Tired: the age old fight of Fahrenheit vs. Celsius. Wired: a new scale of temperature ranging from ‘colder than Mars’ to ‘hot as dick’.
Just in time for summer, computer scientist Jim Webb has blessed us with a curse word-based temperature scale using science. From here on out, 84 degrees Fahrenheit will be known as “hot as balls.”
Webb created a temperature scale for our age using, what else, Twitter. He gathered 5,400 geolocated tweets sent between August 2017 and January 2018 with phrases like “hot as ___” and “cold as ___.” He then put any phrase that appeared more than 10 times to describe the median temperature in that location on that day on the scale, and voila, a 21st century temperature scale was born. No word on how climate change will impact it.
The results reveal a few things about the human psyche.
One is that people are wimps. “Colder than my heart” correlates with 42 degrees Fahrenheit. Really? Have you seen my heart lately?
“Cold as ice” correlates with 48 degrees Fahrenheit, which, in addition to being wrong according to decades of previous science, is also just pathetic. Come back to me when you have frostbite on your fingers. And don’t even get me started on “colder than a witch’s tit” at 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Toughen up, people!
On the warm side, I’m deeply concerned that hotter than two rats (fucking) is on the list at 82 degrees Fahrenheit. Under no circumstances is rat sex hot, and describing summer picnic weather as too warm is also extremely misguided.
While some term only appeared on the cold side (booger, mars, my heart) or hot side (two rats, devil’s dick, devil’s balls, fish grease [???]), the weather scale shows remarkable symmetry, with many words appearing on both the cold and hot side of the scale (or if you’re feeling less charitable, a lack of creativity).
It can be both hot and cold as hell, according to the internet. Fuck, balls, tits (including a witches tit), shit, an mf, and bitch are also both hot and cold. You could argue that this is wrong, but your arguments would not be backed up by this new science.
Despite my beef with a few terms, this is the our temperature scale. I am here for it and plan to make a We the People petition asking the National Weather Service to toss out Fahrenheit and make this the national temperature scale ASAP. It has a better chance of becoming reality than Jimmy Carter’s Celsius pipe dream (apologies to my Canadian wife, but screw Celsius).
In the spirit of our new temperature scale overlords, here’s the forecast for the rest of the week for New York: Thursday will be sunny and hot as a bitch, followed by cloudy with highs hotter than satan’s asshole on Friday, before a cold front passes through overnight. It will just be hot as heck on Saturday and nice* on Sunday.
*69 wasn’t on the scale because it was neither hot as or cold as, but I think we can all agree this is the only appropriate term for it.
