On a light(er) note...

[vakkotaur]

A while back Fairmont's public utilities celebrated their centennial anniversary. I took a tour of the local power plant and visited the city office where they had some programs and freebies. One of the freebies was a neat little bright blue LED key-chain flashlight. This is a very handy little thing and so I've taken to using it for various things, like illuminating stairways.

Last night I discovered something. Now, when a blue light is shone upon an orange object the usual result is that the object looks dark as there is no orange light for it to reflect. But an empty Tide box shone bright orange in the pure blue (yes, blue, not UV) light. I'd heard that detergent makers added fluorescing dyes to their products, but now I see that trick is used in the packaging too. Presumably to make the box seem brighter (and cleaner, less dingy) than others in the store. I wonder if the other detergent packages fluoresce as well (I expect they do, lest any one of them be allowed an advantage), but I'm not going to buy a sample of all of them to find out.

It might be interesting to get bright LEDs of various colors and see how things look when illuminated by a single color. I suspect the high energy blue is probably the most interesting of the LED choices. A UV lamp might show more.