices of ordinary citizens in institutions
www.theguardian.com
February 14, 2025 at 9:01 AM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
Any experts on terrible #C19th handwriting on here? #histsci
darwinsbulldog.bsky.social Michael D. Barton @darwinsbulldog.bsky.social · Feb 12
Transcription help: letter from Arthur Stanley to John Tyndall (1880): "I suppose that the Telegraphic m[ee]t[in]g will take up the ev[en]ing—otherwise the Professor c[ou]ld be spared for an hour. [Please] do not take [pains] to answer, [as I shall] [????] that the [????] is [????]."

#histsci #HPS
February 12, 2025 at 3:47 PM
rolandjackson.bsky.social
On Black Combe and the Ordnance Survey in #Cumbria #C19 #histsci
www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/black-combe-...
Black Combe and the Ordnance Survey (Background: Whitcham) | Cumbria County History Trust
Black Combe was important not just for the Ordnance Survey’s mapping of Cumbria – but for their mapping of the whole of Britain.
www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk
February 6, 2025 at 10:48 AM