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21-letter words containing m, a, c, 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.
  • cooperative apartment — a block of flats belonging to a corporation in which shares are owned in proportion to the relative value of the flat occupied
  • cooperative-apartment — working or acting together willingly for a common purpose or benefit.
  • coordination compound — complex (def 10).
  • coronal mass ejection — a cloud of particles ejected from the sun's surface during a solar flare
  • cosmological argument — one of the arguments that purport to prove the existence of God from empirical facts about the universe, esp the argument to the existence of a first cause
  • cosmological constant — a term introduced by Einstein into his field equations of general relativity to permit a stationary, nonexpanding universe: it has since been abandoned in most models of the universe.
  • countably compact set — a set for which every cover consisting of a countable number of sets has a subcover consisting of a finite number of sets.
  • counterdemonstrations — Plural form of counterdemonstration.
  • court of common pleas — (formerly) a superior court exercising jurisdiction in civil actions between private citizens
  • crankcase compression — Crankcase compression is the method of starting some smaller two-stroke engines, where the mixture charge is compressed in a sealed crankcase by the descending piston before passing to the combustion chamber.
  • criminal conversation — (formerly) a common law action brought by a husband by which he claimed damages against an adulterer
  • cross-cousin marriage — marriage between the children of a brother and sister.
  • customer satisfaction — When customers are pleased with the goods or services they have bought, you can refer to customer satisfaction.
  • cyclical unemployment — unemployment caused by fluctuations in the level of economic activity inherent in trade cycles
  • dacryocystorhinostomy — A surgical procedure to restore the flow of tears into the nose from the lacrimal sac when the nasolacrimal duct does not function.
  • datamatic corporation — Honeywell
  • dead from the neck up — stupid or unintelligent
  • decompression chamber — a chamber in which the pressure of air can be varied slowly for returning people from abnormal pressures to atmospheric pressure without inducing decompression sickness
  • democratic centralism — the Leninist principle that policy should be decided centrally by officials, who are nominally democratically elected
  • denominational school — a school associated with a particular religious denomination
  • department of justice — the department of the U.S. federal government charged with the responsibility for the enforcement of federal laws. Abbreviation: DOJ.
  • development education — an area of study that aims to give pupils an understanding of their involvement in world affairs
  • diapason normal pitch — a standard of pitch in which A above middle C is established at 435 vibrations per second.
  • 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)
  • displacement activity — a behavior performed out of its usual context and apparently irrelevant to the prevailing situation, as eating when an unknown individual approaches, tending to occur when appropiate behaviors, as attacking or fleeing, are in conflict or obstructed.
  • 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.
  • dynamic data exchange — (language)   (DDE, originally Dynamic Data Linking, DDL) A Microsoft Windows 3 hotlink protocol that allows application programs to communicate using a client-server model. Whenever the server (or "publisher") modifies part of a document which is being shared via DDE, one or more clients ("subscribers") are informed and include the modification in the copy of the data on which they are working.
  • dynamic drive overlay — (storage, software)   (DDO) Software to allow a system BIOS that does not support Logical Block Addressing to access drives larger than 528 MB. The alternatives are to update the system BIOS or install an EIDE controller card with a suitable on-board BIOS.
  • electric displacement — the electric flux density when an electric field exists in free space into which a dielectric is introduced
  • electroencephalograms — Plural form of electroencephalogram.
  • 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
  • electromagnetic pulse — a surge of electromagnetic radiation, esp one resulting from a nuclear explosion, which can disrupt electronic devices and, occasionally, larger structures and equipment
  • electronystagmography — A diagnostic test to record involuntary movements of the eye caused by a condition known as nystagmus. It can also be used to diagnose the cause of vertigo, dizziness or balance dysfunction by testing the vestibular system.
  • emotional correctness — pressure on an individual to be seen to feel the same emotion as others
  • endoplasmic reticulum — an extensive intracellular membrane system whose functions include synthesis and transport of lipids and, in regions where ribosomes are attached, of proteins
  • enharmonic modulation — a change of key achieved by regarding a note in one key as an equivalent note in another. Thus E flat in the key of A flat could be regarded as D sharp in the key of B major
  • entrance requirements — the grades in school examinations required for admission to university
  • epidemic encephalitis — any type of widespread encephalitis caused by various viruses
  • exposure compensation — the act of overriding a camera's automatic exposure in order to achieve a particular effect or due to difficult lighting conditions
  • faculty board meeting — a meeting of the governing body of a faculty
  • financial times index — one of the indexes of share prices produced by the Financial Times, especially the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index
  • flotation compartment — in a boat, an enclosed section filled with air or gas to give buoyancy
  • fort lesley j. mcnair — a military reservation in SW Washington, D.C., on the Potomac River, SW of the Capitol.
  • 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.
  • fuming sulphuric acid — a mixture of pyrosulphuric acid, H2S2O7, and other condensed acids, made by dissolving sulphur trioxide in concentrated sulphuric acid
  • functional imperative — a requirement for the survival of any social system, as communication, control of conflict, or socialization.
  • fundamental frequency — the lowest frequency at which a medium will freely oscillate.
  • 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.
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