Where is the good weather?

I spent a little time yesterday building a computer program to interrogate a year’s worth of data from a little over twelve thousand weather stations all over the world to find out which places have what I would consider the most comfortable year round climate. The criteria were that it never freezes, never gets above 29°C, and is neither oppressively humid nor overly dry. Other considerations lead me to prefer Western Eurasia, thus the options depicted on the above map.

In the course of doing this, I was reminded of Feynman’s observation when the first electronic computers arrived at Los Alamos:

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you play with them!

The code is here, the data was pulled from here.

This entry is part of my journal, published February 9, 2014, in New York.