Nacelle
A streamlined enclosure on an airplane, dirigible, or other aircraft, which is not part of the fuselage, and in which the engine is housed or in which cargo or passengers are carried. Possibly the most recognizable nacelles were the two parallel nacelles featured on the starship Enterprise in the Star Trek universe.
Nadsat
Fictional language created by Anthony Burgess for his 1962 A Clockwork Orange (novel).
Naiad
See Nymph.
Namor
On an expedition to Antarctica in 1920, Namor’s father, American seaman Leonard McKenzie, caused an avalanche. Making his way to safety, McKenzie set explosive charges to break up ice floes in his ship’s path, unaware that Atlantis lay beneath the waters. The submerged city sustained heavy damage, and Atlantean Emperor Thakorr commanded his daughter Fen to investigate the cause of the explosions. Startling McKenzie’s crew, the blue-skinned princess wound up staying aboard the ship for several weeks. Fen and McKenzie fell in love and were married. Thakorr, fearing his daughter had been kidnapped or killed, sent an Atlantean war party to search for her. Thinking her a captive, the Atlanteans slaughtered McKenzie’s crew, and apparently McKenzie himself. Afterwards, Fen returned with the war party to Atlantis. Nine months later, Namor was born, the first known Homo sapien/Homo mermanus hybrid.
The young prince maintained a hostile attitude toward surface-dwellers, whom he blamed for the near-destruction of Atlantis; however, when Nazi troops attacked Atlantis, however, Namor joined the Allied cause alongside Captain America and his fellow Invaders. Although most often opposed by the Fantastic Four, Namor developed an attraction to Susan Storm, the Invisible Girl (later Invisble Woman). Against the surface dwellers, Namor has teamed up with both Doctor Doom and Magneto, though both turned against him once they felt they had the upper hand. With the help of the Fantastic Four, Namor soon defeated both one-time partners. Namor was created in 1939 during the Golden Age of Comics by writer/artist Bill Everett for Motion Picture Funnies Weekly, but he would also appear in Marvel Comics #1, a comics publication line of Timely Comics. This title would prove to be prophetic, as Timely would evolve into Marvel Comics by 1961.
NAND flash memory
One of two types of non-volatile storage technologies (the other being “NOR”) used in memory cards that does not require power to retain data. An important goal of NAND (or “Not and”) flash development has been to reduce the cost per bit and increase maximum chip capacity to the extent that flash memory can compete with magnetic storage devices like hard disks. Introduced by Toshiba in 1989, NAND flash has found a market in devices to which large files are frequently uploaded and replaced: MP3 players, digital cameras and USB drives.
Nanotechnology
The science of building microscopic devices (such as robots) by manipulating materials on an atomic or molecular level.
Napaeae
See Nymph.
Napoleon Dynamite
An awkward small-town teen’s life is made even more uncomfortable when his strangely nostalgic uncle shows up to keep an eye on him. With no comfort zone at home or at school, he befriends a morose newcomer, and the two launch a campaign to elect the new kid in town class president. The 2004 cult classic starred Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez and Jon Gries.
Narcissus
In Greek mythology, the son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope was distinguished for his beauty. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book III, Narcissus’ mother was told by a blind seer that her son would have a long life, provided he was never made aware of his great beauty; however, upon seeing his own reflection in the waters of a spring, Narcissus fell in love and pined away (or killed himself). According to the tale, the flower that bears his name first sprang up on the spot where he died. Another viewpoint states that it is more likely that Narcissus had fallen in love with his identical twin sister, who had perished, and to console himself, sat gazing into the spring to recall her features until he himself perished. The tale of Narcissus may have been meant as a cautionary tale, derived from the ancient Greek superstition that it was unlucky or even fatal to see one’s own reflection. Narcissus was a very popular subject in Roman art. In Freudian psychiatry and psychoanalysis, the term narcissism denotes an excessive degree of self-esteem or self-involvement, a condition that is usually a form of emotional immaturity.
Naruto
In a fantasy world of ninjas and supernatural creatures, the hero of this popular manga series is a boy who has a wicked demon fox’s soul sealed inside him, and thus is shunned by almost everyone. Putting his life on the line to help another was the act that proved Naruto worthy of entering ninja school. He believes that becoming a great ninja may be the only way to get the people of the village to accept him and acknowledge the fact that he is a human being worthy of love and attention. In spite of the pain, hardships and losses that Naruto and the others face, their determination to become strong helps them learn more about themselves and each other, and prepares them for the many more difficult battles that lie ahead on the road to becoming the strongest ninja!
Nash, John
Widely regarded as one of the greatest problem solvers of the 20th Century, the award-winning mathematician and subject of the 2001 Best Picture A Beautiful Mind was born John Forbes Nash Jr. on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia. Nash was recognized as a prodigy at a very early age, who read voraciously, played chess and whistled entire Bach melodies. In high school, he demonstrated his own mathematical skill by independently proving a classic Fermat theorem. Nash enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, majoring in Chemical Engineering with the intention of becoming an engineer. However, he soon switched to Chemistry and then to Mathematics, the major in which he would receive his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both in 1948. Two years later, at age 22, he completed his doctorate program at Princeton University. Dr. Nash’s 27-page doctoral thesis, written when he was 21, provided a way of predicting the possible outcome of a game with multiple players, in which each was acting to maximize self-interest.
Nash took on a problem left unsolved by game theory pioneers John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in their 1944 publication Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, and while he was still in graduate school, Nash published his first paper, “The Bargaining Problem,” in the journal Econometrica in April 1950. He expanded on his mathematical model for bargaining in his influential doctoral thesis, “Non-Cooperative Games,” which appeared in the September 1951 edition of Annals of Mathematics. Nash thus established the mathematical principles of game theory, a branch of mathematics that examines the rivalries between competitors with mixed interests. Known as the Nash solution or the Nash equilibrium, his theory attempted to explain the dynamics of threat and action between competitors. Though his theory included recognized limitations, the Nash solution provided a conceptually simple but powerful mathematical tool for analyzing a range of competitive situations, and has since been widely applied by business strategists and legislative decision-makers.
In 1951, Dr. Nash worked as a consultant to the RAND Corporation and joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he continued to attack problems that no one else could solve, pursuing research into partial differential equations. On a dare, he developed an entirely original approach to a long-standing problem in differential geometry, showing that abstract geometric spaces called Riemannian manifolds could be compacted into arbitrarily small pieces of Euclidean space. Nash’s research led to his seminal paper “Real Algebraic Manifolds,” which was published in Annals of Mathematics in November 1952. Despite his triumphs, Nash resigned from MIT in the late 1950s after bouts of paranoid schizophrenia. In April 1959, he was committed to a psychiatric ward.
Nash received the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (which he shared with two economists, John C. Harsanyi of the University of California at Berkeley, and Reinhard Selten of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn, Germany) on mathematics of game theory, work which greatly extended the reach and power of modern economic theory.
Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 Nash biography A Beautiful Mind inspired the well-received Oscar-winning film. A more factually accurate exploration of Nash’s struggle with mental illness was presented in the 2002 public television documentary A Brilliant Madness.
In May 2015, Nash and his wife traveled to Norway so he could accept the Abel Prize (which he shared with Louis Nirenberg) for his contributions to the study of partial differential equations. After returning to the U.S., John and Alicia Nash were killed in a traffic accident on the New Jersey turnpike on May 23, 2015.
In Ron Howard’s film A Beautiful Mind, Nash was portrayed by Russell Crowe.
Natural selection
The process by which forms of life better able to adapt to a specific environment tend to survive in greater numbers than those less able to adapt.
Navicular bone
A boat-shaped bone located in the top inner side of the foot, positioned between the distal and proximal rows on the medial side, the navicular bone helps to connect the talus (anklebone) to the cuneiform bones of the foot.
Nazgûl
Derived from Black Speech nazg, meaning “ring,” and gûl, meaning “wraith or spirit” (presumably related to the word gul, meaning “sorcery”), the Nazgûl are characters in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Also called Ring-wraiths, Black Riders, Dark Riders, Sauron’s “most terrible servants,” the Nine Riders, or simply the Nine, the members of the Nazgûl were nine men who succumbed to Sauron’s power and attained near-immortality as wraiths and servants bound to the power of The One Ring.
Necronomicon
Also known as “The Book of The Black Earth” and “The Book of the Dead,” it is a history of the customs of the dead, and a central piece of horror/sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.
Brilliantly laid out to the point that it is still believed by some to be a real publication, The Necronomicon is said to be full of arcane and forbidden knowledge that could drive a person who reads it mad. In the Evil Dead films and Ash vs. Evil Dead series, the book is known as the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis.
Nelson, Mike
The second host of television’s Mystery Science Theater 3000, the cult-stoking comedy series that provided awful films with hilarious, sharp, high-speed “heckling” commentary. “MST3K,” as its fans know it, is the story of a sarcastic Earth dweller—played initially by series creator Joel Hodgson, but later portrayed by Nelson, the show’s head writer—who’s exiled to a ramshackle spaceship called the Satellite of Love, where he’s forced to watch an endless supply of some of the world’s most ridiculously bad movies. While the movie plays on screen, our hero is seen with his two robot companions as shadows in the “front row,” as they watch and unleash a torrent of one-liners, or “riffs,” at the laughably bad action before them. Hodgson left the show in the midst of the fifth season, and Nelson took over as the central host with the October 30, 1992 screening of the 1962 “horror” movie The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, and he stayed with the show until its final airing, heckling Diabolik before the Satellite of Love crash-landed back on Earth. The cancellation of MST3K didn’t end the fun, though. Along with the voices of the robot hosts, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, Nelson heckles more classic schlock films, as well as much more current blockbusters, on digital video disc (DVD) and synced MP3 tracks, under the name RiffTrax.
Nelson, Ted
Believed by some to be a computer and networking visionary while receiving widespread criticism for his concepts as being impractical, Theodor Holm Nelson is an American philosopher, scientist and internet pioneer. He got his B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1960. Afterward, he enrolled at Harvard for his graduate studies in Sociology. In the 1960s, Nelson presented a paper at the annual conference of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and coined the terms “hypertext,” “hypermedia,” “virtuality” and “populitism” for the text displayed on a computer screen or electronic device with references to other text documents that the user can access immediately. The concept is one of the basic ideas that evolved website hyperlinks. Nelson was also one of the cofounders of the itty bitty machine company (ibm), a small retail computer store operating between 1977 and 1980 that was one of the first companies to sell Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s Apple Inc. computers. He has been presented with a Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award and a knighthood by the French government called “Officier des Arts et Lettres” (The Order of Arts and Letters).
Neptune
See Poseidon.
Nerd
A colloquialism for an unstylish or socially inept person, or a person devoted to or single-minded about particular technical, intellectual or academic pursuits, as well as specific hobbies that certain social circles might find odd.
nerD
A visitor to the nerDictionary website; one who learns more about a nerDy topic by referring to the nerDictionary.
Nereid
See Nymph.
Nerf
Parker Brothers originally developed the 4″ soft-foam ball in 1969. Millions were sold by the end of 1970. In 1972, NERF got sports-minded with a basketball game called NERFoop and the NERF Football, followed in 1983 by NERF Baseball, and in 1989 by the Blast-A-Ball, an early single-shot precursor to later toys like the Ballzooka. NERF introduced its iconic Bow ‘n’ Arrow in 1991, with The Master Blaster and the Slingshot following close behind in 1992. The Ballzooka came out in 1994, and NERF started the NERF Dart World Championship in 2009, traveling to five cities across the U.S. setting up competitions. In 2013, NERF debuted its Rebelle line, a series of toys designed to appeal specifically to girls. In 2014, Zombie Strike line, which offers children and children-at-heart everywhere the opportunity to engage in some post-zombie apocalypse play, and the terrifying remote-controlled Attacknid walking spider-bots emerged as part of the NERF Combat Creatures line.
Netiquette
A set of etiquette rules specifically geared toward electronic and online communications. Since the internet changes rapidly, its netiquette does, too, but in general, the rules are always based on the Golden Rule.
Network administrator
A manager of an organization’s communications local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN). A network administrator’s typical responsibilities include the maintenance of network security, hardware and applications, software upgrades, daily activity, licensing agreements, storage management programs, and routine backups.
Neuman, Alfred E.
In 1954, MAD magazine artist Harvey Kurtzman plucked a postcard from a bulletin board in a colleague’s office that featured a young boy with a goofy, gap-toothed grin and the two-part rhetorical question, “What? Me Worry?” After several minor appearances in the magazine, Norman Mingo’s full-color re-imagining of the postcard image appeared on the cover of MAD #30 in December 1956, replete with the catchphrase, and Alfred’s career as trademark and cover boy for MAD was launched.
For years, legions of books, websites and online forums have debated and analyzed the origins of the image. The upshot of all the discussion was that Alfred E. Neuman is a copy of a copy of a copy of an image that bounced around for decades in various guises, including political buttons, silly postcards, ads for painless dentistry, and even Nazi propaganda posters. No one could identify a specific image that started it all, although some have suggested that the image evolved from a tradition of cartoonish and racist depictions of Irish immigrants from the mid- to late-19th Century America. For some time, the earliest known, fully Neuman-esque image has been of “The Kid,” a member of “A Pie Family,” who appeared in a print advertisement for Atmore’s Mince Meat and Genuine English Plum Pudding. The advertisement appeared in the New York edition of the Illustrated London News and McClure’s magazine in 1895. Then, an image emerged from the previous year. Long before he advertised pies and eventually became Alfred E. Neuman, the trademark face of MAD magazine, he was the face of The New Boy, a comic farce stage play and blockbuster hit of 1894.
Neural neutralizer
Invented by Dr. Simon Van Gelder in 2266, the device was designed to make a subject susceptible to suggestion, to aid in the rehabilitation of criminals. Unfortunately, the device was discovered to have severe detrimental effects if used without proper supervision and care. The neural neutralizer was featured in the original Star Trek series episode “Dagger of the Mind.” The episode originally aired during the show’s first season, on November 3, 1966.
Neutron
A subatomic particle contained in the nucleus of an atom (except for a hydrogen atom, which contains only one proton). It has no net electric charge, and a mass slightly greater than that of a proton. The first hint of neutrons’ existence came in 1930, when Walther Bothe and H. Becker found that applying alpha radiation to elements like lithium and boron caused a new form of radiation to be emitted. In 1932, James Chadwick proved that these results couldn’t be explained by gamma rays, and proposed, then verified, an alternate explanation: uncharged particles in the nucleus, approximately the same size as protons.
NeverEnding Story, The
In this 1984 Wolfgang Petersen-directed film, 10-year-old Bastian ducks into a bookstore to avoid bullies. The store owner shows him a book (which he “borrows” without consent) that features magical creatures and a fantasy land … but also describes himself as the savior of this world! As he reads, Bastian is pulled into the adventure as a central character. Starring Barret Oliver, Gerald McRaney and Noah Hathaway, the film’s screenplay by Wolfgang Petersen and Herman Weigel was based on Michael Ende’s novel. The popular film spawned one sequel, 1990’s The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter.
“New 52, The”
Launched in September 2011 as a sales boost strategy, DC Comics rebooted 52 titles, starting each back at Issue #1, with newly designed looks. The initiative was an effort to get people excited about comics, attracting new, current and old readers with easy jumping-on points in the new storylines. DC first released Justice League #1, written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Jim Lee. Both the Vertigo and Wildstorm universes were merged into the DC Universe, starting the whole universe anew. Many of DC’s properties were re-imagined or refreshed. Changes to current characters ranged from minor tweaks, to complete reboots. Due to sales being generally high on both the Batman and Green Lantern franchises prior to the initiative, much of those family of characters’ continuity remained the same; meanwhile, the new Teen Titans explores the first meeting of the team, effectively erasing the history of the previous modern day Teen Titans. Following the Convergence event, which saw different universes from DC’s multiverse brought together by Brainiac for a devastating experiment, the DC Comics line was narrowed down to 24 brand-new series and 25 existing ongoing titles beginning in June 2015.
New Gods
Long ago, before time was even measured, there existed a race of Old Gods, whose world was split apart in a fiery holocaust, unleashing a bright “godwave” of energy that swept across the universe. This godwave empowered the Olympian Gods and gave rise to latter-day human superheroes, as it seeded inhabitants of various worlds with the potential for near-omnipotent power. The winner of a Will Eisner Award, this DC Comics series by Jack Kirby debuted in 1971 and introduced a universe in which gods of epic proportions fight a never-ending war for power and control. Centered on the battle between the evil Darkseid and his rebellious anti-hero son Orion, this black-and-white book relates the story of a war between the Fourth World inhabitants of New Genesis and Apokolips (which mirror Heaven and Hell, respectively). The series was discontinued in 1978, during the infamous “DC Implosion,” which saw the end of many series.
Newsgroup
An internet-based discussion group that is focused on a particular topic. Newsgroup topics range from sports and investing to cars and teen problems. Users post messages to a news server, which sends the messages to a bunch of other participating servers. Then other users can access the newsgroup and read the postings. The groups can be either moderated, where a person or group decides which postings will become part of the discussion, or unmoderated, where everything posted is included in the discussion. To participate in a newsgroup, a user must subscribe to it. Nearly all newsgroups are found on Usenet, which is a collection of servers around the world.
Newspeak
The official language of the totalitarian state of Oceania in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The language had been “cleansed” of such concepts that were potentially threatening to the government, such as Freedom, Liberty, Love, Privacy and Democracy. Other words had been redefined to be misleading to the people: The Ministry of Truth was the state’s propaganda department, and The Ministry of Plenty controlled the sparse rationing of food and supplies.
NeXT, Inc.
After leaving Apple Inc. in 1985, Steve Jobs founded his second company, and its first product, the NeXT Computer, was unveiled in 1988. The NeXT combined powerful hardware and software based on the Motorola 68030 processor, and ran at an impressive 25 MHz. It was then coupled with the first built-in digital signal processor (DSP). NeXT’s system software was designed to rival the best offerings of both the Macintosh and the IBM PC: NeXT used the UNIX operating system and added its own graphical user interface (GUI), and was marketed as an alternative to Sun Microsystems. NeXT was also the first computer company to ship a built-in 256 MB magneto-optical storage medium. Boasting a high-resolution display, built-in Ethernet, CD-quality sound, and multimedia e-mail, the NeXT Computer was packaged in a stunning one-foot-by-one-foot black magnesium cube. In 1990, NeXT unveiled faster workstations that ran at 25 MHz on the Motorola 68040. Affectionately called “The Slab,” the NeXTstation had a black-and-white display, while the NeXTstation Color displayed 4,096 colors. An updated version of the NeXTcube offered a 32-bit true-color display.
In the spring of 1992, NeXT discontinued its optical disk, but introduced upgraded workstations, the NeXTstation Turbo and Turbo Color, which operated at 33 MHz. NeXT also began offering a color printer and a standard CD-ROM drive. Foreshadowing its exit from the hardware business, the company announced it had begun working on NeXTSTEP for Intel. NeXT stopped manufacturing hardware in 1993 to become a software-only vendor, selling NeXTSTEP as a combination operating system and object-oriented development environment. NeXTSTEP for Intel boasted rapidly developed and deployed custom software, and became a popular product among large companies, particularly financial institutions.
Apple Computer bought NeXT in 1996 after its own efforts to upgrade the Macintosh operating system failed. After the sale, Steve Jobs began working as an advisor, but was later appointed acting CEO, and then finally CEO of the company. The NeXT Cube workstation was used by Tim Berners-Lee at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or CERN) to create the first version of the internet, and the NeXT operating system, called NeXTSTEP, eventually became the Mac OS X.
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