Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
| Domain | Definitions |
Computing | Phase of the moon n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See also heisenbug. True story: Once upon a time there was a program bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon! The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter `corrected' it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug. However, beware of assumptions. A few years ago, engineers of CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) were baffled by some errors in experiments conducted with the LEP particle accelerator. As the formidable amount of data generated by such devices is heavily processed by computers before being seen by humans, many people suggested the software was somehow sensitive to the phase of the moon. A few desperate engineers discovered the truth; the error turned out to be the result of a tiny change in the geometry of the 27km circumference ring, physically caused by the deformation of the Earth by the passage of the Moon! This story has entered physics folklore as a Newtonian vengeance on particle physics and as an example of the relevance of the simplest and oldest physical laws to the most modern science. Source: Jargon File. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
Crosswords: Phase Of The Moon |
| English words defined with "phase of the moon": full phase of the moon ♦ new phase of the moon ♦ phase. (references) |
| Specialty definitions using "phase of the moon": age of the moon ♦ magnetic lunar daily variation ♦ sunspots. (references) |
| Domain | Usage | |
Movie/TV Titles | Fifteenth Phase of the Moon (1992) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
| Domain | Title |
Music |
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Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
Expressions using "phase of the moon": full phase of the moon ♦ new phase of the moon. Additional references. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. |
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Expression | Frequency per Day |
chart of phase of the moon | 25 |
info on the phase of the moon | 2 |
waxing phase of the moon | 2 |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Language | Translations for "phase of the moon"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | ||||
Japanese Kanji | 月相 . (various references) | ||||
Japanese Katakana | げっそう. (various references) | ||||
Pig Latin | asephay ofay ethay oonmay | ||||
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "a-e-e-f-h-h-m-n-o-o-o-p-s-t" | |
-4 letters: homeopaths, homophones. | |
-5 letters: ethephons, homeopath, homophone, pahoehoes. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)50 68 61 73 65 4F 66 54 68 65 4D 6F 6F 6E |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)
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Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)01010000 01101000 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01001111 01100110 00100000 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01001101 01101111 01101111 01101110 |
HTML Code (1990) (references)P h a s e   O f   T h e   M o o n |
ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)0050 0068 0061 0073 0065 004F 0066 0054 0068 0065 004D 006F 006F 006E |
Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)5074678571249722547471247818180 |
| Amazon.com BOOKS: Search for: "phase of the moon" |
