Recently I have is trying to get through the big report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was published late last year, called “Climate change 2021: Physical Science Basis. ” It was a challenge because (a) I had to, um, learn as I continued, and (b) the nearly 4,000-page PDF of the weather consensus, annotated, and illustrated. That’s too much consensus; everyone agrees. However, it is clear that they — the hundreds of IPCC scientists who compiled this enormous document—would like We read it, right? That exists, so I should at least give it a try. Plus, it’s completely free to download. I like a bargain.
However, the huge PDF file broke my e-reader. I got it working, but the font is too small. So I used a command line program called mutool to split each page in half and now I can read the book in landscape mode with larger typeface, a bit of a hack that I am proudly proud of. embarrassing — even though the resulting document is almost 8,000 pages long.
Eight kilograms is a lot, but a very long book is still a book: You start at the beginning, skip the introductory pages, skim through the “Summary for Policymakers” , jump ahead 7,000 pages or so and read a bit from “Appendix V : Monsoons. Okay, so maybe it’s not really a book, more of a database that’s the result of a complicated bureaucratic process. I make it a few pages at a time, until my brain refuses to continue without Twitter rest.
Fed up with my slow progress, I started using Twitter to look up the climate scientists themselves, clicking on their timelines. It’s a great way to see what they’re saying — to pick up on social cues that can make the rest of their network better focused. As you’d expect from a bunch of people who are literally cloud smart, they don’t quite drown out the actual poster of the memo. Some statements in the press release; Some like to share scientific news. However, personal details are always exposed — children and spouses and the like. You see their little representative faces, encounter some artifacts like Spotify playlists, witness their naked enthusiasm for the glacier. Reading through all of this, I definitely get goosebumps.
I think this kind of dirty spy — sneak reading — is a belong to the internet learning way. It’s like when you wake up and all the social media posts circulating in your peer group are suddenly gone. an objectbut you don’t know what Thing To be. Most of the time the tweets are elliptical, like “Can’t happen with a nicer columnist” or “Just shows you what’s really going on in the mineralogical community.” In fact, the more ambiguous they are, the more likely things are to be really bad and/or serious. So now you have to — there’s no higher priority — to blow up your morning and use context clues to debunk scandals, scour the internet, see who likes what, paste tweets Go into your group chats to see if anyone has insights, until you find out who was called for what by a currently locked account, with the end result , of course, that you do figure out, some silly annoying thing someone said or did, and, great, you can carry on with your day and wait for the story to come out in an essay on cancellation culture.
I’m not proud of this. I have do it. Sometimes it’s the only way to learn about subcultures and communities. When you’re researching software history, which is what I love to do, you have to get into dubious Discords about copyright and special sites that focus on repositories and hang around until you figure it out. way to get the good stuff. You have to go through a series of trivia, drama, struggle over whether the old computer emulation in the software is “real” or not. And if you lurk long enough, reading enough forum threads, someone will post a temporary link to a special Google document filled with links to zip files with confusing titles. The internet turns the world into a puzzle you must solve to feel safe. Scary of course, but when you solve the puzzle, you get an unbelievable sense of control. (This is also how you get QAnon.)
But being a sneak browser is just who I am. Due to my cowardice, extraordinary shyness, or perhaps toxic masculinity (choose which is right for you), I’d rather be a spy for a year than ask a direct question. This is an unfortunate quality in a journalist. A journalist’s job is to call smart people and ask them to explain things. Those people Yes to talk to you because it helps their career. I find that I always misunderstand what they tell me; I misinterpreted the tone, and then they sent correction emails that hurt my soul. I am better off looking at the artifacts of a civilization than taking part in it. Twitter, newsletter, Slacks, Discords: Lurking is learning.
So give me a network and tools to read it. Give me a textbook called Web markup languages created in Angercollection of GitHub messages called You can’t program in Lisp because you’re an idiotclimate report entitled “People in the Energy System and People in the Earth System: The Longest Rope”.
