Experiment #2013-11-22-A: Permeability of nitrile gloves

Earlier this year, I bought a pair of armored motorcycle gloves for riding my motorcycle. Unfortunately, I bought them in May when it was plenty warm out. Now that it's in the low-30s in the morning, these gloves do precisely squat to keep my hands from nearly freezing on my 18 mile, mostly freeway commute from Seattle to Bellevue. I've tried adding a pair of cheapy stretch gloves underneath to no avail.

This morning, I ran a bad science experiment to determine whether the cheap nitrile gloves I bought for oil changes would provide any discernible wind-breaking between the armored and nitrile layers. I setup each hand with the cheap stretch glove, then for a control/treatment, I put the nitrile glove on only one hand:

On top of these went the armored gloves:

From there came the ride through beautiful Seattle, across I-90 (seen here), and into Bellevue.

By the time I got to downtown Seattle, it was already evident that there was no windbreaking from the roughly $0.045 glove, and by Bellevue, I could barely feel either finger.

Conclusion: buy some sort of bike mitts.