What Tools do I Need to Program from a Winnebago

Geez, does this guy get it: Patrick Collison blog : Hacking for fun and profit with Mathematica and the Google Analytics API. It's always nice to see Mathematica used in more traditional programming and software prototyping senses.

The maps in Patrick's post prompted me to post a fun result I got yesterday.

Below is a map of the United States showing me where all the comfy cities are --- according to my definition of comfortable. These are the cities that show up in CityData where the current temperature, grabbed from WeatherData, lies within my personally-defined comfort zone of 74-84 degrees Fahenheit (23.2C-28.9C).

The post's title is a stackoverflow.com nod and hints at the real question I had. What I was curious to do but didn't have time is to explore the historic temperatures and answer the question "if I lived in a motor home, where could I go during the year so that I was always living in a temperature range that I specify?" I don't really want to do that, I'm used to the four seasons and lots of weather variety, but I started to wonder what those places would be.

There's absolutely nothing clever to the code for this, it's sheer brute force actually. We just ask for all the U.S. cities in the database, look up their temperature, select those in the right range, and then plot them.

Needs["Units`"];

CityHasDesirableTemperatureQ[city_, low_, high_] := 
 With[{lowC = ConvertTemperature[low, Fahrenheit, Celsius], 
   highC = ConvertTemperature[high, Fahrenheit, Celsius], 
   temp = WeatherData[city, "Temperature"]},
  lowC <= temp <= highC];

allCities = CityData[{All, "UnitedStates"}];

Graphics[{Gray, CountryData["UnitedStates", "Polygon"], 
  PointSize[Large], Red, 
  Point[Reverse[CityData[#, "Coordinates"]]] & /@ 
   Select[allCities, CityHasDesirableTemperatureQ[#, 74, 84] &]}]