19-letter words containing f, u, c
- hyperbolic function — a function of an angle expressed as a relationship between the distances from a point on a hyperbola to the origin and to the coordinate axes, as hyperbolic sine or hyperbolic cosine: often expressed as combinations of exponential functions.
- hyperfine structure — the splitting of the lines of an atomic spectrum, produced by the angular momentum of the nucleus of the atom.
- in consequence (of) — as a result (of)
- incomplete fracture — a fracture extending partly across the bone.
- index-tracking fund — an investment fund that is administered so that its value changes in line with a given share index
- inductive inference — grammatical inference
- jacques montgolfier — Jacques Étienne [zhahk ey-tyen] /ʒɑk eɪˈtyɛn/ (Show IPA), 1745–99, and his brother Joseph Michel [zhaw-zef mee-shel] /ʒɔˈzɛf miˈʃɛl/ (Show IPA) 1740–1810, French aeronauts: inventors of the first practical balloon 1783.
- juan de fuca strait — strait between Vancouver Island and NW Wash.: c. 100 mi (161 km) long
- judicial conference — a conference of judges held to discuss improvements in methods or judicial procedure through court rules or otherwise.
- knights of columbus — an international fraternal and benevolent organization of Roman Catholic men, founded in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1882.
- lagrangian function — kinetic potential.
- landrum-griffin act — an act of Congress (1959) outlawing secondary boycotts, requiring public disclosure of the financial records of unions, and guaranteeing the use of secret ballots in union voting.
- languages of choice — C and Lisp. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities. There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with Fortran, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as Real Programmers, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel"). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. Fortran occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming. Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional card walloper languages as a total and unmitigated loss.
- left-luggage locker — a coin-operated locker in which luggage can be left
- left-luggage office — a checkroom for baggage.
- lift the curtain on — to begin
- lift up one's voice — to speak out loudly
- luminous efficiency — the perceived brightness of light as a ratio of the total luminous flux to total radiant flux of the source; a measure of brightness obtained by dividing the source's luminous flux by the consumption of its energy.
- malice aforethought — a predetermination to commit an unlawful act without just cause or provocation (applied chiefly to cases of first-degree murder).
- malicious falsehood — a lie told by someone who knows the lie is false or knows it will do harm to the person it is concerning
- manufacturing plant — factory
- means of production — resources: equipment, workers
- membership function — fuzzy subset
- minimum iron fabric — cloth used to make clothes that require little ironing
- municipal bond fund — a mutual fund that invests in municipal bonds.
- mutual fund company — a company that sells and manages mutual funds
- neats vs. scruffies — (artificial intelligence, jargon) The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; "neats" tend to try to build systems that "reason" in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense" of living intelligences.
- neufchâtel (cheese) — a soft white cheese prepared from whole milk or skim milk and eaten fresh or cured
- not for much longer — if something will not happen for much longer, it will soon stop happening
- objectfuscated code — (humour, programming) Object-oriented code which has been abstracted to so many levels that no-one can understand it anymore. A play on obfuscated code.
- on (or off) course — moving (or not moving) in the intended direction
- on cue/as if on cue — If you say that something happened on cue or as if on cue, you mean that it happened just when it was expected to happen, or just at the right time.
- open-hearth furnace — a process of steelmaking in which the charge is laid in a furnace (open-hearth furnace) on a shallow hearth and heated directly by burning gas as well as radiatively by the furnace walls.
- performance figures — the statistics that indicate how well or badly a company or organization has performed
- peroxysulfuric acid — persulfuric acid (def 1).
- phacoemulsification — the removal of a cataract by first liquefying the affected lens with ultrasonic vibrations and then extracting it by suction.
- phakoemulsification — the removal of a cataract by first liquefying the affected lens with ultrasonic vibrations and then extracting it by suction.
- pillars of hercules — the two promontories at the E end of the Strait of Gibraltar: the Rock of Gibraltar on the European side and the Jebel Musa on the African side; according to legend, formed by Hercules
- presumption of fact — a presumption based on experience or knowledge of the relationship between a known fact and a fact inferred from it.
- production platform — offshore power station
- pugwash conferences — international peace conferences of scientists held regularly to discuss world problems: Nobel peace prize 1995 awarded to Joseph Rotblat (1908–2005) , one of the founders of the conferences, secretary-general (1957–73), and president (1988–97)
- radioactive fallout — the settling to the ground of airborne particles ejected into the atmosphere from the earth by explosions, eruptions, forest fires, etc., especially such settling from nuclear explosions (radioactive fallout) Compare rainout.
- radius of curvature — the absolute value of the reciprocal of the curvature at a point on a curve.
- reciprocity failure — a failure of the two exposure variables, light intensity and exposure time, to behave in a reciprocal fashion at very high or very low values
- republic of ireland — John, 1838–1918, U.S. Roman Catholic clergyman and social reformer, born in Ireland: archbishop of St. Paul, Minn., 1888–1918.
- republic of letters — the collective body of literary people.
- republic of vietnam — the name (from 1955–75) for South Vietnam, as an independent republic, following the division of the country in 1954 into North Vietnam and South Vietnam
- reticular formation — a network of neurons in the brainstem involved in consciousness, regulation of breathing, the transmission of sensory stimuli to higher brain centers, and the constantly shifting muscular activity that supports the body against gravity.
- ruffini's corpuscle — an end organ of certain sensory neurons that branches out parallel to the skin and responds to steady pressure.
- saccharofarinaceous — pertaining to or consisting of sugar and meal.