Silence at noon. Enlightening articles. Straws in the wind.

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After the heaviest bombardment we have suffered so far, it has been quiet since noon. Odd. Another straw in the wind is that Kyiv will be under a 35-hour lock down starting at 8 PM tonight. We can't leave the house. The metals markets have been acting weirder than their weird recent past. Gold, silver and platinum are plummeting. Could mean (A) confidence that the war is ending or (B) Russia panic dumping assets to raise money. The ruble has strengthened and the hryvnia seems to have stabilized.

Thanks to streamfortyseven for putting some of my stuff on his site. He has a number of extraordinarily good pieces up today. Better than what you will find from the American press. He also posted a good comment on my earlier post of the day. Recommend that you take a look, and bookmark his site.

As we were hearing booms all around us, it prompted me to do some research on the physics of noise.

Sound waves emanate from their source in a spherical form. The strength of the wave is proportional to the size of the surface of the sphere. The formula for a sphere surface is 4 pi r2. The strength of sound waves is 10 times less at the square root of 10 (approximately three) times further away from the sound.

Sound is measured in decibels. The energy of a sound of 70 dB is 10 times that of a sound of 60, which is 10 times that of 50. The blasts from Obolon appear to be about 70 dB, equivalent to traffic or a vacuum cleaner.

Comparing two blasts, a second one 10 dB louder than the first is probably about three times closer.

The blasts I was hearing in Obolon, 9 km away are something more than twice as loud as those from Brovary, 15 km away. The really loud one I heard this morning was reportedly from Kyiv, about 5 km away.  Bottom line – until they hit the level of car horns or jets taking off, they are probably not close enough to be dangerous to us

I hope not to become an expert on this subject.

Graham