And, from LinkedIn. The federal government is sclerotic and seemingly incapable of internal change. Hope that Musk gets a chance to reform it. 

Our home in Northeast Wichita is on the market and we are having an open house  on Sunday from 2 to 4pm. It is a great house and we loved living there for 32 years. It is a nice open lot with terrific views of sunsets.  You can see interior and exterior photos and learn more here .  If you live in Wichita or are moving to Wichita-Sedgwick County, please take a look. You will be glad you did!!

My Mother, Virginia "Ginny" Smith, passed away this morning at the age of 94. She was in very good health until the last 18 months or so. Mom and Dad were married 68 years with Dad passing away about a month before all of the COVID mess in 2020. She was a great, great woman who was proud of her Italian heritage. If you want to taste the spaghetti and meatballs we so loved in our family, the Maggiano's chain of restaurants has a very close version.  In addition to her five children and their spouses, she had 13 grandchildren and -- so far -- 17 great grandchildren each of whom she dearly loved. Our Smithmases, which includes spouses and significant others of grandchildren featured 50 people crammed into a room with loud conversation and great holiday joy. Mom thought I was slightly crazy to stand outside looking at thunderstorms when I was a teenager and hated  me going to the University of Oklahoma for college but she and Dad always allowed me to follow my dreams; for whi

Many of have wondered, almost since day one, why Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) is doing flood risk analysis rather than NOAA (my first choice) or the U.S. Geological Survey (my second choice).  An investigative report by the Washington Post  shows FEMA's flood risk maps are grossly in error. An example is below. FEMA's risk (left); insurance industry risk (right). Washington Post.  In addition to mistakenly leading people to believe they don't need flood insurance, a second injurious aspect of these maps was to make people who were very much at risk of flooding is to believe they were safe. This may explain why so many were caught completely off-guard when we were warning of "catastrophic" flooding in the region well ahead of the event .  FEMA is another federal agency we would be better off without in its present form. It accomplishes its mission poorly, expects big praise for doing something routine, and spends huge amounts of money on the w

I don't know why the Daily Mail  is so determined to report false weather information .   The graphic is from the National Hurricane Center and the 60% odds refer to the weather system at the X becoming a tropical depression,  not a hurricane. A tropical depression is even below a tropical storm in the hierarchy of tropical weather systems. And, while it is potentially (hasn't formed yet) headed in the direction of the Gulf of Mexico or Florida, it is not forecast to approach the U.S. through ten days. The red equals where the storm weakens.  I never thought we would be in an era of "weather porn" but here we are. I promise I will never intentionally hype a storm and that I will inform you when there is something to be concerned about, as I did with Helene when others were forecasting " isolated " flooding in the southern Appalachians. As always, I invite you to let your friends know about this blog if you wish to have accurate and non-sensational weather i

Nuclear power plants are tornado-proof. Most conventional (gas and goal) plants are hardened against tornadoes.  The same cannot be said for solar and wind! From last week's Florida tornadoes.  Who is going to clean up this mess -- some of which was made from hazardous chemicals? Given the increasingly poor economics for solar and, especially, wind, I wonder if it will be cleaned up at all?