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18-letter words containing m, o, t

  • law of mass action — the statement that the rate of a chemical reaction is proportional to the concentrations of the reacting substances.
  • limestone pavement — a horizontal surface of exposed limestone in which the joints have been enlarged, cutting the surface into roughly rectangular blocks
  • limited government — confined within limits; restricted or circumscribed: a limited space; limited resources.
  • linear combination — a sum of products of each quantity times a constant: The expression aX + bY + cZ is a linear combination of X, Y, and Z, where a, b, and c are constants.
  • list comprehension — (functional programming)   An expression in a functional language denoting the results of some operation on (selected) elements of one or more lists. An example in Haskell: This returns all pairs of numbers (x,y) where x and y are elements of the list 1, 2, ..., 10, y <= x and their sum is less than 10. A list comprehension is simply "syntactic sugar" for a combination of applications of the functions, concat, map and filter. For instance the above example could be written: The term "list comprehension" appears in the references below. The earliest reference to the notation is in Rod Burstall and John Darlington's description of their language, NPL. David Turner subsequently adopted this notation in his languages SASL, KRC and Miranda, where he has called them "ZF expressions", set abstractions and list abstractions (in his 1985 FPCA paper [Miranda: A Non-Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic Types]).
  • literae humaniores — (at Oxford University) the faculty concerned with Greek and Latin literature, ancient history, and philosophy; classics
  • local examinations — (in the UK) any of various examinations, such as the GCE, set by university boards and conducted in local centres, schools, etc
  • logarithmic spiral — log r = aθ
  • logarithmus dualis — (mathematics)   (ld) Latin for logarithm base two. More commonly written as "log" with a subscript "2". Roughly the number of bits required to represent an integer.
  • logical complement — (logic)   In Boolean algebra, the logical complement or negation of a Boolean value is the opposite value, given by the following truth table: A | -A --+--- T | F F | T -A is also written as A with a bar over it or with a small vertical line hanging from the right-hand end of the "-" (LaTeX \neg) or as A'. In the C programming language, it is !A and in digital circuit design, /A.
  • logical positivism — a philosophical movement that stresses the function of philosophy as a method of criticizing and analyzing science and that rejects all transcendental metaphysics, statements of fact being held to be meaningful only if they have verifiable consequences in experience and in statements of logic, mathematics, or philosophy itself, and with such statements of fact deriving their validity from the rules of language.
  • lone-parent family — a family in which there is only one parent
  • loosestrife family — the plant family Lythraceae, characterized by herbaceous plants, shrubs, and trees having usually opposite or whorled, simple leaves, clusters of flowers, and fruit in the form of a capsule, and including the crape myrtle, loosestrifes of the genus Lythrum, and the henna shrub.
  • loschmidt's number — the number of molecules in one cubic centimeter of an ideal gas at standard temperature and pressure, equal to 2.687 × 10 19.
  • low-start mortgage — a mortgage in which interest only is repaid for a fixed period at the outset, to make it more affordable
  • lower klamath lake — See under Klamath Lakes.
  • luminous emittance — luminous flux emitted per unit area.
  • luminous intensity — the luminous flux in lumens emitted per unit solid angle by a light source, measured in candles.
  • macroinvertebrates — Plural form of macroinvertebrate.
  • 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".
  • magistrate's court — a court having limited jurisdiction over minor civil and criminal matters, as matters of contract not exceeding a particular amount of money.
  • magistrates' court — law: handles minor crimes
  • magnetic induction — Also called magnetic flux density. a vector quantity used as a measure of a magnetic field. Symbol: B.
  • magnetic potential — a scalar quantity, analogous to the electric potential, defined at each point in a given magnetic field to be equal to the work done in bringing a unit north pole from infinity to the point.
  • magnetic recording — the process of recording sound or other data on magnetic tape, wire, etc.
  • magnetic resonance — the response by atoms, molecules, or nuclei subjected to a magnetic field to radio waves or other forms of energy: used in medicine for scanning
  • magnetic variation — variation (def 8).
  • magnetocrystalline — (physics) Describing the interaction between the magnetization and the crystal structure of a material.
  • magnetoelectricity — electricity developed by the action of magnets.
  • magnetogasdynamics — magnetohydrodynamics.
  • magnetorheological — (physics) describing a substance whose rheological properties are modified by a magnetic field.
  • major tranquilizer — antipsychotic (def 2).
  • make a meal of sth — If you think someone is taking more time and energy to do something than is necessary, you can say that they are making a meal of it.
  • make a night of it — to cause an activity to last a night
  • make a practice of — be in the habit of
  • make matters worse — If you say that something makes matters worse, you mean that it makes a difficult situation even more difficult.
  • make short work of — exertion or effort directed to produce or accomplish something; labor; toil.
  • make someone tired — to annoy or vex someone
  • make sth one's own — If you make something your own, you become involved in it in such a way that people think of it as being related only to you or belonging only to you, rather than to anyone else.
  • maksutov telescope — a reflecting telescope in which coma and spherical aberration are reduced to a minimum by a combination of a spherical mirror and a meniscus lens placed inside the radius of curvature of the mirror.
  • malignant melanoma — skin cancer
  • man-to-man defense — a method of defense in team sports, especially in basketball and football, in which each member of the defensive team is designated to guard a particular member of the offensive team.
  • man-to-man marking — the tactic of assigning a particular player to stay close to a specific member of the opposing team to hamper his or her play
  • management company — a company that manages a unit trust
  • mandelbrot, benoit — Benoit Mandelbrot
  • manufactured goods — products made by machine
  • margaret of valois — ("Queen Margot") 1533–1615, 1st wife of Henry IV of France: queen of Navarre; patron of science and literature (daughter of Henry II of France and Catherine de' Medici).
  • maritime provinces — region in Canada
  • market opportunity — a situation in which a company can meet an unsatisfied customer need before its competitors
  • marriage encounter — a meeting with a person or thing, especially a casual, unexpected, or brief meeting: Our running into each other was merely a chance encounter.
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