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Blake Stacey is a physics boffin and science-fiction writer who wandered the Earth and eventually settled in the nation-state of Denial.
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Category: Bibliophilia
Posted on: July 16, 2009 5:24 PM, by Blake Stacey
Thomas Pynchon has a new novel, Inherent Vice, set for publication this August.
In addition to leaving me with the distinct impression that the novel will involve hunting ghosts through the Florida swamps, this cover suggests somebody is still obsessing on the early artificial dyes made from coal-tar, i.e., mauveine and Perkin's Green, seen in Gravity's Rainbow (1974) and Against the Day (2006).
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![[sex and science]](http://www.sunclipse.org/downloads/sexandscience3.png)
Comments
Never heard of Perkin's Green (and still have to read Pynchon ...)
Do people still use neonlights?
Posted by: Sili
| July 16, 2009 9:39 PM
Right on both counts, I should think. If not ghosts, then dead bodies in alligator-infested swamps.
Posted by: Monado | July 17, 2009 2:01 PM
Sili, they do get used, but not a lot. LEDs are much less fragile. And those are not "neon" colors, which supports Blake's hypothesis. The closest standard colors to those are (I think) straight mercury purple and frog green, but they're not quite a match for either color.
Posted by: Stephanie Z | July 17, 2009 2:06 PM
But they're nevertheless shaped to look like tubes.
Posted by: Sili
| July 17, 2009 4:11 PM
To make it all the more clear that they are not a truck.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | July 17, 2009 4:16 PM
Stephanie, I think mercury vapor's glow is a lot more bluish. And I don't even know how you'd vaporize a frog.
Posted by: John Armstrong | July 17, 2009 4:45 PM
Wrong, Blake (what else can you expect from a guy in a trenchcoat and hat).
Those tubes are obviously not connected in a series.
Sheeeesssshhhh.
Posted by: Sili
| July 17, 2009 7:41 PM
The green looks a lot like "vine green" and the pink looks something like "paradise pink." It's also possible that the pink is BL-55 with a neon fill but it's been years since I've worked in a sign shop and, from my experience in Photoshop, I'd guess that they just went for pink and green so it would look "50s."
John: "Neon" is a misnomer since all tubes that are not mostly red are filled not with neon but with argon and mercury. The argon gives a very faint purple glow, but the arc is enough to excite the mercury to glow bright blue and, more importantly, create UV light which makes the phosphor coating in the tube glow. That coating will overwhelm the blue glow from the mercury.
Posted by: Ben Zvan | July 18, 2009 1:04 AM
Ben, I'd hoped that referring to vaporizing a frog would be a tipoff that it was a joke. I suppose I need to work on being less subtle.
Posted by: John Armstrong | July 18, 2009 8:25 AM
John, he laughed. Really. Then the neon geek took over. :)
Posted by: Stephanie Z | July 19, 2009 10:57 PM