Afaik, having played a lot with mercury vapor discharge lamps, the warning
about not running them on a dimmer is serious. You see, most mercury
discharge lamps store the mercury in amalgamated anodes and mercury vapor
discharges with asymetrical steering (like a starting or stuttering
dimmer), are actually rectifiers. If you try to dim one of those it will
probably become unbalanced, start rectifying, and 'cook' the ballast or
dimmer. The nice part is that once unbalanced they stay so until they cool
down and are restarted. They also get to choose the polarity (randomly)
;-(. Unless otherwise specified, either run the anodes at operating
temperature (implies full power) or not at all.

Peter

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