Just how hot is 'hot as balls?' One curious man found out.
Have you ever wondered just how hot it has to be outside for someone to say it's "hot as balls?"
One very curious man did.
Over the past year Jim Webb, a web developer in Washington D.C., developed a project to analyze tweets that correlated language and temperatures. Every time someone used a temperature phrase in a tweet, like "cold as fuck," Webb geo-located the tweet and nabbed the real-time temperature.
He collected about 5,400 of these tweets from August 2017 to January 2018, cataloging often-repeated, colorful phrases. Matching each tweet to its user's temperature led to quite a range when he found the median temperature for each expression: from "colder than mars" (minus-7 degrees Fahrenheit) to "hot as dick" (92 degrees).
"Hot as balls" is, apparently, a balmy 84 degrees. In case you were wondering, actual human testicles are warmer, usually at 97 degrees.
The most commonly used phrases per temperature were "cold as fuck" and "hot as hell," as seen in the chart below. "Hot as hell" is an appropriate 86 degrees, but "cold as fuck" doesn't even dip into freezing, with a median temperature of 41 degrees. Is it really cold as fuck?
While phrases like "hell," "shit," "balls," and "fuck" were used across the temperature spectrum, there were some that were very strongly associated with one or the other. "Boogers" are, apparently, cold, whereas the "devil's dick" is hot, hot, hot.
The association of each phrase and its respective temperature is shown below. Most parts of the human anatomy are hot -- except for "tits." Anything associated with the devil tends to be hotter. "Two rats," which tops the hot association chart, apparently stands for "two rats fucking."
Delightful.
Webb said that this project was done solely for fun and totally "without merit."
For more insight on his important work, which he presented at Hack and Tell DC, check out the project's GitHub.
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Petrana Radulovic was a web culture fellow here at Mashable. She enjoys exploring the growing intersection of story-telling and digital spaces, hanging out in book shops and art museums, and the tasteful meme. Follow her on Twitter at @pet_rana for #relatable content.
