Sparrows in the bird bath

It was fun to see a bunch of sparrows in the bird bath but in this picture the two remaining have just bathed.

Know anyone who has been to Namibia?

Thank you for the birthday wishes for Sam. He is sleeping soundly and breathing deeply.

Before the reinvasion of 2022 Ukraine had patchy radar and it didn’t matter because a lot of the incoming missiles were flying too low to be caught on radar anyway. Ukraine used more cleverness. Four days after the invasion some Ukrainians formed Technari to develop an alternative system, known as ePPO, for detecting and tracking Russian aerial attacks. It uses verified Ukrainian citizens, a smartphone app, and artificial intelligence and allows people to report flying objects they see or hear with the push of a button. There are other companies also using networks of microphones. These are dramatically cheaper than radar, don’t emit a signal, and work at the altitudes that combat drones fly. A microphone listening stations costs $500. A radar costs $500,000. That makes a microphone network much easier to set up. 


Russia is not making much progress and the little that it is making is at enormous costs. Russia may not care about its soldiers and may be sending them to war in golf carts and on bicycles (no, not making it up), but it does not have infinite stockpiles of Soviet era weapons. Pavel Luzin, an expert on Russian military capacity at the Washington-based Centre for European Policy Analysis, thinks that Russia can build only 30 brand-new tanks a year. Most estimates are that Russia had lost about 3,000 tanks and 5,000 other armored vehicles. 


Olga Kharlan won the first medal for Ukraine.