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18-letter words containing g, y, r

  • launching ceremony — a ceremony that celebrates the launch of a ship for the first time into the water
  • long-stay car park — a car park (eg at an airport) where cars can be left for a long time
  • magic switch story — Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who). You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position. I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side. It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed. Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer. A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch. The computer promptly crashed. This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since. We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic. I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
  • magnetocrystalline — (physics) Describing the interaction between the magnetization and the crystal structure of a material.
  • magnetoelectricity — electricity developed by the action of magnets.
  • marine archaeology — the branch of archaeology that deals with the recovery of ancient objects found beneath the sea, as shipwrecks or remains from submerged islands, and with the techniques of underwater exploration, excavation, and retrieval.
  • marketing strategy — a general plan or set of plans dealing with marketing, especially over a long period
  • micropalaeontology — the branch of palaeontology concerned with the study of microscopic fossils
  • minority programme — a programme that appeals to a minority of the available audience
  • monetary aggregate — a measure of the money in circulation.
  • montgomery village — a city in central Maryland.
  • moog (synthesizer) — an early musical synthesizer
  • neo-pythagoreanism — a philosophical system, established in Alexandria and Rome in the second century b.c., consisting mainly of revived Pythagorean doctrines with elements of Platonism and Stoicism.
  • neuroendocrinology — the study of the anatomical and physiological interactions between the nervous and endocrine systems.
  • neuroophthalmology — the branch of ophthalmology that deals with the optic nerve and other nervous system structures involved in vision.
  • neurophysiological — the branch of physiology dealing with the functions of the nervous system.
  • neuropsychological — Of or pertaining to neuropsychology, the relation or combination of brain and mind.
  • new storage system — (storage)   (NSS) A major Multics implementation project during the 1970s. The initial Multics file system design had evolved from the one-huge-disk world of CTSS. When multiple disk units were used they were just assigned increasing ranges of disk addresses, so a segment could have pages scattered over all disks on the system. This provided good I/O parallelism but made crash recovery expensive. NSS redesigned the lower levels of the file system, introducing the concepts of logical volume and physical volume and a mapping from a Multics directory branch to a VTOC entry for each file. The new system had much better recovery performance in exchange for a small space and performance cost.
  • not a pretty sight — If you say that someone or something is not a pretty sight, you mean that it is not pleasant to look at.
  • now you're talking — at last you're saying something agreeable
  • oak-leaf hydrangea — a shrub, Hydrangea quercifolia, of the southeastern U.S., having lobed leaves and pyramidal clusters of white flowers.
  • of your own making — If you say that something such as a problem you have is of your own making, you mean you have caused or created it yourself.
  • offset lithography — offset (def 6).
  • open heart surgery — surgery performed on the exposed heart while a heart-lung machine pumps and oxygenates the blood and diverts it from the heart.
  • open-heart surgery — surgery performed on the exposed heart while a heart-lung machine pumps and oxygenates the blood and diverts it from the heart.
  • organic solidarity — social cohesiveness that is based on division of labor and interdependence and is characteristic of complex, industrial societies.
  • orthopedic surgery — corrective operation on bones or joints
  • oscillographically — By means of oscillography.
  • owen stanley range — a mountain range in SE New Guinea. Highest peak: Mount Victoria, 4073 m (13 363 ft)
  • palaeoanthropology — the branch of anthropology concerned with primitive man
  • paraglyph printing — the printing of the positive and negative of a radiograph superimposed in slight misalignment to give the effect of a relief.
  • parathyroid glands — any of several small oval glands usually lying near or embedded in the thyroid gland.
  • perennial ryegrass — any of several European grasses of the genus Lolium, as L. perenne (perennial ryegrass) grown for forage in the U.S.
  • personal bodyguard — a person employed to protect a particular person
  • phantasmagorically — having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination.
  • physical geography — the branch of geography concerned with natural features and phenomena of the earth's surface, as landforms, drainage features, climates, soils, and vegetation.
  • plane trigonometry — the branch of trigonometry dealing with plane triangles.
  • play silly buggers — to fool around and waste time
  • plenary indulgence — a remission of the total temporal punishment that is still due to sin after absolution. Compare indulgence (def 6).
  • positively charged — having a positive charge
  • pre-filled syringe — A pre-filled syringe is a disposable syringe that is supplied already loaded with the substance to be injected.
  • programme of study — the prescribed syllabus that pupils must be taught at each key stage in the National Curriculum
  • proprietary rights — rights of ownership
  • psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
  • psychopharmacology — the branch of pharmacology dealing with the psychological effects of drugs.
  • quantity surveying — the action or profession of a person who estimates the cost of the materials and labour necessary for a construction job
  • radius of gyration — the distance from an axis at which the mass of a body may be assumed to be concentrated and at which the moment of inertia will be equal to the moment of inertia of the actual mass about the axis, equal to the square root of the quotient of the moment of inertia and the mass.
  • range of stability — the angle to the perpendicular through which a vessel may be heeled without losing the ability to right itself.
  • rear its ugly head — the upper part of the body in humans, joined to the trunk by the neck, containing the brain, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
  • recruitment agency — company that places job candidates
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