The Church of Munger

People, when you share an office for 3 or 4 years with a person who can burp out the pledge of allegiance or the alphabet almost on demand, you become well acquainted with the eructatory arts.


So without further ado, I give you the Church of Munger!

How so? Well it is a nominally Catholic church in Chiapas Mexico that uses burping almost as a sacrament! It is sometimes called the coca-cola church.


Here's one account:

Chamulans believe that burping cleanses the body of evil spirits. And since the carbonation in soda makes you burp, well you get the picture. So inside this white, blue, and green exterior are walls lined with bottles of this drink for cleansing purposes.


and here's another:

It is not just spitting that Chamulan’s believe rid one of evil spirits but also burping. What I didn’t mention is that every ritual that we saw at the church involved Coca-Cola. Every group involved in ritual practice had glass bottles of Coke with them. Generally we saw people drink it in shot glasses, almost as if they were taking a medicine.


They are just waiting for their high priest, Rev. Mungowitz, to arrive.

Hat tip to the never burpy Mrs. Angus.

The Umpire Strikes Back

Some thoughts on Uber, and the California Labor Commission decision....

Excerpt:

In August of 2011, my Twitter pal @pmarca (Marc Andreessen) wrote an article that will still be discussed 10 years from now, maybe longer. The title was “Why Software is Eating the World.” What was important about that article is that it recognized, and spelled out pretty clearly, the destructive power of smart phones with software apps that provide services. 

Not employees, mind you. Software. “Eats the world” was Andreessen's way of describing the death of traditional ways of doing business. 

Of course, one of the key examples of software eating the world is Uber. The company claims that it is not a provider of taxi services, but rather a software platform that helps a willing buyer and a qualified, nearby seller to find each other. 

And Uber is exactly right about that: Uber is not an employer of drivers, and it is not a seller of transport services. Uber is selling reductions in transactions costs: I want a ride, and you have a car and a few minutes. We could never find each other on our own, but with Uber we can make a convenient, mutually beneficial exchange in safety and with minimal fuss on clearing the payment.

Going all Munger on your asses!

Thinking about the NSA, and HRC and the Ferguson police department, I was drawn to this quote from John Locke as posted by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

"The injury and the crime is equal, whether committed by the wearer of a crown, or some petty villain. The title of the offender, and the number of his followers, make no difference in the offence, unless it be to aggravate it. The only difference is, great robbers punish little ones, to keep them in their obedience; but the great ones are rewarded with laurels and triumphs, because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world, and have the power in their own possession, which should punish offenders. What is my remedy against a robber, that so broke into my house?"


and then to the old Mungerian chestnut from Edmond Burke:

In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse!

Damn Gubmint got me all crabby on a beautiful Saturday morning!

No Wonder Mungo was such a great chair

Interesting piece at VOX describing research done on how the citation history of a department head is correlated with changes in the publishing performance of the department down the road.

Here's the money shot:

My boy KG Mungowitz sits at around 5400 cites on Google Scholar.  I think Duke owes him some royalties or something.

Here's what the article says about some common departmental decision rules:

It is not unusual for senior administrators to select chairs who have either undergone a decline in research productivity or made fewer research-specific investments over their careers (McDowell, Singell, and Stater 2009, 2011). Our study suggests that this may be a mistake.

Hat tip to Mark Thoma