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18-letter words containing a, e, t

  • every now and then — from time to time; occasionally
  • evolution strategy — (ES) A kind of evolutionary algorithm where individuals (potential solutions) are encoded by a set of real-valued "object variables" (the individual's "genome"). For each object variable an individual also has a "strategy variable" which determines the degree of mutation to be applied to the corresponding object variable. The strategy variables also mutate, allowing the rate of mutation of the object variables to vary. An ES is characterised by the population size, the number of offspring produced in each generation and whether the new population is selected from parents and offspring or only from the offspring. ES were invented in 1963 by Ingo Rechenberg, Hans-Paul Schwefel at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) while searching for the optimal shapes of bodies in a flow.
  • examination script — a script with answers written on it by an examination candidate taking a written examination
  • excess profits tax — a tax on profits exceeding a certain amount
  • executable content — (operating system)   Executable programs sent by one computer to another via a network. For example a Java applet is executable content. Usage: rare.
  • executive chairman — the most senior internal position within a company, combining the duties of chairman and chief executive
  • exhaustive testing — (programming)   Executing a program with all possible combinations of inputs or values for program variables.
  • extemporaneousness — The degree or property of being extemporaneous.
  • extermination camp — a camp where people are imprisoned and killed
  • eyeball to eyeball — If you are eyeball to eyeball with someone, you are in their presence and involved in a meeting, dispute, or contest with them. You can also talk about having an eyeball to eyeball meeting or confrontation.
  • eyewitness account — a description given by someone who was present at an event
  • fabric conditioner — a product used when washing clothes to make them feel softer
  • fall on one's feet — a plural of foot.
  • fall to the ground — (of a plan, theory, etc) to be rendered invalid, esp because of lack of necessary information
  • fallot's tetralogy — a congenital heart disease in which there are four defects: pulmonary stenosis, enlarged right ventricle, a ventricular septal defect, and an aorta whose origin lies over the septal defect. In babies suffering this disease the defects can be corrected by surgery
  • false imprisonment — the unlawful restraint of a person from exercising the right to freedom of movement.
  • family-size packet — a packet large enough to be suitable for a family
  • family-tree theory — a theory that describes language change in terms of genetically related languages developing in successive splits from a common parent language, such as Indo-European, as depicted by a family tree diagram.
  • fantasy basketball — imagination, especially when extravagant and unrestrained.
  • far eastern region — former name of Khabarovsk.
  • farewell-to-spring — a slender, showy plant, Clarkia amoena, of the evening primrose family, native to western North America, having satiny, cup-shaped, lilac-crimson or reddish-pink flowers and roundish fruit.
  • farm the long acre — to graze cows on the verge of a road
  • farmer in the dell — a game, accompanied by a song with several verses, in which one person, designated as the farmer, occupies the center of a circle of persons and is joined in the circle by other players designated as wife, child, nurse, cat, rat, and cheese, these then leaving the circle in order except for the one designated as cheese, who is left standing alone in the circle at the end.
  • farmer-labor party — a political party in Minnesota, founded in 1920 and merged with the Democratic Party in 1944.
  • fatty degeneration — deterioration of the cells of the body, accompanied by the formation of fat globules within the diseased cells.
  • feast of orthodoxy — a solemn festival held on the first Sunday of Lent (Orthodoxy Sunday) commemorating the restoration of the use of icons in the church (a.d. 842) and the triumph over all heresies.
  • feather one's nest — one of the horny structures forming the principal covering of birds, consisting typically of a hard, tubular portion attached to the body and tapering into a thinner, stemlike portion bearing a series of slender, barbed processes that interlock to form a flat structure on each side.
  • federal funds rate — The federal funds rate is the overnight rate between banks.
  • federal government — pertaining to or of the nature of a union of states under a central government distinct from the individual governments of the separate states, as in federal government; federal system.
  • feeping creaturism — /fee'ping kree"ch*r-izm/ A deliberate spoonerism for creeping featurism, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn"t really well defined, but it sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises.
  • feldenkrais method — a system of gentle movements that promote flexibility, coordination, and self-awareness
  • fermat's last post — (humour)   A post to a bug tracker, mailing list or forum in which the author claims to have found a simple fix or workaround for a bug, but never says what it is and never shows up again to explain it (even after others have been puzzling over the bug for years).
  • fermat's principle — Optics. the law that the path taken by a ray of light in going from one point to another point will be the path that requires the least time.
  • ferrite-rod aerial — a type of aerial, normally used in radio reception, consisting of a small coil of wire mounted on a ferrite core, the coil serving as a tuning inductance
  • fettuccine alfredo — fettuccine in cream sauce with grated Parmesan cheese.
  • fifth monarchy men — (during the Commonwealth in the 17th century) a militant sect of Puritans who identified the fifth monarchy with the millennial reign of Christ and who believed they should help to inaugurate that reign by force.
  • fight to the death — If you say that you will fight to the death for something, you are emphasizing that you will do anything to achieve or protect it, even if you suffer as a consequence.
  • filename extension — (filename extension)   The portion of a filename, following the final point, which indicates the kind of data stored in the file - the file type. Many operating systems use filename extensions, e.g. Unix, VMS, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows. They are usually from one to three letters (some sad old OSes support no more than three). Examples include "c" for C source code, "ps" for PostScript, "txt" for arbitrary text. Apart from informing the user what type of content the file holds, filename extensions are typically used to decide which program to launch when a file is "run", e.g. by double-clicking it in a GUI file browser. They are also used by Unix's make to determine how to build one kind of file from another. Compare: MIME type.
  • finite-dimensional — (of a vector space) having a basis consisting of a finite number of elements.
  • fire and brimstone — When people talk about fire and brimstone, they are referring to hell and how they think people are punished there after death.
  • fire-and-brimstone — threatening punishment in the hereafter: a fire-and-brimstone sermon.
  • first and foremost — primarily
  • first class module — (programming)   A module that is a first class data object of the programming language, e.g. a record containing functions. In a functional language, it is standard to have first class programs, so program building blocks can have the same status.
  • first year infants — a class for young children who have just started school
  • fitzwilliam museum — a museum, attached to Cambridge University and founded in 1816, noted esp for its paintings and collections devoted to the applied arts
  • fixed-term tenancy — a tenancy arrangement for a particular and fixed period
  • flame-of-the-woods — an Indian evergreen shrub, Ixora coccinea, of the madder family, having red, tubular flowers in dense clusters.
  • flash butt welding — a method of welding metal edge-to-edge with a powerful electric flash followed by the application of pressure.
  • flat address space — (architecture)   The memory architecture in which any memory location can be selected from a single contiguous block by a single integer offset. Almost all popular processors have a flat address space, but the Intel x86 family has a segmented address space. A flat address space greatly simplifies programming because of the simple correspondence between addresses (pointers) and integers.
  • flat file database — (database)   A database containing a single table, stored in a single flat file, often in a human-readable format such as comma-separated values or fixed-width columns.
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