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Allright, While risking putting my foot in my mouth, lemme give this one shot: I don't have my university physics book with me to give the exact relationship, but the fact that light intensity does not vary with the inverse square of distance for a florescent light has some merit if it is implied that the light comes from an infinitely long "bar" or light as opposed to a point source. One way to see this is to think that the further you are from the bar of light, you can see more of it head-on (you can now see parts of the light source that are further away from the centre where you started moving from), hence there would be more "light source" visible to you than, say, from a single point source, so the intensity would not decrease as much (in fact, I think in this case the intensity drop is inversely proportional to distance as opposed to the inverse square). However, the farther you are from the fluorescent tube, which is in all practicality finite in length, the more it acts as a point source, in which case the intensity would follow the inverse square rule. In the end, it's all up to interpretation, and I'm a bigger geek than I was yesterday. Calaille
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