From: What We Now Know [wwnk@publishers-mgmt.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 12:48 PM
To: gkuever@tweaks.org
Subject: What We Now Know, week of September 27, 2005
What We Now Know

Week of 9/27/05

IN THIS ISSUE

Science of Cold Heats Up
Trust in Bottles
A Flat-Out Success
Reader Feedback

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Science of Cold Heats Up

by Brian Wowk, PhD

Half a century ago, it was discovered that single cells could survive freezing if protected by a glycerol solution. Although there have been isolated successes in freezing tissue and even some organs such as intestines and ovaries, generally success at freezing organs has been elusive. While it’s commonly believed that freezing causes cells to burst, this is an urban myth. Slow cooling actually causes ice to grow between cells, and this ice disrupts delicate cell-to-cell connections necessary for survival of organized tissue.

In the early 1980s, Dr. Gregory Fahy suggested a new approach to low-temperature preservation while working at the American Red Cross. Instead of freezing during cooling, special chemicals would make the water inside tissue become thicker and thicker until at temperatures below -120ºC, it becomes an unchanging glassy solid. This technology is called “vitrification”, which means to become glass.

Today Dr. Fahy works as Chief Scientific Officer at a company called 21st Century Medicine, where the vitrification approach is beginning to bear fruit. Last year, he published a paper in the journal Cryobiology, reporting routine recovery of rabbit kidneys after cooling them to -45ºC (-50ºF) using vitrification chemicals to prevent freezing. At the 2005 meeting of the Society for Cryobiology held in Minneapolis in July, he also reported long-term survival of a transplanted kidney cooled all the way to -135ºC (-211ºF) and back. Banking of human organs at those temperatures could revolutionize the field of transplantation.

Vitrification was initially plagued by problems of chemical toxicity and an associated need for high cooling rates. However, within the last decade new preservation solutions have been devised for vitrification that are much less toxic and more effective at preventing ice formation at slow cooling rates. A growing variety of tissues can now be reversibly vitrified—including pancreatic islets, ovarian tissue, skin, vascular grafts, and now kidneys.

One organ that doesn’t get much attention in cryobiology is the brain. Partially successful brain freezing experiments were first reported in a 1966 issue of Nature by Isamu Suda. Follow-up work demonstrated weak recovery of brain electrical activity from a cat even after seven years of frozen storage. Experiments such as these helped motivate the nascent field of cryonics—the practice of freezing terminally ill people after the heart stops in hope of future resuscitation.

Cryonicists argue that adequate brain preservation is the minimum requirement for cryonics to work since all other tissues can theoretically be regenerated around the brain with sufficiently advanced control over growth and development. Until relatively recently, direct evidence of good brain preservation in cryonics was lacking. The first study showing good structural preservation of brain tissue using contemporary cryonics methods was privately published by Mike Darwin and collaborators in 1995.

In 2004, the cryonics organization Alcor Life Extension Foundation published a paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, showing for the first time that a whole brain could be vitrified. Their brain results were obtained using the same chemical solution, called M22, that 21st Century Medicine used in their kidney preservation experiments. Unlike Suda’s experiments, no functional measurements were made. However, excellent preservation of brain cell structure without ice damage was documented after rewarming.

Currently, large animals can be held in “suspended animation” near 0ºC (+32ºF) for up to five hours and still recover. Reversible brain preservation at very low temperatures is a necessary first step to extend this time indefinitely. Demonstrated structural preservation of the brain by vitrification is promising, but much work remains to be done.

In the meantime, cryonicists look toward advanced nanotechnology for repairing cellular and biochemical damage that still happens with today’s preservation technology. Nanotechnology expert Ralph Merkle has argued that cryonics is at worst a cryptography problem that involves inferring and restoring a healthy tissue state based on detailed analysis of preserved injured tissue. This only becomes impossible when so much information is lost due to injury that “information-theoretic death” has occurred, and there is inadequate information to restore the original patient. This perspective suggests that almost everyone declared dead today doesn’t really die until several hours later.

In August, Alcor announced that they will begin using M22 vitrification solution to attempt to vitrify all their cryonics cases. Although the procedure is still far from reversible, it appears that M22 will preserve more cell structure and biochemistry than previously possible. Under ideal circumstances, the process can be started within the first 4 to 6 minutes after the heart stops, allowing the brain to remain viable by contemporary criteria during the early stages of the procedure.

Alcor members typically arrange for cryonics through life insurance. More information is available on the Alcor Foundation website http://www.alcor.org.

Dr. Brian Wowk is a Senior Scientist at 21st Century Medicine, Inc., in Rancho Cucamonga, California (http://www.21cm.com). He was originally trained as a medical physicist, but has spent most of the last decade working on chemical and engineering problems of transplantable tissue preservation. He has been a close observer of the controversial field of cryonics for two decades.

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Brian Wowk is another of the fascinating speakers at the 2005 Eris Conference—together with other scientific visionaries like Aubrey de Grey, the “Prophet of Immortality,” aviation pioneer Paul MacCready, and robotics expert Robert Doornick… with luminaries like well-known Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas)… and oddballs like Art Goodtimes, first and only Green county commissioner in the Inner Basin West, professed poet, political activist, and organizer of the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival.

The wealth of ingenious ideas and creative thoughts accumulating at the annual conference of Doug Casey’s Eris Society—now in its 25th year—is second to none. And today, for the first time ever, you can hear what these outstanding freethinkers have to say.

Click here to learn more.

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Trust in Bottles

What kind of investor are you – the happy-go-lucky, trusting type, or the guarded, overly suspicious kind? Your answer may have to do less with your upbringing or personal investment philosophy than with your chemical makeup.

Swiss researchers from the University of Zurich have recently found the substance of gullibility: Oxytocin, a hormone that is known to induce labor in pregnant women, that makes cows give more milk, and whose levels peak during orgasm. In fact, sex therapists often warn their clients not to hop into bed too quickly with a new flame because the generated oxytocin can render them blind to their lover’s potential character flaws.

In the study, 200 male university students were asked to use an oxytocin-containing nasal spray (half of the group received a placebo). Afterwards, the group was divided into “investors” and “trustees” and the former were being handed 12 “monetary units” to invest.

“Investors were given the option of placing none, one-third, two-thirds or all of their money with the trustee, who promised to share whatever returns resulted,” the Canadian Globe and Mail described the test “Nearly half (45 per cent) of the oxytocin group forked over all of t= heir money, compared with only one-fifth (21 per cent) of the placebo group.”

The trustees’ trustworthiness, however, was not affected by the oxytocin. After the “investments” were tripled and the trustees given free reign to distribute gains as they saw fit, cheating the investors out of their fair share occurred as often in the oxytocin as in the placebo group.

To make sure it was really trust and not merely a willingness to take higher risks that was influenced by the hormone, the scientists removed the human element and let the investors make their speculations per computer. Here, both the oxytocin and the placebo group fared equally well.

As funny as it sounds, these results could open up a possibility for chilling Orwellian scenarios, say prominent experts like Dr. Michael Kosfeld, leader of the research team. While oxytocin may have a positive impact on certain mental and social disorders, it could also “be misused to induce trusting behaviors that selfish actors subsequently exploit.”

For example, said University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio in Nature, “some may worry about the prospect that political operators will generously spray the crowd with oxytocin at rallies of their candidates.

"The scenario may be rather too close to reality for comfort, but those with such fear should note that current marketing techniques… may well exert their effects through the natural release of molecules such as oxytocin in response to well-crafted stimuli."

So the next time you suddenly feel complete faith in someone you don’t know very well, look out for the mini-spray bottle in their hands.

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A Flat-Out Success

In America, the flat tax is a joke. So much so that an obscure TV journalist named Bernard Goldberg could launch a best-selling book career with Bias, in which the centerpiece story (told and re-told) is about how one of his CBS colleagues poked some on-air fun at Steve Forbes, the last serious presidential candidate to make a flat tax part of his platform.

In Estonia, however, Goldberg would probably have to find a different second career.

It’s likely that most Americans couldn’t locate Estonia—one of the former Soviet Baltic satellites—on a map. Yet what happened there has caught the attention of Europe and is beginning to pique a little interest here as well.

Estonia, when it finally cast off its Soviet chains, was as impoverished as any of the Republics. That was fourteen years ago, when the people elected Mart Laar as their prime minister. Laar was only 32, a scraggly-bearded history teacher who dressed in T-shirts and black chinos and loved to listen to Guns ’n Roses.

From the beginning, Laar thought outside the box—in part because he was unencumbered by previous political experience, in part because he’d only read a single book on economics in his life, and in part because he was young and idealistic in the first heady days of freedom. Today he’s considered a prophet, and is consulted by politicians and economists from countries around the world. Excluding ours.

Under Laar’s leadership, Estonia enacted a 26% flat tax on income in 1994. No loopholes, no exemptions. It also instituted 0% inheritance taxes and, to encourage reinvestment, no tax on corporate profits until they are distributed as dividends.

Last April—as Laar celebrated the 25th anniversary of Solidarity with Lech Walesa, and met with Cuban opposition leaders to plot out how to change their country after Fidel passes—he recalled the resistance he faced: “Most experts advised against it, and said it was a stupid idea. My finance minister said don’t do it, the IMF said don’t do it. But it’s not very easy to convince a young person that he is wrong and I was that type of young person. So I did it.”

Estonia was quite fortunate he was that type of young person. Inflation, then running at 1,000% per year, dropped to 2.5%. Unemployment plunged from 30% to 6%. As a flood of foreign investment buoyed the economy, growth reached double digits in 1997. Even after the worldwide slump of 2000, it leveled off at 6% per year.

Laar is a bit bemused by his canonization as the father of the flat tax. “My main ‘problem’ was I was not an economist but a historian,” he says.

That one economics text he had read? Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose. After reading it, he just assumed it represented mainstream Western thought, and that Friedman’s theories were standard practice. He hardly expected to be hailed as a pioneer. It was just that “a flat tax seemed to be very logical and very fair,” he says. “I didn’t have the smallest clue I would be the first.”

Laar explains the logic and simplicity of his system: “The same rate of tax for everybody, or no rate at all. There is a minimum level at which it kicks in. There’s no point wasting state money collecting tax from the very poor… [and] rich people are paying significantly more tax even with the same percentage… It is [also] very efficient in destroying the black market, [being] very easy to collect and control.” Overall, “In a highly progressive tax system there is no incentive to work: the harder you work, the sooner you get to the next, higher tax level. A flat tax generates more growth and therefore more revenue for the government.”

The results seem to bear him out. General government revenues, 39.4% of GDP in 1993, were 39.6% in 2002. This has been sufficient to allow the tax to be lowered to 23%, with a further cut to 20% scheduled for next year.

Estonia’s neighboring Republics, Latvia (25%) and Lithuania (33%), established their own flat taxes by 1995, and by 2005 most of eastern Europe had fallen in line, as Russia (13%), Serbia (14%), Ukraine (13%), Georgia (12%), and Romania (16%) followed suit. Slovakia went to a 19% flat rate in 2004 and, counter to the Estonian model, decided to encourage savings by taxing corporate profits (at the same 19%) but not dividends.

Russia’s experience may be the most instructive. At the turn of the century, the government was bankrupt and had to do something. Its radical reorganization included a 2001 overhaul that consolidated 12%, 20% and 30% progressive tax bands into one 13% flat tax. The following year, there was a general economic rebound that saw a healthy 12% growth in wages. Yet government revenues jumped more than twice as much, by 26% (they went on to double by 2005).

Why the disparity? Laar and other flat-tax advocates would say that disincentives to work had been removed. Maybe. But a study authored by Anna Ivanova and Michael Keen of the IMF, along with Alexander Klemm of London’s Institute of Fiscal Studies, argues otherwise. These economists found little evidence that Russians were working harder, which is unsurprising since those who had previously inhabited the 12% bracket were actually paying more in taxes. What they did find is that the former members of the two higher brackets reported 68% of their income in 2001, under the flat tax, vs. only 52% the year before.

This suggests that the flat tax’s primary attraction might be that it simplifies, something to keep in mind when considering the situation in the U.S. In a typical year, the IRS estimates that for every dollar it collects, about 20 cents is owed but not paid. The Economist addressed that issue in a recent article: “In part, the tax system is burdensome because people dodge it. Every loophole that is exploited must be plugged. Every blurry line that is crossed must be sharpened. But Messrs [Jeffrey] Owens and [Stuart] Hamilton [of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] worry that the tax-codifiers and the tax-dodgers are locked in a mutually destructive ‘arms race’. The code is made more complex, because of tax wheezes. More people then seek to avoid taxes. The best way to fight tax avoidance, then, is with simplicity.”

As the highly taxed citizens of Western Europe grow increasingly restive, their systems have come under examination as well. Because it’s such an explosive issue in a union of welfare states, the flat tax is probably not coming anytime soon. Nevertheless, France and Spain are reducing the number of brackets and lowering their top rates; Greece is poised to adopt similar changes; Britain’s Conservative Party has a commission studying flat taxation; and Angela Merkel, vying to become Germany’s next chancellor, has a flat-tax advocate as one of her top economic advisors.

The bottom line isn’t fairness, it’s competitiveness, says Paul Mylonas, chief economist at the National Bank of Greece. “Our neighboring countries are reducing taxes, which provides them with a more attractive business climate.”

Not everyone is sold on the idea, of course. Critics question how much of Estonia’s robust revenues are due to the flat tax, since it still levies an 18% VAT on most sales, and collects a hefty social security/pension/health insurance tax. Each of these contributes more to general revenues than the income tax.

But such criticisms don’t attack the fundamentals. Almost no one—short of those philosophically wedded to soak-the-rich progressive taxation—is suggesting that a flat income tax would be worse than one that relies on more than 60,000 pages of code (up 50% in just the past ten years) and a vast, universally despised enforcement bureaucracy. The IRS now has 115,000 employees, more than EPA, OSHA, FBI, DEA, FDA, and BATF combined. It seems tax reform is clearly something that should be put to a full debate here at home.

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Reader Feedback

Let’s start with a passionate response to last week’s article “Jesus Saves, But Americans Don’t” from Ron G.:

I think you're way off the mark regarding the US savings rate. Firstly, most people begin to seriously save in their 50's; the majority of savings are generated from this group. This group for the first time in recorded history will have an incredible transfer of wealth from their WWII generation parents... and for most it will be tax free! This generation also has 401Ks, two payments from Social Security because for the first time couples have now worked a lifetime and are eligible for social security payments that are material. They also have homes that have appreciated materially over their lifetimes. The way you and others are depicting Americans is that all of them are free-spending hedonistic, depraved individuals who are spending today, with no hope of getting out of debt in the future.. you are absolutely wrong!!! Rather than looking at stats that only te= ll part of the picture, see how most Americans live and you will be surprised that they are positioned to deal with retirement... being from their savings or from other sources.

The world is not that dark when you travel throughout this great country and see that Americans do struggle and do worry about their future... but relative to other countries we're doing fine!!! In Europe the savings rate may be higher because they know that their socialist system will eventually collapse and they will truly need their savings to survive.

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Last week, we asked our readers for advice to protect yourself from Internet spies. Some of them offered concrete software solutions, a few of which you see below. Please note that we don’t have the resources to test and evaluate the mentioned software, therefore we cannot guarantee its quality and/or efficiency and are not to be held liable for same.

Spyware (and viruses) seem to target Windows systems. My advice is to find a Linux enthusiast and make the move to a more secure operating system as I did 5 years ago. Security is just one advantage; cost, freedom from lock-in, plus the increasing availability of FOSS applications are other reasons to dump Windows.

(David N.)

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I've been in the computer field since early 1980 and my first computer. I've designed systems for myself, my own business and consulted and worked for Fortune 100 companies.

Since even before then, the operative key phrase in computer security is "defense in depth" and it compares well to portfolio diversification in the investing field. The only other key is that it has always been impossible to have 100% perfect computer security... or anything else for that matter. The current best answer can certainly involve only keeping very critical data on a computer that has no or minimal connection to any others and I do that, but its not practical for day-to-day work.

Effectively, it’s just a matter of multiple layers of security. I do most of my work on a computer that has some critical and private data, and that computer has many "layers" of security. It’s just too much of a pain to always be typing my address and most passwords, etc. into web forms The layers currently include:
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  • A good Internet service provider that's not one of the big ones—they pay much better attention to what's really going on and the bad guys have a tougher time with their networks.

  • A hardware router/firewall with something called "Statefull Packet Inspection", a really nerdy term that just means it stops more suspicious network communications than normal router/firewalls.

  • An up-to-date software firewall that filters and protects both ways—Microsoft's built-in, for example, does not prevent "nasties" from phoning home if one gets infected. I use Zonealarm.

  • An up-to-date anti-virus package, not always from one of the well-recognized names. AVG and AntiVir are quite good products.

  • An always resident anti-spyware solution. Microsoft's AntiSpyware or Counterspy are good selections.

  • Other anti-spyware solutions to pick up the stuff that others miss—Spybot and AdAware are good examples. I run them every weekend to clean up minor stuff that the others miss.

  • A current version of the operating system—whether its Windows, or a Mac on Linux. Mistakes get made in design and programming, and the newest versions almost always have the best security.

  • I don't do silly stuff like opening email about free stuff I've won or how my eBay password is expiring and I need to do something now or else
    .
  • I actually back up my data frequently too. If something ever does get in, I can just erase & restore. Yes, it took about $300 including software, and about 3 hours to set up and test... and it’s just like the insurance I have on my car too. The car would be a whole lot easier to replace than my computer, especially without backups. The operative phrase here is: "Hard drives wear out and go bad--it's not 'if', it's 'when'".

  • Last but not least, a really geeky piece of software called an IDS, which stands for an Intrusion Detection System. It’s called PrevX, and is simply a "last resort" if everything else misses something trying to install itself without my permission.
With these and a few others things in place like increased browser security, I have never been infected in the last 25 years in any way other than the occasional innocuous tracking cookie that gets deleted during my normal weekly check. Yes, it does take time to keep them as well as my knowledge current, but it also takes time to get my car maintained—I rely on my computer more than my car, although they're both necessary.

Do note that every single one of the types of software I mentioned are available in free versions too. […] P.S. I don't work for nor am paid by any of the companies I mentioned.

(Bart)

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I have been using a Mac since 1989 and I never experience the problems you and every other Microsoft OS experience. There might just be a message there if someone took the time to look and do some research. FYI, I don't have anything to do with Apple. I am just a very satisfied customer for about 16 years. I got several of my friends to switch over the years and they are so glad they did. They were just fed up with all the crashes, viruses, worms, thieves, etc. al. Now, that doesn't happen to them anymore.

I will say I am a little concerned since Apple went to OS X and they are utilizing a more common OS program. Only time will tell if it is as safe as everything up to and including OS 9.2.

(Scott H.)

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End Quote

“How do you balance the budget, cut taxes and increase defense spending at the same time? It’s very simple. You do it with mirrors.”

--John B. Anderson, former U.S. Representative (R-Ill.) and independent presidential candidate in the 1980 elections

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