A few corrections and notes:
Linkletter didn't go to Hunza himself - he financed an expedition.

James Hilton wrote "Shangri-La" (pub. 1933) after visiting the Hunza valley.

The compound in the seeds is amygdalin. Laetrile, AKA Krebiozen AKA "Vitamin B-17" is a partially synthetic compound derived from amygdalin. The study of amygdalfor cancer prevention goes back to the 1800's. At present there is no 'accepted' evidence of its efficacy.

There is only anecdotal evidence about the long life spans.

Oop - actually that would be Alexander the Great's army.

The bit about apple seeds being poisonous brings up an interesting line of factoids. The offending chemical is a sugar+cyanide compound, which is apparently the same as the one found in peach and apricot pits. You would have to eat a huge number of apples to cause any problems.

That's where the factoids get interesting. Snopes (http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/apples.asp) is a good start for the trail. The cyanide compound is believed by certain people to be an anti-cancer treatment, called Laetrile or Krebiozen (sp?). The way it is supposed to work is that hungry cancer cells have a preference for sugars, and so ingest the laetrile more than regular cells. When they break off the sugar, the cyanide kills them. That's the theory.

But wait!! There's more!! This theory got its start from a very interesting trek into the Himalayas by, intrepid explorer (and TV star) Art Linkletter in (IIRC) 1948. Linkletter and his team went to visit the Hunzas, a very long-lived tribe who live in a high valley (8000 ft/2940m) in the Himalayas. At the time, they were reputed to be the longest-lived people on Earth, with some Hunzas supposed to be alive into their 120's. The Hunza valley was supposed to be the inspiration for the legend of Shangri-La.

The Hunzas at the time, who may have been descended from elements of Hannibal's army, had no road to the outside - only a very dangerous humans-only trail (read the Geography section of Hunza on Wikipedia if you want to be scared), and had no words for heart attack or cancer - these diseases were unknown. Their life was incredibly hard but healthy. However if anyone left they generally died quickly as they had no immunity to many common diseases.

One of their major food sources was apricot seed oil that contained this cyanide compound...

Finally, this valley is now connected to today's news - it was historically one of the routes into the Swat Valley.

Fun!! I did something like this back in 1981, using three or four (I forget...) Tektronix 4051 graphic calculators. Someone had written an assembler program (Motorola 6800) to play musical scores on the 'beep' speaker (control was switching Vcc on and off - binary).

I hacked the GPIB signal interface so that all the boxes thought they were the controllers, and rewrote the score of "Fur Elise" to harmony, and got the trio or quartet to play Fur Elise in harmony.

Only problem I had was that the machines got slow when they played 16th notes, so I had to fudge the timing on the scores to accommodate in the other machines that were playing longer notes.

I was delighted to get a fairly successful Fur Elise playing in the end.

Many Wall Street folks took a few looks at the Madoff
'system' and not only stayed away, but repeatedly warned SEC. One thing that has not been mentioned is the fact that Madoff didn't have to convince everybody, just a few. I would suppose that less than 10% of investors or investment firms who were prospects got sucked in. That was enough. So we don't have to assume that Madoff was some super-con - just a regular one, working in a field with a lot of zeroes in the amounts.

Just so, the Nigerian scam at one time (maybe still?) was the second largest industry in Nigeria, bringing in billions of dollars per year, on what I would assume was a much less than 1% hit rate on their ads.

Ahh, this explains why cities are the common habitat of the Urban Liberal! :)

(*GB ducks to avoid incoming missiles...)