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21-letter words containing c, a, f, o, n

  • 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.
  • correctional facility — A correctional facility is a prison or similar institution.
  • 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
  • court of common pleas — (formerly) a superior court exercising jurisdiction in civil actions between private citizens
  • customer satisfaction — When customers are pleased with the goods or services they have bought, you can refer to customer satisfaction.
  • dead from the neck up — stupid or unintelligent
  • department of justice — the department of the U.S. federal government charged with the responsibility for the enforcement of federal laws. Abbreviation: DOJ.
  • detoxification centre — a place that specializes in the treatment of alcoholism or drug addiction
  • dictionary definition — the meaning of a word as given in a dictionary or dictionaries
  • discriminant function — a linear function of measurements of different properties of an object or event that is used to assign the object or event to one population or another (discriminant analysis)
  • draft once reuse many — (jargon)   (DORUM) Reusing parts of a document to produce parts of an entirely new document. The term normally refers to text documents but the practise is equally common in programming.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • first consonant shift — the consonant shift described by Grimm's law, which distinguishes Germanic languages from other Indo-European languages.
  • first-round financing — First round financing is the first time a new company raises money from investors.
  • flotation compartment — in a boat, an enclosed section filled with air or gas to give buoyancy
  • food conversion ratio — a ratio expressing the weight of food required to produce a unit gain in the live weight of an animal
  • food standards agency — the full form of FDA
  • foreign exchange rate — the rate that specifies how much the currency of a nation is worth in terms of the currency of another nation
  • forensic anthropology — the branch of physical anthropology in which anthropological data, criteria, and techniques are used to determine the sex, age, genetic population, or parentage of skeletal or biological materials in questions of civil or criminal law.
  • fort lesley j. mcnair — a military reservation in SW Washington, D.C., on the Potomac River, SW of the Capitol.
  • forward exchange rate — the exchange rate of a currency to be delivered at a later date
  • fractional extraction — Fractional extraction is a process of extracting a liquid from a liquid, in which two solutes are separated, with one leaving in the extract and one in the raffinate.
  • framing specification — A specification of the "protocol bits" that surround the "data bits" on a communications channel to allow the data to be "framed" into chunks, like start and stop bits in EIA-232. It allows a receiver to synchronize at points along the data stream.
  • franco-belgian system — French system.
  • fraudulent conversion — conversion committed with the intent to defraud
  • french fried potatoes — a more formal name for chips
  • functional dependency — (database)   Given a relation R (in a relational database), attribute Y of R is functionally dependent on attribute X of R and X of R functionally determines Y of R (in symbols R.X -> R.Y) if and only if each X in R has associated with it precisely one Y in R (at any one time). Attributes X and Y may be composite. This is very close to a function in the mathematical sense.
  • functional illiterate — a person with some basic education who still falls short of a minimum standard of literacy or whose reading and writing skills are inadequate to everyday needs.
  • functional imperative — a requirement for the survival of any social system, as communication, control of conflict, or socialization.
  • game of cat and mouse — In a fight or contest, if one person plays cat and mouse, or a game of cat and mouse, with the other, the first person tries to confuse or deceive the second in order to defeat them.
  • garden of remembrance — an area of land containing cultivated plants, trees, etc, to commemorate the dead
  • genetic amplification — an increase in the frequency of replication of a DNA segment.
  • ground-effect machine — ACV (def 2).
  • hay-pauncefote treaty — an agreement (1901) between the U.S. and Great Britain giving the U.S. the sole right to build a canal across Central America connecting the Atlantic and Pacific.
  • highest common factor — greatest common divisor. Abbreviation: H.C.F.
  • horns and halo effect — a tendency to allow one's judgement of another person, esp in a job interview, to be unduly influenced by an unfavourable (horns) or favourable (halo) first impression based on appearances
  • host command facility — (operating system)   (HCF) Used to access IBM S/36 and AS/400 computers from a mainframe.
  • hubble classification — a method of classifying galaxies depending on whether they are elliptical, spiral, barred spiral, or irregular
  • identification papers — documents that serve to establish someone's identity
  • identification parade — a group of persons including one suspected of having committed a crime assembled for the purpose of discovering whether a witness can identify the suspect
  • in (or out of) place — in (or out of) the customary, proper, or assigned place
  • in a class of its own — unequalled; unparalleled
  • infectious ectromelia — ectromelia (def 2).
  • infiltration capacity — the maximum rate at which a soil in a given condition will absorb water.
  • information appliance — (hardware)   (IA) A consumer device that performs only a few targeted tasks and is controlled by a simple touch-screen interface or push buttons on the device's enclosure.
  • information scientist — someone who works in information science
  • joint chiefs of staff — the chiefs of staff of the army and the air force, the commandant of the marine corps, and the chief of naval operations, together with a chairman selected from one of the branches of the armed forces, serving as the principal military advisory body to the president, the National Security Council, and the secretary of defense.
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