So now we're voting on the WEATHER?

[dreamshark]

OK, the age of social media has jumped the shark. Weather.com has added a pair of buttons under the current weather display where you are asked to vote on whether the current temperature is acceptable to you.

To make it even more unbearably cloying, the two choices are not thumbs-up|thumbs-down, but "Ugh" and Heart Symbol.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Maybe when a horrible weather story crops up, they'll cover that? Oh, wait.

K.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if you've just watched a flood destroy your home, I would think that "Ugh" doesn't begin to cover it.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

Makes me even happier that Rick Santorum failed to cut NOAA's budget some years ago.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Well, I get really tired of the MPR people editorializing about the weather -- describing it as "excellent" when I think it's horrible, or whatever. "Voting" doesn't really make sense, but a poll about how you like it makes sense to me; it gets away from having only one opinion expressed.

[quadong.livejournal.com]

This would be fine and interesting (e.g. it gets you statistics on what the average preferred temperature is), except that for some unfathomable reason, people insist on getting angry at each other when they disagree about whether the weather is nice. I think perhaps even seemingly rational people have a sub-conscious belief that the weather might be trying to please people who verbally express opinions about it.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

It's also pretty unclear just what we are "voting" on. The buttons are actually directly under large text proclaiming "Right Now!" There's a lot more to the weather than just the temperature (humidity, wind, dewpoint, seasonal appropriateness, etc.)

The only two pieces of information displayed for "Right Now" are Temperature and "Feels Like." "Feels Like" drives me CRAZY. It's apparently a vague attempt at coming up with a new sexy synthetic weather number that will be as big a hit as Wind Chill. But we know what Wind Chill means. It's based on how quickly human flesh will freeze at a particular combination of temperature and wind speed. What is "Feels Like" supposed to mean? The context suggests that it is showing the difference between the current temperature at "normal humidity" as opposed to the actual humidity. But what is "normal humidity?" Is it normal humidity for the specific location, or some overall average of world humidity over all locations and dates? Or is it just the number that somebody has randomly decided is the most comfortable?

So my temptation is to respond with "Ugh" any time the actual temperature differs from "Feels Like."

[quadong.livejournal.com]

As far as I have ever been able to understand it, wind chill is defined such that it is always a lower number than the temperature unless there is no wind at all, while the heat index is defined such that it is always higher than the temperature unless the humidity is below some point (40%, I think?) that is far below normal for anywhere I've ever lived. Charitably, I'd say that they are both supposed to instill an extra sense of urgency to protect one's self in bad weather. Cynically, I'd say they are both supposed to boost ratings by making the weather sound really extreme and newsworthy. Neither produces anything as useful as a number which is the same as the actual temperature in average conditions at that temperature (which would of course be location-dependent, and so complicated to generate and then complicated to explain, but still very handy after you've lived somewhere for a while).