Where Sunday procrastination took me

Yesterday, I found A Pictorial Dictionary of the Animal World, published in 1966. It starts with abdomen and ends with zygote and has many biology terms and pictures in between. I never saw this book before until I was browsing my dad’s bookshelf yesterday. I think it was my dad’s when he was studying English.

In it, there is a definition and explanation of Acetylcholine, which sounded familiar. After I read the definition, I remembered I heard of this term from one of Andrew Huberman’s podcast episodes – a really good science podcast on how our body works and how to use science to optimize our performance and well-being.

Acetylcholine. A substance that has been found in almost all animals possesing a nervous system. It is produced in minute amounts at many nerve-endings when a signal passes along the nerve cell. It appears to be responsible for passing the signal (impulse) on to the next nerve cell or for trigerring off a reaction in a muscle when the signal arrives. Acetylcholine is destroyed almost immediately by cholinesterase. If this were not so, the acetylcholine would go on setting up impulses or reactions and the nervours system would be in chaos.

Michael Chinery. 1966. A Pictorial Dictionary of the Animal World: An illustrated demonstration of terms used in animal biology. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co.

Thank god for acetylcholine in our bodies and other neuromodulators that keep us balanced!

I’ve been experiencing a pull to paper books, printed photos and the internet before social media. This discovery of this more than half-a-century-old book makes me happy. See lopsided pics below.

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Today, I planned to write something about my travels a couple of weeks ago, but I got sidetracked by procrastination after finding old pictures from my childhood. This is from when I was in kindergarten. I’m probably around four or five years old here. At that young age, I was timid, anxious, and already felt ugly, perhaps because of my teeth – and started to develop feelings of unworthiness. When I see this picture, I want to hug little me and tell her that she’s beautiful and she matters.

So, of course, after seeing this old picture, I started to want to remember what it was like in the 1980s and 1990s, and my fingers moved to my computer and started to open Youtube and search “Indonesia in the 1970s”. I found this channel with a video of Indonesia in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s – with beautiful actresses such as Paramitha Rusady, Lidya Kandou, and Desi Permatasari.

I didn’t stop there.

I followed what Youtube recommended and arrived at David Hoffman’s channel, a documentary filmmaker who has been filming since the early 1960s.

I watched one of his videos interviewing people on Wall Street in 1979. Their answers about work, government, corporations, and information society resonate today. The difference is that the people’s curiosity and anxiety about the camera.

His channel is a treasure trove of memories. I’ve subscribed.