>> If you believe NCIS and so forth, UV makes blood and other bodily fluids
>> glow bright green. (I never did figure out why...)
> 
> Only if treated with Luminol, the I think it's more of a dull blue....

Yes, you never get to see that...

>> I've been watching Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds. Some very cool
>> stuff, but unfortunately the cool stuff is only on screen for, like, 2
>> seconds, and then we get Hammond chattering some more.
> 
> I hope that show is available in the States soon, I've been following 
> the guy who did the UV Photography's blog for quite some time.

The other problem, of course, is that I missed it while it was on TV, so 
I had to watch it on BBC iPlayer. So it's very blury. (Oh, and I watched 
two episodes but seem to have somehow missed the rest...)

>> I'd love to do the whole trip with time-lapse photography, high-speed
>> photography, UV and thermographs, etc. In fact, I've often wondered what
>> the world would look like if you would see radio waves.
> 
> Interesting thought. Not sure how to build a detector for radio waves, 
> though (in terms of forming an image on a plane ...) it's exceedingly 
> difficult to detect thermal IR, I can only imagine the difficulty in 
> focusing radio waves onto a plane.

Presumably you need some sort of shielding to block out waves except 
through a specific opening, and then use magnets to focus the waves that 
come through the opening?

Alternatively, just don't bother trying to focus it at all. You'd still 
get *something*, if not a sharp images.

> It's fascinating how we process information from our world. I've often 
> wondered why we perceive blue as-- well-- BLUE, rather than red. I'd 
> love to know what the world would look like if I had tetrachromatic or 
> even pentachromatic vision. Some of the subtleties of some colors would 
> definitely be more obvious. Fun stuff.

Apparently most mammals see only 2 wavelengths. Humans and a few 
primates have a duplicate gene that mutated very slightly, yielding a 
new pigment that responds to a very slightly different wavelength band, 
giving us 3-colour vision. (Go look at the CIE spectrum diagrams. The 
"red" and "green" wavelengths are quite close together, but "blue" is a 
mile away.)

Apparently mad scientists tried introducing the mutant gene into mice. 
Normally mice see only 2 wavelengths, but these genetically-engineered 
mice see the same 3 bands that we do. And, as best as the scientists can 
tell, their brains were able to process this new information. Just 
adding the new pigment was all that was necessary for the brain to adapt 
and use it.

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