Hey, and welcome to the short stuff, I'm Josh and there's Chuck over there and Jerry's hanging around somewhere. And this is short stuff about Vantiv Black, which is pretty cool.

It is. And it's funny, I never really thought about variations of black until a couple of years ago when we finally were able to professionally renovate our house and not just have me do it poorly because I wanted my upstairs office to be black because it's got lots of windows and tons of light. And so it wouldn't have that, you know, dungeon like feel even if it were black. Right. And I didn't know how many blacks there were to choose from until I started looking.

It was really interesting.

Yeah, there's a ton. And actually, if you wanted to go superduper black Chuck, you would it cost you a pretty penny had you been like, I'm going to paint this whole thing in black because that's some expensive stuff.

I don't think you can buy it, can you?

I don't know. I think there is something called Vehbi X2, which is a bit of a paint like actual paint that you could spray on. But I yeah, I don't get the impression that that you could buy it. And as a matter of fact, I guess if you would buy it or tried to buy it, you'd be running afoul of a license held by an artist named Anish Kapoor, who supposedly is the only person legally allowed to buy Vaneta Black.

So who knows in this crazy world? But a lot of people are probably like, what are you guys talking about? What's so great about this Vanna Black that it would it would warrant its own short stuff episode. And I say to those people, kick back and listen up, because Venta Black is pretty interesting stuff.

That's right.

If you would be interested in having a really, really, really deep black oh, let's say one that absorbs, I don't know, ninety nine point nine six five percent of light, then Vantiv Black is for you. It was I remember when this came out, I think it's about six or seven years ago from Soury Systems. They very much were proud of the fact that they set a world record for their vertically aligned nanotube array, black, which is what it stands for as being the blackest black of all time.

Right, and it's called vertically aligned nanotube, very black, because it's actually made up of nanotubes. I was looking into it's like, well, how how would that create a black pigment? Yeah, and it's pretty interesting. These these tubes are super, super tall and they're so they're vertically oriented. So they're standing up on end. And the apparently the ratio between their width or diameter and their length is like one to one million. So for, say, every nanometre that they are around, they're a million nanometres tall and they're really tightly crowded together.

So there's like a billion nanotubes per square centimeter of, you know, whatever's painted in the black. And they actually capture light. The light goes into these nanotubes and can't find its way out and eventually just dissipates its heat, which means that the reflective ness of anything painted in Venta black or with nano nano carbon tubes. Like like you just don't see anything. There's no ridges, there's no depth, there's no anything. It's just basically like you're looking at a void and all you can see is the silhouette of that thing that's painted Vaina black, which makes it pretty awesome.

All right. How about we take a break? That's a great cliffhanger. And we'll talk a little bit about why anyone cares, because it is kind of cool right after this I.

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Yes. Do you remember the the none more black joke?

No. It's when they came out with their black album and they said, look at the cover, how black is that or something like that. And he goes, it could be none more black. And there's a very subtle joke in that scene, which I didn't pick up on until about my 30th viewing, which is they have a record store release signing for their black album and they're sitting there holding black sharpies. They're awesome, but they don't pay attention to it.

That's great. Those are usually the best kinds of jokes where, you know, you just have to pick up on it.

You know, it's pretty great. So we teased you with why would anyone care about having something that black? And the original purpose of Vantiv Black was for space travel or maybe an application on something to improve visibility of something very in the very far distant. So think like like if you have a telescope or something coating the inside and maybe even outside of that with Vantiv Black, it would absorb all of that light coming in. That really just takes away any glare that you could think of.

Right, exactly.

So there's like a lot of scientific applications to it. But if you say, like, the black is black, that doesn't really let light escape. It tends to also capture the attention of artists and designers. Oh, of course.

And designers qualify as artists. But, you know, we like to separate them out here, there. And I just did. And in fact, some car designers from BMW said, hey, we want to use Fanta Black to basically paint a BMW six so that we can, like, look at the silhouettes and not have to worry about, you know, any kind of glare or anything like that. They basically used it. I think they really did it as a publicity stunt.

They they ostensibly did it so that they could study the shapes of the cars without being distracted by glare or reflection in there. And if you look at this, this BMW execs, it is pretty cool.

The look at it's awesome. And I'm not even a car guy, but I looked at that and I was like, that's pretty sweet.

Yeah. Because, again, when you look at something like this head on, it's letting such a little amount of light escape that there's there's no there's no perspective or any angles or anything in it. It's just the silhouette of it ideally. So it is pretty cool to look at. But I saw a watch by Mozer and Company.

They released a 75000 dollar van to Black Watch you and the the the minute and our hands are just hovering in the middle of this chasm. This void. Yeah. That's the watch face which has been painted. Vaina black. It's pretty good. It's, it's very cool to see as a matter of fact. So it's really hard to come by. But every once in a while people use it to a pretty great effect.

I'll spring for a slide whistle for you. You're not getting that watch. OK, all right.

For now, give it give us a few more years, hopefully. But I did research and get you the best slide whistle there is.

It's a good slide whistle and I will eventually break though. I know. I know.

We're going to hear it. This is like building the suspense.

Yeah. Yeah. That's where Shoman if anything for that BMW, though they couldn't use the original of antiblack, they had to use different arrangements of the carbon nanotubes to even get something that you could apply as like a car paint. So they had to kind of rearrange things a little bit. They eventually and also something that doesn't have to be grown in a CBD reactor, which is problematic if you want to paint a car. And they eventually did come up with that.

And like you said, the thing looks really nice and it's kind of like you should when you get a safe place to look this thing up, you really need to put your eyes on it to kind of see what you mean. But it is interesting to see a car. I mean, obviously, you see a car. They use words like it disappears and it's invisible and it's not invisible. But the details are a bit invisible.

Yeah. And I mean, I don't know if we've said it or not, but the original Van Black was clocked in at absorbing ninety nine point nine six five percent of visible light.

Yeah, we led with that. Oh, we did. OK, I'm sorry I didn't catch that. But so that was kind of like the the the trend that was there, the benchmark that was set. But apparently some other people have said we can do better than that. And I guess in September of 2019, Chuck, a group from MIT did just that. They came up with a type of black that's actually blacker than Vantiv black. And it uses the same technology of carbon nanotubes.

And it is it captures ninety nine point nine nine five percent of visible light, which makes it officially blacker than Vantiv black. And like I. Saying this kind of stuff captures the attention of artists and designers, and there was a an artist named oh, what was her name? She's a German artist named Dimmit Strib. CREB is. Did I say that correctly?

Hmm. I might say Treb, but I don't know.

It's way better. She took a diamond, a two million dollar diamond and had it coated with this new black or black. So it's like a void, a diamond void. It's just amazing stuff to see this. It just takes over this thing and it basically plunges it into a black hole no matter what you coated with.

Yeah. And if you are redoing your house and you want to have a black office like me, I chose one that, you know, now that I look at it, it definitely looks black. But you could argue that there's a little bit of grey to it. If you do want something super black, though, there's an artist named Stuart, simple as simply that made to matte black acrylic paints, Black 2.0 and Black 3.0, which are apparently really, really black.

Yeah, they are.

And so so I mentioned earlier the artist Anish Kapoor. Well, Anish Kapoor and Stuart Simple are in an art war, the good old fashioned art showdown, because Stuart Simple is not very happy that in each Kapoor has the market cornered legally on Venta Black. So Stuart simply makes his own pigments and sells them. And if you go buy them, you went and bought a tube of this this Black 3.0 today. Oh yeah. And yeah. And in it when you're buying it, you have to say I affirm that I'm not a niche.

Kapoor that I'm not an associate of a niche. Kapoor This is not going to get into the hands of a niche. Kapoor I'm not buying it for him. You have to like click that box that says all that before you can actually purchase the stuff, which is pretty great. And I was like a niche. Kapoor sounds kind of familiar and it turns out we've actually seen his work. You mean I don't think you and I have ever seen his work together at the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C. and he has these like giant eggs and the inside is painted Venta black.

Oh, cool. And it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life, because it really is like you're looking into a black hole, like if you stuck your hand in, it would just keep going into another dimension is what it looks like.

That's awesome. It really is. I think that this Stuart's simple Anish Kapoor feud, you should warn its own short stuff one day and let's hope it doesn't end in bloodshed.

Yes. And well, since we hoped against bloodshed, I think that means we've reached the end of Short-Staffed, don't you, Chuck? Does that mean we're out short stuff at.

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