18-letter words starting with mag
- 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
- magnesium arsenate — a white, water-insoluble powder, Mg 3 (AsO 4) 2 ⋅xH 2 O, used chiefly as an insecticide.
- magnesium peroxide — a white, tasteless, water-insoluble powder, MgO 2 , used as an antiseptic and as an oxidizing and bleaching agent.
- magnesium silicate — a white powder, 3MgSiO 3 ⋅5H 2 O, with variable hydration, insoluble in water or alcohol, used as a rubber filler, a bleaching agent, an odor absorbent, and in the manufacture of paints and resins.
- magnesium stearate — Magnesium stearate is a salt that is often used as a diluent and lubricant in tablets and capsules.
- magnetic amplifier — an amplifier that applies the input signal to a primary winding and feeds an alternating current to a secondary winding where this current is modulated by the variations in the primary winding.
- 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 tape unit — a computer device that moves reels of magnetic tape past read-write heads so that data can be transferred to or from the computer
- 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.
On this page, we collect all 18-letter words starting with MAG. It’s easy to find right word with a certain length. It is the easiest way to find 18-letter word that beginning with MAG to use in Scrabble or Crossword puzzles.