Word: dimmer
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...meant to turn off all the lights in the Science Center, but they only have dimmer switches,” Widmer recalled. “It was kind of a bungled prank...
...study, Zhong and his colleagues took a subtler approach, but one that's likely to have more real-world implications. In the first part of their three-part experiment, they recruited 84 students and divided them between a brightly lit room with 10 fluorescent bulbs burning and a dimmer room with only four bulbs. The subjects were each given a brown envelope with $10 in singles and coins as well as an empty white envelope. They were all then told they had five minutes to complete a simple mathematical task, looking for pairs of numbers that added...
When the researchers collected the envelopes and reviewed the results at the end of the five-minute period, what they found was striking. Consistently, the people in the dimmer room reported finding more matches - an average of 11.47 - than those in the bright room, who averaged just 7.78. When their work was checked, it turned out that cheating was rife in the dim room, with the participants there claiming an average of 4.21 more correct answers than they actually got, compared with 0.83 for the other room. Even though none of the subjects put their name on their paper...
Still, even these planetary finds are unlikely to be exact copies of Earth, and for a very simple reason. Kepler spots faraway planets by watching them transit, or pass in front of, their stars, blocking out a little bit of light and making the star slightly dimmer. The five planets just announced orbit very close to their suns, which is the reason they're so ridiculously hot. That proximity also means they move very fast, completing three or even more transits in the first round of observations - which is just the kind of data stream the Kepler team prefers...
...especially portable. Roughly the size of one of the last generation of VHS players, it is recommended for projections as large as 10 ft. as measured along the diagonal. (It can throw an image as big as 25 ft. across, but it would look considerably dimmer.) Optoma also recommends using a projector screen, and I can attest that the image looked way better on the 80-incher they lent me - a decent foldable one costs $399 - than it did on the wall. (See the best inventions...