21-letter words containing s, o, c, i, e, 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.
- 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
- 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
- cottony-cushion scale — a small scale insect, Icerya purchasi, that is a pest of citrus trees in California: it is controlled by introducing an Australian ladybird, Rodolia cardinalis, into affected areas
- counsel of perfection — excellent but unrealizable advice
- count of monte cristo — a novel (1844–45) by Alexandre Dumas père.
- counterdemonstrations — Plural form of counterdemonstration.
- 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
- crittenden compromise — a series of constitutional amendments proposed in Congress in 1860 to serve as a compromise between proslavery and antislavery factions, one of which would have permitted slavery in the territories south but not north of latitude 36°30′N.
- crool someone's pitch — to spoil an opportunity for someone
- 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.
- de-ontological ethics — the branch of ethics dealing with right action and the nature of duty, without regard to the goodness or value of motives or the desirability of the ends of any act.
- 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.
- deployment descriptor — (programming) (DD) A J2EE configuration file.
- deprovincialization's — to make provincial in character.
- diffusion coefficient — the rate at which a diffusing substance is transported between opposite faces of a unit cube of a system when there is unit concentration difference between them
- discretionary account — an account in which the stockbroker is allowed complete control over the purchase and sale of securities on the customer's behalf.
- disruptive technology — A disruptive technology is a new technology, such as computers and the Internet, which has a rapid and major effect on technologies that existed before.
- distinctiveness ratio — the ratio of the relative frequency of some event in a given sample to that in the general population or another relevant sample
- duccio di buoninsegna — c1255–1319? Italian painter.
- eccles-jordan circuit — flip-flop
- ecological succession — succession (def 6).
- ecological-succession — the coming of one person or thing after another in order, sequence, or in the course of events: many troubles in succession.
- educational sociology — the application of sociological principles and methods to the solution of problems in an educational system.
- 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
- electronic publishing — Electronic publishing is the publishing of documents in a form that can be read on a computer, for example as a CD-ROM.
- 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
- exposure compensation — the act of overriding a camera's automatic exposure in order to achieve a particular effect or due to difficult lighting conditions
- food conversion ratio — a ratio expressing the weight of food required to produce a unit gain in the live weight of an animal
- foreground processing — a type of processing that supports interaction between interactive and batch operations
- foreign correspondent — a correspondent, as for a periodical, assigned to send back articles and news dispatches from a foreign country for publication.
- 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.
- 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
- gas analysis recorder — A gas analysis recorder is a device which samples, records, and analyses gas.
- gastrohepatic omentum — lesser omentum.
- geometric progression — a sequence of terms in which the ratio between any two successive terms is the same, as the progression 1, 3, 9, 27, 81 or 144, 12, 1, 1/12, 1/144.
- get on someone's wick — to cause irritation to a person
- give place to someone — to make room for or be superseded by someone
- gobject introspection — (programming) A GNOME project that defines a syntax for introspection annotation pragmas to be used in the GObject library source code. Rather than actual introspection, these are intended to allow automatic generation of bindings (APIs) to expose the library to higher-level languages. The sort of information provided is the type and direction (in, out, inout) of function parameters and the responsibility for freeing memory used by data structures.