Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

USPS Dog Attacks Per Capita
Neanderthal’s Last Stand
Day Trading for Canadian Dummies
Government Spending and GDP

Posted: 13 May 2011 10:57 PM PDT

Purely as an over-long-conference-call lark, I analyzed some new USPS dog attack data to come up with the top U.S. cities, per capita, in terms of dog attacks on postal delivery people. What’s up with St. Louis?

Dog attacks

Neanderthal’s Last Stand

Posted: 13 May 2011 10:45 PM PDT

There have been so many interesting developments in the last year in our understanding of Neanderthals, from breeding, to origins, to range. Here is the summary of some new work on their possible “last stand”:

The Ural Mountains site “may be one of the last [refuges] of the Neanderthals, and that would be very exciting,” said study leader Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at France’s Université de Toulouse le Mirail.

Neanderthals dominated Europe for some 200,000 years until modern humans began moving into the region about 45,000 years ago. The two human species likely shared space for a while, but it’s a mystery what happened during that period, how long it lasted, and why Homo sapiens prevailed in the end.

Previous archaeological evidence had placed the last known Neanderthal refuges on the Iberian Peninsula, home to current-day Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar. (See “Neanderthals” Last Stand Was in Gibraltar, Study Suggests.”)

“Not surprisingly, it was in the peripheral areas”—Iberia and perhaps northwestern Europe—”that Neanderthals remained the longest as discrete populations,” said Neanderthal expert Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who wasn’t part of the new study.

Day Trading for Canadian Dummies

Posted: 13 May 2011 06:41 PM PDT

Alright, I’ll admit I just found this book cover I ran across today amusing.

Day trading

Government Spending and GDP

Posted: 13 May 2011 06:39 PM PDT

While U.S. government spending as a percentage of GDP has risen dramatically in recent years, it isn’t as high as it has been. I made that point to someone today who had been arguing that the ratio was at unprecedented levels, and that the government had squeezed out the private sector, etc.

I finally had to pull out the following FRED graph. It shows that we’re back to the mid-point of recent history in that ratio, and below most of the period before 1985.That shouldn’t be surprising given the post-2000 U.S. wars, and then the expansion of social programs after TWDSTGD (The Worst Downturn Since The Great Depression), but it does seem to cloud people’s minds (sic.).