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22-letter words containing a, s, t, i, c

  • inconsistent equations — two or more equations impossible to satisfy by any one set of values for the variables (Ex.: x + y = 1 and x + y = 2)
  • indeterminate sentence — a penalty, imposed by a court, that has relatively wide limits or no limits, as one of imprisonment for one to ten years.
  • industrial archaeology — the study of past industrial machines, works, etc
  • industrialized country — a country characterized by industry on an extensive scale
  • inferential statistics — the branch of statistics dealing with conclusions, generalizations, predictions, and estimations based on data from samples.
  • infinitesimal calculus — the differential calculus and the integral calculus, considered together.
  • information processing — processing of information, especially the handling of information by computers in accordance with strictly defined systems of procedure.
  • interactive courseware — (ICW) A training program controlled by a computer that relies on trainee input to determine the order and pace of instruction delivery. The trainee advances through the sequence of instructional events by making decisions and selections. The instruction branches according to the trainee's responses. ICW is a US military term which includes computer-aided instruction and computer-based training.
  • interactive television — techniques that enable viewers to interact with what they are watching
  • interpretive semantics — a school of semantic theory based on the doctrine that the rules that relate sentences to their meanings form an autonomous system, separate from the rules that determine what is grammatical in a language
  • islamic fundamentalism — the belief or advocating of a conservative adherence to literal or traditional interpretations of the Qu'ran and the Sunnah
  • isthmus of tehuantepec — the narrowest part of S Mexico, with the Bay of Campeche on the north coast and the Gulf of Tehuantepec (an inlet of the Pacific) on the south coast
  • it's london to a brick — it is certain
  • java community process — (project)   (JCP) An organization controlled by Sun Microsystems to further the growth of the Java language and runtime. The JCP produces standards called Java Standard Requests, which are "requests" in the same sense as RFCs.
  • john vincent atanasoff — (person)   John Vincent Atanasoff, 1903-10-04 - 1995-06-15. An American mathemetical physicist, and the inventor of the electronic digital computer. Between 1937 and 1942 he built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer with Clifford Berry, at the Iowa State University. Atanasoff was born on 1903-10-04 in Hamilton, New York. In 1925, he got a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida. In 1926 he received a Master's degree in Maths from Iowa State University. He received a PhD as a theoretical physicist from the University of Wisconsin in 1930. While an associate professor of mathematics and physics at Iowa State University, Atanasoff began to envision a digital computational device, believing analogue devices to be too restrictive. Whilst working on his electronic digital computer, Atanasoff was introduced to a graduate student named Clifford Berry, who helped him build the computer. The first prototype of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was demonstrated in December 1939. Although no patent was awarded for the new computer, in 1973 US District Judge Earl R. Larson declared Atanasoff the inventor of the digital computer (declaring the ENIAC patent invalid). Atanasoff was awarded the National Medal of Technology by US President Bush on 1990-11-13. He died following a stroke on 1995-06-15.
  • junior sales associate — A junior sales associate is an inexperienced member of the sales staff, usually receiving training or supervised by more experienced staff.
  • justification by works — the belief that a person becomes just before God by the performance of good works: the doctrine against which Luther protested in inaugurating the Protestant Reformation.
  • kensington and chelsea — a borough of Greater London, England.
  • label switching router — (networking)   (LSR) A device that typically resides somewhere in the middle of a network and is capable of forwarding datagrams by label switching. In many cases, especially early versions of MPLS networks, a LSR will typically be a modified ATM switch that forwards datagrams based upon a label in the VPI/VCI field.
  • landscape architecture — the art of arranging or modifying the features of a landscape, an urban area, etc., for aesthetic or practical reasons.
  • last call optimisation — (programming)   (Or "tail call optimisation") Discarding the immediate calling context (call stack frame) when the last action of a function or procedure, A, is to call another function or procedure, B. B will then return directly to A's caller, or possibly further up the call stack if the optimisation has been applied to several consecutive calls. Last call optimisation allows arbitrarily deep nesting of procedure calls without consuming memory to store useless environments. This is particularly useful in the special case of tail recursion optimisation, where a procedure's last action is to call itself (possibly indirectly).
  • leather-stocking tales — a series of historical novels by James Fenimore Cooper, comprising The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
  • lethargic encephalitis — sleeping sickness (def 2).
  • limited access highway — expressway
  • liquid crystal display — (hardware)   (LCD) An electro-optical device used to display digits, characters or images, commonly used in digital watches, calculators, and portable computers. The heart of the liquid crystal display is a piece of liquid crystal material placed between a pair of transparent electrodes. The liquid crystal changes the phase of the light passing through it and this phase change can be controlled by the voltage applied between the electrodes. If such a unit is placed between a pair of plane polariser plates then light can pass through it only if the correct voltage is applied. Liquid crystal displays are formed by integrating a number of such cells, or more usually, by using a single liquid crystal plate and a pattern of electrodes. The simplest kind of liquid crystal displays, those used in digital watches and calculators, contain a common electrode plane covering one side and a pattern of electrodes on the other. These electrodes can be individually controlled to produce the appropriate display. Computer displays, however, require far too many pixels (typically between 50,000 and several millions) to make this scheme, in particular its wiring, feasible. The electrodes are therefore replaced by a number of row electrodes on one side and column electrodes on the other. By applying voltage to one row and several columns the pixels at the intersections are set. The pixels being set one row after the other, in passive matrix displays the number of rows is limited by the ratio of the setting and fading times. In the setup described above (known as "twisted nematic") the number of rows is limited to about 20. Using an alternative "supertwisted nematic" setup VGA quality displays (480 rows) can be easily built. As of 1995 most notebook computers used this technique. Fading can be slowed by putting an active element, such as a transistor, on the top of each pixel. This "remembers" the setting of that pixel. These active matrix displays are of much better quality (as good as CRTs) but are much more expensive than the passive matrix displays. LCDs are slimmer, lighter and consume less power than the previous dominant display type, the cathode ray tube, hence their importance for portable computers.
  • lord justice of appeal — an ordinary judge of the Court of Appeal
  • magnetic pole strength — Electricity. a measure of the force exerted by one face of a magnet on a face of another magnet when both magnets are represented by equal and opposite poles. Symbol: m.
  • make common cause with — join forces
  • make contact (with sb) — If you make contact with someone, you find out where they are and talk or write to them.
  • manufacturing industry — the industry of manufacturing goods from raw materials
  • master warrant officer — a noncommissioned officer in the Canadian forces junior to a chief warrant officer
  • metasyntactic variable — (grammar)   Strictly, a variable used in metasyntax, but often used for any name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use "foo" or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at any time. To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures: bazola, ztesch: Stanford (from mid-'70s on). zxc, spqr, wombat: Cambridge University (England). shme: Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/. blarg, wibble: New Zealand Of all these, only "foo" and "bar" are universal (and baz nearly so). The compounds foobar and "foobaz" also enjoy very wide currency. Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumble, for example. See also Commonwealth Hackish for discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.
  • microwave spectroscopy — the determination of those frequencies of the microwave spectrum that are selectively absorbed by certain materials, providing information about atomic, molecular, and crystalline structure.
  • middle atlantic states — the states of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey
  • middle-distance runner — someone who runs races of a length between the sprints and the distance events, esp the 800 metres and the 1500 metres
  • miscarriage of justice — law: wrongful judgement
  • molecular distillation — a vacuum distillation in which the molecules of the distillate reach the condenser before colliding with one another.
  • most significant digit — the digit farthest to the left in a number. Abbreviation: MSD.
  • mother carey's chicken — any of various small petrels, especially the stormy petrel, Oceanites oceanicus.
  • multiplicative inverse — reciprocal (def 9).
  • name service switching — Domain Name System
  • national semiconductor — (company)   A semiconductor manufacturer, responsible for the SC/MP, National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000 series of microprocessors.
  • natural classification — classification of organisms according to relationships based on descent from a common ancestor
  • no room to swing a cat — If you say 'There's no room to swing a cat' or 'You can't swing a cat', you mean that the place you are talking about is very small or crowded.
  • nodal switching system — (NSS) Main routing nodes in the NSFnet backbone.
  • nominal semidestructor — (abuse)   Slang for "National Semiconductor", found among other places in the 4.3BSD networking sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this company marketed a series of microprocessors including the National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000. At one point early in the great microprocessor race, the specs on these chips made them look like serious competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0 series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and never implemented the full instruction set promised in their literature, apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without trace, joining the Zilog Z8000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten microprocessors.
  • non-restrictive clause — a relative clause that describes or supplements but is not essential in establishing the identity of the antecedent and is usually set off by commas in English. In This year, which has been dry, is bad for crops the clause which has been dry is a nonrestrictive clause.
  • nonspecular reflection — the diffuse reflection of sound or light waves
  • oak processionary moth — a moth, (Thaumetopoea processionea), of the family Thaumetopoeidae, the larvae of which leave the communal shelter nightly for food in a V-shaped procession
  • object-oriented pascal — Object Pascal
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