Word: dimness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...horrifyingly funny Lord Earl of Leete. Speaking coolly of more than a few unspeakable acts he has committed in order to maintain the integrity of the estate, the Earl declares his father "a nasty booby of a man who I hated ferociously," his mother "stupid," and his brother "decidedly dim." Broadbent's incomparably pompous English accent and straightfaced Monty-Pythonesque expression are perfect. But after the first few unemotional narrations and reenactments of his gruesome crimes, the Earl's understandably predictable stories, coupled with the unexciting cinematography, begin to verge on the tedious. Still, a few choice lines, expertly delivered...
...long time from now, when the year 1993 seems like a dim memory to some and like a fantasy to others, Giardi will be talked of as if he were a mythical figure, a sentinel of the Stadium. And then a golden-legged whipper snapper will rise up and challenge Giardi's mammoth accomplishments. Then the cycle will begin again...
...couldn't say what it was, but they knew it was out there because of its undeniable effect on stars and planets. What could the invisible stuff be made of? The Berkeley group was checking out a theory that dark matter takes the form of large planets or small, dim stars -- a plausible idea, but one that Griest suspected was wrong. A little over two weeks ago, he was prepared to say confidently that dark matter was almost certainly something else...
...come up with many competing notions about the identity of dark matter. The candidates have included various kinds of subatomic particles, many of which aren't even known to exist; black holes; and even long, thin strings of pure energy left over from the Big Bang. Large planets or dim stars -- known as MACHOs (massive compact halo objects) -- are by far the most mundane of the solutions to the puzzle. They're also the least popular: theorists think there should be just enough dark matter to stop the universe's expansion without reversing it, and MACHOs can't be numerous...
...only the beginning; the astronomers then had to put thousands of megabytes of data from their telescopes through a computer. The computer's job was to identify the unusual flickers of light caused by MACHOs amid the flashes from thousands of naturally pulsating stars that regularly switch from dim to bright and back again. After nearly 2 million individual observations that yielded just one dubious MACHO, Griest's group was ready to give up. Then, unexpectedly, the computer spit out what he calls "a beautiful event." After Griest and his colleagues had raised and ruled out phenomena that might...