Are clothes the root of all evil?

How would today be different if humans rejected clothing and nudism prevailed?

Let's start by turning to Biblical scripture for help in answering the question. In Genesis, Adam and Eve ate an apple, i.e. fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, despite it being forbidden. (Blame the serpent.) Upon doing so, they felt shame at their nakedness, and covered themselves. In fact, that is how God immediately knew that Adam and Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.

naked = without wisdom gained from eating of Tree of Knowledge 




clothed = with wisdom gained from eating of Tree of Knowledge




evil = serpent

Adam and Eve each hold a golden apple.

Elisha of Ascoli's Ketubah: Mantua, Italy on 31 August 1629

Since this was a decoration for the upper right corner of a ketubah (a marriage certificate used mostly by Sephardic Jews from about 1400 to the 1950s), the Hebrew inscription (happily!) doesn't directly correspond with the image. 

This is how it is pleasantly described by the online source, The Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art at the Center for Jewish Art, Image ID 10661

A roundel, located in the top right corner of the outer border, features the naked Adam and Eve each with an outstretched hand, holding a golden apple. The Tree of Knowledge with golden fruits and the serpent coiled around its trunk stands on the left. A Hebrew inscription encircles the scene: יבורכו חתן וכלה כברך ה' אדם וחוה, "May the groom and bride be blessed as the lord blessed Adam and Eve".

Putting it all together, being unclothed is ignorant. Wearing clothing is wise, despite being associated with disobeying the command of God. Forces of evil were the impetus for mankind to go to a clothed state. Clothing was not the root of evil, but merely a manifestation of knowledge, thus clothes are not the root of all evil.

Many happy returns!

This is birthday girl

Deluxe version

Large, somewhat grainy animated GIF with music 

Днем Рождения! Happy Birthday! 

Low bandwidth silent version

Demise of the Navajo Generating Station

Here's the Quora question: How can California go completely to electric cars when we already experience brown-outs and other rolling blackouts due to not having enough electricity?

This answer by Quora user Edw says it all.

California is decommissioning its nuclear plants. Wind and solar won't be able to take up the slack so it will have to buy power from nuclear and coal plants in neighboring states.

That might not be as easy as it once was. More on that in a moment. I upvoted the answer and left a comment of agreement.

Yes, you are correct. California has been sucking all the electricity from Hoover Dam for decades. The Colorado River and Hoover Dam are on the border between Arizona (where I live) and Nevada. Yet my state only gets 10% of the electricity generated by the hydroelectric power from Hoover Dam. Nevada gets about the same. California takes over 50%.

There's more. Californian insanity has spread like a contagion to states north and east of California, and now they are decommissioning their nuclear power and coal plants too!

Let me tell you about another victim, not a nuclear plant, but important nonetheless

The Navajo Generating Station

The Navajo Nation operated a coal power plant on reservation land for DECADES. They were forced to shut it down in 2019. Green liberal Democrats and Republican renewable energy business didn’t care that the Navajo Generating Station had kept the reservation energy-independent. It is a tragedy how 700 Navajo people lost their good jobs, that were right there, on the reservation in northeast Arizona. The generating station produced more energy than needed locally, so the extra was sold through interties to the electric power grid. AND the coal was mined locally!

The Navajo nation protested regulatory demands for plant closure, instigated by California, to no avail. Although it was located on supposedly sovereign native American land, The State shut down their power plant. There is nothing to replace it. 

Google Maps retrospective

I was curious, and had a look at what Google Maps reviews had to say about the Navajo Generating Station, which was run with assistance from a Maricopa County public utility, the Salt River Project. I reproduced some of the reviews here. 

Wind and solar will never replace nuclear and coal, despite what John Kerry and other attendees at COP say. This first review describes solar only advocates as ignorami.

This guy HATED the Navajo Generating Station, as it detracted from his Lake Powell experience, OMG!

Why is working in pairs so rare at work?

I agree that on-the-job working in pairs is rare. There are some exceptions such as pair programming and law enforcement (police work in pairs usually) but not many others!

Why are pairs so rare?

I attribute it to the fact that some supervisors and project managers either:

1. don’t know what is technically involved in enough detail to think of a way to allocate work to teams of two. When they do, it usually isn’t two workers who are peers. Instead, one is experienced and the other is less so or maybe new to the company or project, and mostly “shadows” the experienced person. It is more like one person working, and the other person watching and learning!
2. are concerned that two people who are peers—and should contribute equally—will not. One person will do most or all of the work. Why does this happen, and why doesn’t the one who contributes say something about it to management or the team leader? Lots of reasons, some of which I couldn’t ever figure out! Even when I suspected this was going on, it wasn’t possible to prove without the cooperation of the person who was doing the bulk of the work.

People can work in pairs most effectively when there are not multiple dependencies in the workflow/ timing. For example, one person might write the code to do some analysis, after or maybe simultaneously with the other person who looks for a data source then tests/confirms its adequacy (e.g. quality, frequency, time span, availability/cost, has a data dictionary) for the analysis. Yet even this scenario is more accurately described as two people working on two different parts of a project (or assignment, or experiment) rather than working as a pair.

An eponymous example

The only example that quickly comes to my mind is pairs programming. I did that at work, briefly. It was fascinating and revealing!