I apologize for the disruption of service last week at arloandjanis.com. I was called out of town for a few days. I’m back now, however, and several of you have expressed concern for my well-being in light of the multiple outbreaks of tornadoes in my part of the world. Thank you for worrying about me, but I am fine in that regard. My only encounter with any tornado was during the severe April outbreak of 2011, when my home had a very close call with an F4 tornado; I think I told you that story. With Doppler radar and other modern instruments, meteorological scientists today can measure the windspeeds within tornadoes, but this hasn’t been the case until quite recently. The strength of tornadoes was determined by studying the damage in their aftermath. It still is, in fact, because it’s hard to know exactly where to deploy precise instrumentation when tornadoes pop up. You’re all familiar with the “F” scale: the Enhanced Fujita Scale. I’ve already referenced it once. “Fujita” was the name of a Japanese-born American meteorologist who was the principle developer of the scale. His is a fascinating story. He was a young mechanical engineer in Japan at the end of World War II and was obsessed with understanding the patterns of destruction left by the atomic bomb explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He later emigrated to the United States and applied his early research to tornado damage. So we have our familiar benchmarks, from smaller F1 tornadoes to the monstrous F5 tornadoes, fortunately very rare.