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🔗 Medicine

The choking game (also known as the fainting game and a wide variety of slang terms) refers to intentionally cutting off oxygen to the brain with the goal of inducing temporary loss of consciousness and euphoria.

🔗 Department of Fun

The Terminal Event Management Policy (TEMP) is a Wikipedia policy detailing the procedures to be followed to safeguard the content of the encyclopedia in the event of a non-localized event that would render the continuation of Wikipedia in its current form untenable.

The policy is designed to facilitate the preservation of the encyclopedia by a transition to non-electronic media in an orderly, time-sensitive manner or, if events dictate otherwise, the preservation of the encyclopedia by other means. Editors are asked to familiarize themselves with the procedures and in the unlikely event that the implementation of these procedures proves necessary, act in accordance with the procedural guidelines, inasmuch as circumstances allow.

🔗 Law

In contract law, a non-compete clause (often NCC), or covenant not to compete (CNC), is a clause under which one party (usually an employee) agrees not to enter into or start a similar profession or trade in competition against another party (usually the employer). Some courts refer to these as "restrictive covenants". As a contract provision, a CNC is bound by traditional contract requirements including the consideration doctrine.

The use of such clauses is premised on the possibility that upon their termination or resignation, an employee might begin working for a competitor or start a business, and gain competitive advantage by exploiting confidential information about their former employer's operations or trade secrets, or sensitive information such as customer/client lists, business practices, upcoming products, and marketing plans.

However, an over-broad CNC may prevent an employee from working elsewhere at all. English common law originally held any such constraint to be unenforceable under the public policy doctrine. Contemporary case law permits exceptions, but generally will only enforce CNCs to the extent necessary to protect the employer. Most jurisdictions in which such contracts have been examined by the courts have deemed CNCs to be legally binding so long as the clause contains reasonable limitations as to the geographical area and time period in which an employee of a company may not compete.

The extent to which non-compete clauses are legally allowed varies per jurisdiction. For example, the state of California in the United States invalidates non-compete-clauses for all but equity stakeholders in the sale of business interests.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Canada 🔗 LGBT studies 🔗 Law Enforcement 🔗 Discrimination

"Fruit machine" is a term for a device developed in Canada by Frank Robert Wake that was supposed to be able to identify gay men (derogatorily referred to as "fruits"). The subjects were made to view pornography; the device then measured the diameter of the pupils of the eyes (pupillary response test), perspiration, and pulse for a supposed erotic response.

The "fruit machine" was employed in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s during a campaign to eliminate all gay men from the civil service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the military. A substantial number of workers did lose their jobs. Although funding for the "fruit machine" project was cut off in the late 1960s, the investigations continued, and the RCMP collected files on over 9,000 "suspected" gay people.

The chair employed resembled that used by dentists. It had a pulley with a camera going towards the pupils, with a black box located in front of it that displayed pictures. The pictures ranged from the mundane to sexually explicit photos of men and women. It had previously been determined that the pupils would dilate in relation to the amount of interest in the picture per the technique termed 'the pupillary response test'.

People were first led to believe that the machine's purpose was to rate stress. After knowledge of its real purpose became widespread, few people volunteered for it.

🔗 Business 🔗 Automobiles

The Toyota Way is a set of principles and behaviors that underlie the Toyota Motor Corporation's managerial approach and production system. Toyota first summed up its philosophy, values and manufacturing ideals in 2001, calling it "The Toyota Way 2001". It consists of principles in two key areas: continuous improvement, and respect for people.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Plants

Ensete ventricosum, commonly known as enset or ensete, Ethiopian banana, Abyssinian banana, and false banana, is an herbaceous species of flowering plant in the banana family Musaceae. The domesticated form of the plant is only cultivated in Ethiopia, where it provides the staple food for approximately 20 million people. The name Ensete ventricosum was first published in 1948 in the Kew Bulletin, 1947, p. 101. Its synonyms include Musa arnoldiana De Wild., Musa ventricosa Welw. and Musa ensete J.F.Gmel. In its wild form, it is native to the eastern edge of the Great African Plateau, extending northwards from South Africa through Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania to Ethiopia, and west to the Congo, being found in high rainfall forests on mountains, and along forested ravines and streams.

🔗 Urban studies and planning

The Lewis–Mogridge position, named after David Lewis and Martin J. H. Mogridge, was formulated in 1990 and observes that as more roads are built, more traffic consequently fills these roads. Speed gains from some new roads can disappear within months, if not weeks. Sometimes, new roads help to reduce traffic jams, but in most cases, the congestion is only shifted to another junction.

The position reads traffic expands to meet the available road space (Mogridge, 1990). It is generally referred to as induced demand in the transport literature, and was posited as the "Iron Law of Congestion" by Anthony Downs. It is a special case of Jevons paradox (where the resource in question is traffic capacity), and relates to the Marchetti's constant (average commute times are similar in widely varying conditions).

Following the position, it is not generally concluded that new roads are never justified but that their development needs to consider the whole traffic system, which means understanding the movement of goods and people in detail as well as the motivation behind the movement.

The position is often used to understand problems caused by private transport such as congested roads in cities and on motorways. It can also be used to explain the success of schemes such as the London congestion charge.

The position, however, is not confined to private transport. Mogridge, a British transport researcher, concluded also that all road investment in a congested urban area will have the effect of reducing the average speed of the transport system as a whole: road and public transport. The relationship and overall equilibria are also known as the "Downs–Thomson paradox". However, according to Downs, the link between average speeds on public transport and private transport applies only "to regions in which the vast majority of peak-hour commuting is done on rapid transit systems with separate rights of way. Central London is an example, since in 2001 around 85 percent of all morning peak-period commuters into that area used public transit (including 77 percent on separate rights of way) and only 11 percent used private cars. When peak-hour travel equilibrium has been reached between the subway system and the major commuting roads, then the travel time required for any given trip is roughly equal on both modes."

🔗 Television 🔗 Korea 🔗 Fashion 🔗 Korea/North Korea

Let's trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle (alternatively translated as Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle) is a television program that was part of a North Korean government propaganda campaign promulgating grooming and dress standards in 2004–2005.

It was broadcast on state-run Korean Central Television in the capital of Pyongyang and clips from the program were later rebroadcast on the British channel BBC One. The program claimed that hair length can affect human intelligence, in part because of the deprivation to the rest of the body of nutrients required for hair to grow. However, although some researchers have proposed that brain and hair are in competition from an evolutionary standpoint, cutting hair has no influence on its rate of growth. It was part of a longstanding North Korean government restriction campaign against haircuts and fashions deemed at odds with "Socialist values".

🔗 Color

YInMn Blue (for yttrium, indium, manganese), also known as Oregon Blue, Mas Blue, or Yin Min Blue, is an inorganic blue pigment that was discovered accidentally by Professor Mas Subramanian and his then-graduate student Andrew E. Smith at Oregon State University in 2009. It is the first inorganic blue pigment discovered in 200 years, since cobalt blue was identified in 1802.

The compound has a unique trigonal bipyramidal structure, and further research has discovered it may be modified to create green, purple, and orange pigments.