Apparently organizers of a Hong Kong event used UV-C sterilization lamp bulbs instead of the UV-A used for black lighting:
Not only is that a dumb and dangerous idea (exposure to UV C can cause skin melanoma and cataracts), it doesn’t even work for a lot of “black light” fluorescent paints. Just because the UV photons have high energy, this doesn’t do any good if they don’t fall in the excitation spectra bands of the fluorescent material.
In fact, they manufacture special fluorophores that fluoresce in different colors, depending upon the wavelength of the excitation source.
As someone who works with ultraviolet light (it was the bulk of my business at my last job), this is a constant complaint of mine. When you say “ultraviolet”, people think it’s all the same, rather than realizing that there’s an entire spectrum of Ultraviolet, running from below 200 nm to about 400 nm, with different effects in different areas. The UV light that kills bacteria and other microorganisms (260 nm plus or minus about 20 nm) is different from the ultraviolet used for fluorescent paints (circa 360 nm) is different from the ultraviolet light your body uses to convert some cholesterol to vitamin D (290 to 315 nm), all of which are different from the UV light that is judged both germicidal and “eye safe” (between 200 nm and 140 nm).
I’ve written lots of proposals for using ultraviolet light to perform various tasks (breaking down “forever chemicals”, or inactivating allergens, or treating prions), only to have them turned down by the funding agencies because “they already tried using ultraviolet light”. I want to scream at these people that NOT ALL UV LIGHT IS THE SAME. One of these days people will get the message.
That wasn’t very bright.
I’d have thought the people of Hong Kong had some experience avoiding ultry-violet rays…
A concert for and organized by libertarian techbros who spent tens of thousands of dollars on receipts for ugly drawings of stoned monkeys that results in people going blind because of careless disregard for safety is… exactly what you’d expect to happen if you’re smart enough not to waste your money on NFTs, really.
Incidentally, something like this happened when they started making mercury discharge lamps. Ordinarily the deep UV bands at 260 nm are blocked by the glass envelope of the lamp. But the first lamps were made of fused silica for extra strength, and fused silica is transparent down to 200 nm, so it transmitted the dangerous rays. There was no phosphor inside, by the way – it was the multicolor discharge from the mercury vapor that produced the light. In modern fluorescent lamps there is a coating of fluorescent material that absorbs the UV light and fluoresces in the visible. Between the phosphor coating and the glass envelope, no dangerous UV gets out of a modern fluorescent lamp.
I can’t see what you did there.
So with life having given them lemons…
Why not NFTs for audio forms of art?