Roland Jackson

Celebrating Local and Place-Based History: Westmorland and the 250th VCH ‘Big Red Book’ People, Place and Community Seminar

#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

Correction: The evolution of bone-eating worm diversity in the Upper Cretaceous Chalk Group of the United Kingdom

That's a first! A bone-eating worm named after Eunice Foote! (See ref. 5)

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Dr Sarah Rose holding the Kirkby Lonsdale 'Red Book'

Press release for Kirkby Lonsdale 'Red Book'

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...

Aargh, really not good. I do hope it mends soon

We probably should!

It's wonderful stuff. Are you planning something on him?

Of course it was accidental!

Thank goodness there don't seem to be any in Cumbria.

It's as bad as outside of...

Looks like Fringed Gentian

Field Gentian

Edelweiss

I think Fringed and Field Gentians #GentianFamily but admittedly in Switzerland hence bonus Edelweiss. All found within sight of the Matterhorn #WildflowerHour

I'm not sure what it says about them, but they all managed to remain close friends. It doesn't seem that that would be the case for similar differences of principle now, or would it?

Just about to review vol. 18!

Grass of Parnassus flower

Grass of Parnassus, flower of Cumberland #Cumbria, high up in Newlands #WildflowerHour

On the Eiger “Victor”, I yelled, “take the rope in really tight. I can’t get past this overhang”. My cramponed feet scrabbled back onto the rock. Seconds before, I had been hanging by both arms from a fixed rope o...

Indeed. But via the Mittellegi Ridge not, the North Face! See www.rolandjackson.co.uk/post/on-the-...

Snowy peaks of Jungfrau, Eiger and Mönch from the Ebnefluh

Mönch and Jungfrau from the summit of the Eiger

...and here they are from the south (from the summit of the Ebnefluh). Plus bonus of Mönch and Jungfrau from the summit of the Eiger.

That's a real shame - hope you can rescue content from the wreckage.

Looking up Coledale with Eel Crag, a glimpse of Grasmoor and Grisedale Pike

Looking down Coledale towards Skiddaw, Lonscale Fell and Blencathra

Looking up and down Coledale, with a finish of course in the Coledale Inn #Cumbria #LakeDistrict

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

Views from Green Gable #LakeDistrict #Cumbria

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

This is British humour...they all know exactly what is going on!

Looking down the Glencoyne valley with Ullswater below and Pennines in the far distance

A red deer in the bracken with trees behind

Looking down the Glencoyne valley to Ullswater, and a red deer in the bracken just above the lake ##LakeDistrict #Cumbria

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.

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

Looks fascinating! Many congrats.

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I have a copy of the Science Museum masterplan c.2000 on my wall at home! It's a beautiful image from the days of Tim Molloy as Head of Design.

Should've done a Davey. His foot certainly moved!

It's going for 6 straight over long on

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!

And all from a conversation on some previous social media site before it went algebraic!

Newlands valley

Newlands valley

Miners' Crag at the top of Newlands valley

Waterfall swimming pool in Newlands beck

Today in #LakeDistrict sunny paradise it is Newlands and swimming under waterfalls (extremely cold)