Instead of Best/Recent use a slider

I think the most annoying thing about selecting best or recent from the dropdown menu is that it's too binary. For instance, if I want to see popular threads that are somewhat old, but not top of the line in popularity then I'll have a hard time finding them.

Instead of a dropdown menu could you make a slider that scales from best to recent, giving each an appropriate weight when sorting threads?

Edit: So what I mean is if you look at the picture you have a generic slider. Moving the slider all the way to the left would make the thread sorting algorithm behave like it already does when on best. Moving it all the way to the right would make it behave like recent. Anywhere in between interpolates the weight. So if you put it at the halfway point you get the hot behavior.