There’s no denying that we as a people are obsessed with the weather. We measure it. We predict it. And we talk about it. And talk about it. And talk about it.
As for how we talk about it? This oughta help.
In what should be added to the Weather Channel’s company culture deck effective immediately, Washington, D.C.-based developer Jim Webb has created an Urban Dictionary-style temperature scale based on data science.
“Hot as balls”? That’s officially now 84 degrees Fahrenheit, not to be confused, of course, with “hot as dick,” which means 92 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other side of the spectrum, you’ve got “colder than a witch’s tit,” which equates to 25 degrees Fahrenheit.
The beauty of this scale is that it’s actually backed by empirical evidence. Over the past two years, Webb developed a system that analyzed tweets and made connections between language and temperatures. After inspecting some 54,000 tweets, he extracted often-repeated phrases and then geo-located the user to record the temperature.
The result is the wonderful science-based Urban Dictionary for weather you see here.
If you wanna see the full details, Webb explained the project in great detail over at GitHub.
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