Eddie Would Go

The Eddie Aikau Invitational went on Sunday

30 feet at Waimea Bay (photo ©2016 Weldon Berger)

Links are at the end, in the link mausoleum.

The Eddie went off for the first time since 2016.¹ Wave heights were 30–50 feet, which is to say at least as big as the one in the photo, and often much bigger. The county anticipated 30-40,000 people heading up to the North Shore for the event, which from the live shots of the road up there was probably accurate. Waimea Bay is five miles of two lane road from Haleiwa, the nearest town accessible from the freeway, with a parking lot that maybe holds 200 cars. Bit of congestion, as one might guess.

Regular readers will have noticed that I haven’t written anything for a while. Seems like a long while; seems like the news was getting me down; seems like I felt better after taking a break and reading science fiction rather than the daily dystopia.

But what’s life without dystopia? I personally haven’t a long-term clue.

Chronic Stress Causes Behavioral Problems Like Loss of Pleasure and Depression

Medical ethics prohibit researchers from  experimenting on human subjects with things like “restraint, prolonged wet bedding in a tilted cage and social isolation.” Of course you can find all of these conditions in prisons, except maybe the tilted cage, or in various sites beyond the reach of law; the important thing is that it’s just sadistic fuckery there, not medical experimentation. Mostly.

Mice, contrarily, are fair game and since they don’t get depressed in the ordinary way of things, they’re made to be by imposition of the conditions described above. The researchers were looking at the impact of stress on what are called proopiomelanocortin neurons, located in the hypothalamus.²

They found the stressors increased spontaneous firing of these POMC neurons in male and female mice, says corresponding author Xin-Yun Lu, MD, PhD, chair of the MCG Department of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Translational Neuroscience.

When they directly activated the neurons, rather than letting stress increase their firing, it also resulted in the apparent inability to feel pleasure, called anhedonia, and behavioral despair, which is essentially depression.

Reframing the way patients view stressors when, unlike in the lab, they can’t be removed, is an important part of what therapists try to do to help their patients deal with depression and other stress-related behavioral disorders. Reframing things like homelessness, or housing insecurity, or food insecurity, or poverty generally, is hard, though. So it could be useful if researchers could develop a way to dampen the firing of those neurons.

Not, however, as useful as removing the stressors that are removable by a social effort. Can’t get stressed by the indicators of a failed state if they don’t exist.

Anyway. Science!

I got two or three of these

[R]esearchers have discovered more about how the brain fixes long-term memories in its storage slots.

The new study looks at the 'zone of uncertainty' or 'zona incerta' inside the brain: we don't know much about it, but we do know that it seems to handle memory formation in tandem with the neocortex, the largest part of the cerebral cortex.

It’s wonderful that these brains we carry around all the time have resisted uniform exposure. What’s wrong? I’m uncertain.³

The Zone of Uncertainty is not to be mistaken for the galactic Zone of Avoidance⁴, which I wrote about some time back, but certainly the brain has at least one of those, too. We are stardust, we are golden, we are one with the universe.

Rail workers keep on truckin’

In These Times has a piece about rail worker union activity in the wake of the horrible settlement forced on them by the Bidennaires and Congress. They’re exploring other options but they’re still pissed.⁵

Ahead of the next round of contract negotiations, workers are hoping that the coalition building they’ve done over the previous year will help build pressure to secure key wins. Yet they also worry about the precedent set by Biden and Congress last month.

“With the [recent] agreement imposed on us, it gives the railroads no reason to bargain in good faith,” BMWED’s Weaver said. ​“Why would they make a fair agreement with us when they know Congress will just shove anything up our asses?”

Not too long ago I wrote about Josh Hawley floating a new religious-right approach to labor, using rail workers as his entre. He’s not gonna find any takers on the union left, but he and the think tank he rode in on may find ripe pickings elsewhere in labor absent Democrats doing better.⁶

Music by which we have written

Gemma Rogers, “No Place Like Home;”⁷ The Surfing Magazines, “Badgers of Wymesworld;”⁸ Smoke Fairies, "Darkness Brings The Wonders Home."⁹ All new to me, and I liked them all.

That’s it, Comrades.

I apologize for the lengthy pause, but I had to get away get away. That shouldn’t stop you from sharing my stuff if you like it, and perhaps subscribing if you’ve not—always free unless you want to pay.

Take care, be well.

1. Eddie Aikau Invitational website

2. Neuroscience News on new depression science

3. Science Alert on the zone of uncertainty

4. Space.com on the zone of avoidance

5. In These Times on the rail workers’ plight

6. Yr. editors on Josh Hawley’s labor syrup

7. Gemma Rogers, Stop

8. The Surfing Magazines, Sports Bar

9. Smoke Fairies, Out of the Woods