The innocent shall suffer... big time.

The news-inclined among you are probably aware of today's bomb scare in Boston. If not, basically, there was a bomb scare when police seized several devices among the metro system which prompted the closure of bridge closures and the Charles River. However, it turns out that these devices were not bombs and were, instead, these light boxes shown to the left, displaying one of the Mooninites from the Adult Swim show Aqua Teen Hunger Force, in a familiar pose (flipping you off as hard as he can). I imagine that pretty much everyone under 25 would see this as nothing more than another of Adult Swim's marketing ploys, as they usually tend to be rather untraditional. However, the city of Boston, in typical post-9/11 fashion, decided to overreact to these boxes and close down some major thoroughways. As of this post, one of the artists who aided in putting up these devices has been arrested.

Shame on the city for overreacting to ADVERTISING. Even the mayor of Boston has derided this stunt as an example in "corporate greed"- an erroneous statement at best and a dangerous one at worst- people exercising their right to free expression are being held for being potential terrorists. Worst of all, this advertising campaign has also been going on in NINE other major cities without incident. I imagine the arrest (and ensuing arrests) are damage control measures to save face from the fact that a simple phone call to Cartoon Network would have cleared up this situation immediately. This incident should be embarassing to the city of Boston. Now there's an artist in jail, just for being unconventional in his craft. Indeed, as one of the Mooninites eloquently put it, "The innocent shall suffer, big time."

Okay, sorry. Off the soapbox I go. What does any of this have to do with CBC? Why, those lights, of course! They look like LED's, and LED's are a whole lot of chemistry in a little device. I did research as an undergrad on green OLED's in particular, so I'd like to quickly show you two of the more common green emissive materials in OLED's- the common tris(8-hydroxyquinolato)aluminum(III), usually abbreviated AlQ₃; and poly(p-phenylenevinylene) (or PPV). AlQ₃ is typically found in most OLEDs as it is an efficient electron transport material as well as being a good green light emitter. PPV is common in PLEDs (that is, polymer light-emitting diodes) and is one of the most common conductive polymers. This excellent presentation has lots of examples of the most commonly used emissive materials, schemes for light-emitting devices, as well as some potential, exciting applications.


Okay, a REAL stretch, I know. I just wanted to write this because it's not often the Mooninities, with their superior civilization and whatnot, get on the front page anymore. A real travesty, if you ask me. Next week, we'll cover the photophysics behind the quad laser. Jumping... is useless!