In Search of the Perfect Investment

Life is no longer simple. Schlepping your laptop around the country, it’s decidedly dangerous.

Emails are coming from my son, who is not my son.

My friend opens an email attachment and infects his entire company. The hacker tries to steal everyone’s IRS refunds.

145 million Americans have our Equifax credit reports hacked. That means there’s a one in two chance the bad guys have your social security number, your date of birth and your address. Maybe also your poor mother-in-law’s maiden name.

It’s gotten so bad John Oliver on HBO last night devoted his main topic to excoriating Equifax for its laziness, incompetence and sheer greediness. He recommends (as I have) freezing your credit reports.

If you don’t freeze, the consequences for you can be awful, including:

+ The bad guys cleaning out your bank accounts.

+ The bad guys taking out big loans or huge mortgages in your name.

+ The bad guys stealing your identity.

+ The bad guys messing up your credit standing for the rest of your life, or longer.

If later you do want to borrow money or open yet another credit card (which you don’t need), you can easily unfreeze your records… and then freeze them back again, instantly, if not sooner.

You should freeze your credit reports. The four companies and their freezing web sites are:

+ Experian. Click here.

+ TransUnion. Click here.

+ Equifax. Click here.

+ Innovis. Click here. 

You should also monitor every bill you get — to check you haven’t been ripped off.

Everybody and their uncle is trying to exploit our fear. Chief is LifeLock. You do absolutely not need LifeLock. But if you do pay them money, be happy to know that some of your money goes straight to Equifax. (For more watch Oliver on HBO.)

Everyone is getting into the “exploit the fear” business, even TransUnion. I just received this email. I bet if I signed in they’d give me the opportunity to pay them some money. Why am I so cynical?

This Wall Street Journal warning isn’t new. It’s the reason I don’t use airport and Starbucks WiFi. I use the Personal Hotspot on my iPhone. (Hit Settings. It’s five lines down.)

Yet another warning from Wired Magazine.

And now to Bitcoin

Late Friday I sent subscribers to this blog a note saying “Stay away from Coinbase.”

I’d heard that they were the leading place to buy bitcoin. I signed up for an account. … But as I progressed through their signup, I got a horrible feeling in my gut. They were asking far too many questions — including how to sign into my main bank account! (That really freaked me out.)

Anyway I backed out of Coinbase and Googled “Reviews of Coinbase.“

Most were horrendous.

There are (somewhere) legitimate purveyors of bitcoin. But it’s also true that none of them are FDIC insured, or SIPC-insured or anything like that. So you’re on your very own.

Now, I know that everybody and their uncle (including me) is getting crazy for bitcoin, also called cryptocurrencies. You can feel the skyrocketing enthusiasm. Also called momentum.

Recently Bitcoin jumped over $5,000, an all-time high.

But Coinbase burned me for now. I’ve had to change my bank UserID, password and institute two factor authentication. Coinbase is not getting its fingers on my hard-earned shekels.

Some readers have pointed me to legitimate places to buy bitcoin. When I get a few minutes, I’l investigate them. But I keep wondering. Let’s say I have $1 million in my bitcoin. How do I get some real cash? Will they wire real money to my real bank account? Need more investigating.

Meanwhile, tennis giving more pleasure than writing about the crooks who are out to get me (and you).

Read this piece. It’s important:

Your long, healthy, happy life

I don’t know the secret. But I do know I’m in better shape than most of my friends. Hence I can opine on my “secrets”:

+ Exercise. Daily singles tennis. Bicycling also.

+ Regular daily naps. Often twice a day. Learn about your body. There are some times of the day it prefers to sleep — like afternoons.

+ Limit stress. I define “less important” more carefully, and more often. I stress less over unimportant things, like losing money on dumb investments. Conversely, I’m also steering away from riskier, long-term investments, like funds. Especially ones that won’t payout until I’d dead.

+ Exceptional care not to do stupid. Hold stair railings. Drive slowly. Wait at pedestrian crossings for cars running red lights, etc. When it rains, call Uber.

+ Not eating too much. I’m aware of foods my body doesn’t like — e.g. coffee, alcohol and chocolate.

+ Spike up te mental thing. My friends claim their bodies aren’t good for walking, or tennis, or biking. All of them are delaying putting off getting new knees, new hips, etc. Meantime, they’re living a miserable life.

+ Lastly, I’m fascinated with life. I read a lot. I like writing this blog.I like showing off what I’ve learned. It stimulates my tiny brain. Maybe someone else will benefit.

The New York Times’s Gretchen Reynolds has written this important piece on health in the October 10 issue::

For Your Brain’s Sake, Keep Moving

Because we can never have enough reasons to keep exercising, a new study with mice finds that physical activity not only increases the number of new neurons in the brain, it also subtly changes the shape and workings of these cells in ways that might have implications for memory and even delaying the onset of dementia.

As most of us have heard, our brains are not composed of static, unchanging tissue. Instead, in most animals, including people, the brain is a dynamic, active organ in which new neurons and neural connections are created throughout life, especially in areas of the brain related to memory and thinking.

This process of creating new neurons, called neurogenesis, can be altered by lifestyle, including physical activity. Many past studies have shown that in laboratory rodents, exercise doubles or even triples the number of new cells produced in adult animals’ brains compared to the brains of animals that are sedentary.

But it has not been clear whether the new brain cells in active animals are somehow different from comparable new neurons in inactive animals or if they are just more numerous.

That question has long interested scientists at the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, who have been examining how running alters the brains and behavior of lab animals.

Last year, in an important study published in NeuroImage, the researchers found for the first time that young brain cells in adult mice that spent a month with running wheels in their cages did seem to be different from those in animals that did not run. For the experiment, the scientists injected a modified rabies vaccine into the animals, where it entered the nervous system and brain. They then tracked and labeled connections between brain cells and learned that compared to the sedentary animals’ brain cells, the runners’ newborn neurons had more and longer dendrites, the snaky tendrils that help to connect the cells into the neural communications network. They also found that more of these connections led to portions of the brain that are important for spatial memory, which is our internal map of where we have been and how we got there.

This type of memory is often diminished in the early stages of dementia.

But these findings, while intriguing, involved animals that had been running for a month, which is the equivalent of years of physical activity by people. The researchers wondered whether such changes in neurons and connections might actually begin earlier and maybe almost immediately after the animals began to exercise.

So for the new study, which was published last month in Scientific Reports, most of the same researchers gathered a group of adult, male mice. (Males were used to avoid accounting for the effects of the female reproductive cycle.) The animals were injected with a substance that marks newborn neurons. Half were then allowed to run for a week on wheels in their cages, while the others remained inactive. Afterward, some were also injected with the modified rabies vaccine to track new synapses and connections between the neurons.

When the scientists then microscopically examined brain tissue, they found that the runners’ brains, as expected, teemed with far more new neurons than did the brains of the sedentary animals, even though the runners had been exercising for only a week.

Interestingly, these neurons also looked unique. They were larger and, as in the study of mice that ran for a month, displayed more and longer dendrites than similar neurons in the other animals. In effect, the young neurons in the runners’ brains appeared to be more mature after only a week of exercise than brain cells from inactive animals.

These young cells were better integrated into the overall brain circuitry, too, with more connections into portions of the brain involved in spatial and other types of memory. Most surprising to the scientists, these cells also proved to be less easily activated by neurochemical messages to fire rapidly, which is usually a hallmark of more mature neurons. They remained calmer and less prone to excitability than new neurons in the inactive animals’ brains.

What these differences in cell structure and connection mean for brain function remains uncertain, though, says Henriette van Praag, a principal investigator at the National Institutes of Health and senior author of this and the earlier study. Neither study was designed to look into whether the running mice thought and remembered differently than mice that were sedentary for most of the day.

But the current study “provides more pieces of evidence that brain cells produced under running conditions are not just quantitatively but qualitatively different” than other neurons, she says, “and these differences are evident very soon” after exercise begins.

Perhaps most important, the new brain cells in the runners tended to integrate into and bulk up portions of the brain that, if damaged by disease, are associated with early memory loss and dementia, she adds.

Of course, this experiment used mice, which are not people. While some past neurological studies with people have hinted that exercise might alter our brain structure in similar ways, she says, that possibility is still theoretical.

Still, she says, “I think it is a very good idea for the sake of the brain to be moving and active.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 10, 2017, on Page D6 of the New York edition. It’s the same as above. Click here.

Turkey is now a no-go

Americans can no longer get a visa to go there.  It was a really nice place. I visited it twice. For more, here. 

Two wonderful cartoons

Confucius did not say

+ Man who wants pretty nurse must be patient.

+ Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.

+ Man who eats many prunes gets good run for money.

+ War does not determine who is right; it determines who is left.

+ Man who drives like hell is bound to get there.

Harry Newton, who needs to run an updated photo of himself. Still as handsome. Still no wiser. But a little richer, from our recent tech stock boom. However, it is October. We’ve had two huge market drops in Octobers past. I’ve have fingers and toes crossed. Please cross yours also.