The search “does weather affect sexual desire?” returns 1.4m results in Google. The top hits come in the form of various qualitative surveys of horny men, who confirm that they are, in fact, more virile in the summer.
But we live in the information age – and we can do better than small samples and self-reporting.
By scraping data from a London-focussed hookup website, Hot ‘n’ Horny accesses over 2,500 new casual sex advertisements every day, which can be studied for patterns in human (casual) sexual behaviour.
The end goal is to map the temperature against the number of adverts posted online, but until the year’s data is collected, analysis of Hot ‘n’ Horny can provide other interesting insights.
A PHP scraper checks different causal encounter adverts at a well-known hook-up website. At the end of each day it counts how many adverts of each category were posted. This is translated into a graph on the front-end for visitors to see.