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21-letter words containing a, e, o, n, i, c

  • conway's game of life — (simulation)   The first popular cellular automata based artificial life simulation. Life was invented by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970 and was first introduced publicly in "Scientific American" later that year. Conway first devised what he called "The Game of Life" and "ran" it using plates placed on floor tiles in his house. Because of he ran out of floor space and kept stepping on the plates, he later moved to doing it on paper or on a checkerboard and then moved to running Life as a computer program on a PDP-7. That first implementation of Life as a computer program was written by M. J. T. Guy and S. R. Bourne (the author of Unix's Bourne shell). Life uses a rectangular grid of binary (live or dead) cells each of which is updated at each step according to the previous state of its eight neighbours as follows: a live cell with less than two, or more than three, live neighbours dies. A dead cell with exactly three neighbours becomes alive. Other cells do not change. While the rules are fairly simple, the patterns that can arise are of a complexity resembling that of organic systems -- hence the name "Life". Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with Life, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented Life in TECO!; see Gosperism). When a hacker mentions "life", he is more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, the 1950s-era board game or the human state of existence.
  • cooperative apartment — a block of flats belonging to a corporation in which shares are owned in proportion to the relative value of the flat occupied
  • cooperative-apartment — working or acting together willingly for a common purpose or benefit.
  • coordination language — (networking, protocol)   A language defined specifically to allow two or more parties (components) to communicate in order to accomplish some shared goal. Examples of coordination languages are Linda and Xerox's CLF (STITCH).
  • cordillera occidental — the western coastal ranges of the Andes, in Peru and Colombia.
  • coronal mass ejection — a cloud of particles ejected from the sun's surface during a solar flare
  • correctional facility — A correctional facility is a prison or similar institution.
  • cosmological argument — one of the arguments that purport to prove the existence of God from empirical facts about the universe, esp the argument to the existence of a first cause
  • cost-benefit analysis — an analysis that takes into account the costs of a project and its benefits to society, as well as the revenue it generates
  • cottony-cushion scale — a small scale insect, Icerya purchasi, that is a pest of citrus trees in California: it is controlled by introducing an Australian ladybird, Rodolia cardinalis, into affected areas
  • counter-revolutionary — Counter-revolutionary activities are activities intended to reverse the effects of a previous revolution.
  • counterdemonstrations — Plural form of counterdemonstration.
  • counterinterpretation — An interpretation that goes against another interpretation.
  • crankcase compression — Crankcase compression is the method of starting some smaller two-stroke engines, where the mixture charge is compressed in a sealed crankcase by the descending piston before passing to the combustion chamber.
  • criminal conversation — (formerly) a common law action brought by a husband by which he claimed damages against an adulterer
  • cross-cousin marriage — marriage between the children of a brother and sister.
  • crude oil dehydration — Crude oil dehydration is the removal of water or water vapor from crude oil, by separating the oil from the water, often in a rotating centrifuge.
  • customer satisfaction — When customers are pleased with the goods or services they have bought, you can refer to customer satisfaction.
  • cyclical unemployment — unemployment caused by fluctuations in the level of economic activity inherent in trade cycles
  • de-ontological ethics — the branch of ethics dealing with right action and the nature of duty, without regard to the goodness or value of motives or the desirability of the ends of any act.
  • decompression chamber — a chamber in which the pressure of air can be varied slowly for returning people from abnormal pressures to atmospheric pressure without inducing decompression sickness
  • democratic centralism — the Leninist principle that policy should be decided centrally by officials, who are nominally democratically elected
  • dendrochronologically — By the use of, or with reference to dendrochronology.
  • denominational school — a school associated with a particular religious denomination
  • deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA
  • department of justice — the department of the U.S. federal government charged with the responsibility for the enforcement of federal laws. Abbreviation: DOJ.
  • deprovincialization's — to make provincial in character.
  • detoxification centre — a place that specializes in the treatment of alcoholism or drug addiction
  • development education — an area of study that aims to give pupils an understanding of their involvement in world affairs
  • dictionary definition — the meaning of a word as given in a dictionary or dictionaries
  • discretionary account — an account in which the stockbroker is allowed complete control over the purchase and sale of securities on the customer's behalf.
  • distinctiveness ratio — the ratio of the relative frequency of some event in a given sample to that in the general population or another relevant sample
  • drop the handkerchief — a children's game in which all the players but one stand in a circle facing inward, while that one player stealthily drops a handkerchief behind a player in the circle who must pursue and attempt to catch the one who dropped the handkerchief before the latter reaches the vacated place.
  • duccio di buoninsegna — c1255–1319? Italian painter.
  • dynamic drive overlay — (storage, software)   (DDO) Software to allow a system BIOS that does not support Logical Block Addressing to access drives larger than 528 MB. The alternatives are to update the system BIOS or install an EIDE controller card with a suitable on-board BIOS.
  • eccles-jordan circuit — flip-flop
  • ecological succession — succession (def 6).
  • ecological-succession — the coming of one person or thing after another in order, sequence, or in the course of events: many troubles in succession.
  • educational sociology — the application of sociological principles and methods to the solution of problems in an educational system.
  • electric polarization — Electric polarization is the type of polarization of electricity that occurs in a dielectric.
  • electromagnetic field — a field of force associated with a moving electric charge equivalent to an electric field and a magnetic field at right angles to each other and to the direction of propagation
  • electromagnetic pulse — a surge of electromagnetic radiation, esp one resulting from a nuclear explosion, which can disrupt electronic devices and, occasionally, larger structures and equipment
  • emotional correctness — pressure on an individual to be seen to feel the same emotion as others
  • endoplasmic reticulum — an extensive intracellular membrane system whose functions include synthesis and transport of lipids and, in regions where ribosomes are attached, of proteins
  • enhanced oil recovery — any of several techniques that make it possible to recover more oil than can be obtained by natural pressure, such as the injection of fluid or gases into an oilfield to force more oil to the surface
  • enharmonic modulation — a change of key achieved by regarding a note in one key as an equivalent note in another. Thus E flat in the key of A flat could be regarded as D sharp in the key of B major
  • exposure compensation — the act of overriding a camera's automatic exposure in order to achieve a particular effect or due to difficult lighting conditions
  • faculty board meeting — a meeting of the governing body of a faculty
  • file allocation table — (file system)   (FAT) The component of an MS-DOS or Windows 95 file system which describes the files, directories, and free space on a hard disk or floppy disk. A disk is divided into partitions. Under the FAT file system each partition is divided into clusters, each of which can be one or more sectors, depending on the size of the partition. Each cluster is either allocated to a file or directory or it is free (unused). A directory lists the name, size, modification time and starting cluster of each file or subdirectory it contains. At the start of the partition is a table (the FAT) with one entry for each cluster. Each entry gives the number of the next cluster in the same file or a special value for "not allocated" or a special value for "this is the last cluster in the chain". The first few clusters after the FAT contain the root directory. The FAT file system was originally created for the CP/M[?] operating system where files were catalogued using 8-bit addressing. MS DOS's FAT allows only 8.3 filenames. With the introduction of MS-DOS 4 an incompatible 16-bit FAT (FAT16) with 32-kilobyte clusters was introduced that allowed partitions of up to 2 gigabytes. Microsoft later created FAT32 to support partitions larger than two gigabytes and pathnames greater that 256 characters. It also allows more efficient use of disk space since clusters are four kilobytes rather than 32 kilobytes. FAT32 was first available in OEM Service Release 2 of Windows 95 in 1996. It is not fully backward compatible with the 16-bit and 8-bit FATs. Compare: NTFS.
  • flotation compartment — in a boat, an enclosed section filled with air or gas to give buoyancy
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