Your weekend reading: Weather Channel interns under windy duress, Carl Sagan back from the dead to save us from terrible TV

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The extent of human creativity/weirdness always baffles me, but I have to say the Internet really won my heart this week. Here are some staff picks of weird, beautiful, smart stories and videos from the interwebs this week.

Today was the final day to tweet #TornadoWeek to turn up the winds on interns at the Weather Channel. It seems the Weather Channel is embracing climate change with reckless abandon as it turns to an aggressively hilarious editorial strategy. [The Weather Channel] UPDATE: Unfortunately the livestream of the interns getting blasted is over, but you can watch a clip at CNBC »
.If you were a kid growing up in the U.S. in the ’80s and ’90s, or raised a kid during this time, PBS was a testament to the power of good educational television. A satirical trailer-making group called Gritty Robots published a heart-warming video this week of beloved PBS personalities Carl Sagan, Mr. Rogers, Bill Nye the Science Guy (see his TED-Ed lesson above) and Bob Ross as as the Avengers, saving us from bad TV. [Gizmodo]
.Did you know that being annoyed at the incorrect use of “literally” is about as old as the heinous act itself? Ben Yagoda has a literal breakdown. [Lingua Franca]
.In response to Amanda Filipacci’s New York Times op-ed piece last week on Wikipedia’s creation of a separate category for American Women Novelists, James Gleick takes a detailed look at Wikipedia’s women problem. [NYRB]
.New science magazine Nautilus launches its first issue, on the topic “What makes you so special.” We’re excited to see what’s next from this awesome publication. [Nautilus]
.IBM puts out an animation of epically small proportions, moving atoms with extreme precision. The film holds the Guiness World Record for smallest stop-motion film. [YouTube]
.How many countries are there in Africa? Answering the question isn’t as easy as it sounds. [Africa Check] Watch Chimamanda Adichie’s classic talk, “The danger of a single story” »
.A quick, surprising synthesis of an extensive study published by PLoS One, about differences in learning between the sexes. [io9]
.An inside story on the future of Guantanamo Bay and its history of hunger strikes, by Shihab Rattansi. [Al Jazeera]
.The painted turtle is on the path to extinction. A sad, strange story of how it may soon become a 100 percent female species, due to the fact that its eggs are more likely to hatch as females if they are in warm nests. [New Scientist]
.Behold: Nature. Donald Trump. … What? [io9]

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The Top 10 iPhone Apps for Tracking Weather

With summer here it’s a good time to keep tracks on what the weather will look like so you can plan your friends and family outings. And with a computer in your pocket, it’s never been an easier time to keep tabs on the current and future weather conditions.

Here are the top 10 iPhone apps for keeping track of the weather.

I’m in love with this app. Dark Sky isn’t really a full blown weather app but is indispensable in my weather tracking utility belt. The idea of the app is to tell you if it is raining now or if it will rain in the next hour so you can plan your next hour accordingly.

Need to take your dog for a walk? Check Dark Sky. Going for a bike ride? Check Dark Sky. I’ve found that it is pretty darn accurate too; it’s helped me stay out of rain during a workouts a few different times.

My-cast is a great weather app for quick access to the current temperature and conditions like wind speed and humidity as well as access to a radar view of your current location and daily and hourly forecast. My-cast Weather also has a tab for local weather alerts.

The best thing about My-cast Weather is that it holds a ton of information in a very simple interface.

Weather+ is another weather app that crams a bunch of info on your iPhone screen but doesn’t do it in a horrible way. You get everything that you would want out of a weather app like current temperature, 5 days highs and lows, 3 hourly temps and icons for weather conditions, and the current wind speed. Another nice touch is the background video for the time of day and current weather conditions.

You can set unlimited number of cities. One thing that annoyes me is the huge HTC Sense-like clock on the page. Seems like a waste, but some people really like that look.

Living Earth HD is a world clock and weather app on steroids. You can basically see the conditions of millions of different locations around the world with beautiful real time cloud coverage on a 3D map of earth. It’s a very low-key and well done app that is great if you want to look up general weather conditions of places around the world.

Fahrenheit reminds me a log of My-cast Weather except it has a little more of a cluttered feel. The app is still highly usable and good looking though.

Fahrenheit claim to fame is that it uses the app notification icon to inform you of the current temperature in your location. Rather than Apple’s perfect 72 degree icon, this one is actually useful.

Weather Underground is my go to app when I’m on my desktop so it’s never bad to have a reliable friend on your iPhone. Weather Underground has come cool features like a local list of personal weather stations and a familiar weather report interface that we are used to on TV.

The app is free so you aren’t out anything if you want to give it a try.

Swackett is a cool little weather app that takes a different approach; based on the weather in your area it recommends what type of attire you should wear. If it’s sunny it my recommend sunglasses, shorts, and a t-shirt. Cold out? How about a parka and some boots.

Swackett also has the normal 5 day and 3 hourly type of forecasts as well as a radar map that you can view.

Degrees is a nice little weather app if you are a Canadian (Mr. Vardy recommended this one). The interface is clean and easy to look at with all the information about the current conditions you would want. Degrees also has push notifications for weather alerts and a app notification icon like Fahrenheit’s that shows you the current temperature.

Weather HD is more about the images and the interface than showing you a ton of weather information. In fact it shows you very little information in a very minimal way at the bottom of the screen. The images update depending on the time of day and weather conditions.

The images are beautiful though and you can set and swipe through different cities to see the current weather.

One day I was looking for a super simple weather app with app notification temperature and stumbled upon Weather. The name says it all. Weather reminds me a lot of the settings and statistics from Apple’s native weather app but the graphics are more “bubbly”. You get the current temp, the high and low, current forecast, wind, humidity, and, well that’s it.

Simple and effective.

Got any other good weather apps for iPhone to recommend? List them in the comments below.

CM Smith is a technologist, writer, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State. CM is also interested in personal productivity, creativity and how to use technology to get things done. Check out his writing at devburner.net or follow him on Twitter.

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