Wind Chill

Wind chill is a funny thing. Once the wind passes a certain speed, it doesn't really feel substantially colder. The effect maxes out around 45 mph, if I remember right.

A few weeks ago, I put together a snippet of Perl 6 (well, only a small chunk of Perl 6, pulling in two Perl 5 CPAN modules) to calculate the wind chill. It gets a little ugly when moving array refs of hashes back and forth between p5 and p6. Such is life.

use perl5:Weather::Underground <get_weather>; 
use perl5:Temperature::Windchill <windchill_us>; 

my $w = Weather::Underground.new(place => 'Dexter, MI');

my $ar = $w.get_weather();

my %h = $ar[0].kv;  # p5/p6 fun

"The windchill will be: " ~  windchill_us(%h<fahrenheit>, 75);

This is part of a bot, so I can say:

[14:45:25 03/17/08][chris] should I ride to work?
[14:45:26 03/17/08][g6] The windchill will be: 15.130352145929617

So, several mornings of late, I've looked at the weather, checked when the sun would rise, checked cloudiness, asked the bot, and decided to ride the motorcycle to work anyway. Last friday this turned out great, with a gorgeous day for riding.

This morning, I asked the bot, and it said it would be a windchill of -2. Hmmm. Asked again when it was closer to time to leave for work, and it came up with a -1 or so.

Fine, I'll do it. Can't ride home if you don't ride to work.

I managed to make it, but by the time I was pulling down the last road before work my fingers weren't working so well, and my reactions couldn't have been great.

At lunch time, though, I went and got an electric vest. Wired it into my bike's electrical system in the bike shop parking lot. Fired up the bike, plugged in, cranked it up... It's everything I dreamed it would be.

So warm and toasty, I never need to be cold on the bike again. I should have got one of these a long time ago.