The Great Starvation Experiment

Historian Todd Tucker uncovered a story of 36 conscientious objectors during World War II who volunteered to undergo a year-long experiment—an experiment to systematically analyze starvation for six months and then systematically analyze the rehabilitation process. He wrote about his findings in the book The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic men Who Starved So That Millions Could Live (2006).

During and prior to World War II conscientious objectors were given jail sentences for their lack of “patriotism”, but by World War II they were allowed to participate in Civilian Public Service (CPS) which was the first way to deal with the “troublesome pacifist draftees”. The conscientious objectors under the auspices of the CPS did work in mental asylums, work in forestry camps, and volunteered as human guinea pigs. There weren’t too many other options for them.

Evidently being used as human guinea pigs was a big, and not yet controversial “job” that conscientious objectors filled. With the help of the army and the CPS and their human guinea pigs, Dr. Ancel Keys conducted an array of studies on the effects of various vitamins (some of which had only recently been “discovered”, and his experiments on CPS volunteers were primarily with diets lacking thiamine, riboflavin, and the B complex as a whole), the effects of severe cold and severe heat, excessive moisture, thirst, and the effects of a full month of bed-rest.

As the World War II progressed, Keys became interested in the effects of starvation and how a starved body could be rehabilitated, and so conceived the idea of carefully controlling the process of starvation as well as how to best restore the body. Before the actual experiment, Keys compiled a list of 372 “Notable Famines in History” that documented the brute prevalence of starvation, and the list was broken down “Outside India” and “Inside India” since the frequency of famines raged in that country. Examples follow in chronological order (but it is interesting to note the long list of Biblical famines since Keys was an avowed atheist):

Genesis 12:10
11 Kings 6:26-29
Acts 11:28-30
520 Venice, relief sent by Theodoric the Great
1116 Ireland, cannibalism
1574 Gujarat, plague

The experiment was to be of one-year in duration—a three-month control phase of good eating to establish that everyone had a well-balanced and uniformed diet for his ideal weight, then the six-month starvation diet in which each member would lose 25% of his weight (an amount believed by Keys to conduct the study but not cause serious health risks), and then the three-month rehabilitation. Throughout the study the test subjects would have their biological and psychological health measured … for as the advertisement read when recruiting volunteers: “WILL YOU STARVE SO THAT THEY WILL BE BETTER FED?” referring to staving off starvation or rehabilitating the starved in case of future scenarios of starvation.

As World War II began, 34,506,923 American men were registered for the draft out of a population of 134,000,000. Of these registrants, 72,354 applied for conscientious objector (CO) status, about one-fifth of one percent, but 27,000 of these failed the basic medical exam saving the government the “trouble” of figuring out what to do with them. About 25,000 of the COs who passed agreed to noncombatant service—the 1-A-Os, many of these army medics (Desmond Doss, a devout Seventh-day Adventist and 1-A-O army medic, won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism at Okinawa). Slightly more than 6,000 of the COs refused to perform any kind of national service—most were Jehovah’s Witness who claimed that every JW was entitled ministerial exemption, which the government disagreed, thus imprisonment. What remained were 11,966 men, who opposed any kind of uniformed military service but who were open to perform some kind of alternative work … these were the men for the CPS.

The CPS, as historian Todd Tucker puts it, represented the complete, diverse, befuddling rainbows of American religions—58% represented by the Historic Peace Churches (4,665 Mennonite, 1,353 Brethren, and 951 Friends) but in total over 200 denominations with 673 Methodists, the largest group outside the HPC. There were also 149 Catholics, 17 Seventh-day Adventists, 108 Lutherans, 192 Presbyterians, for example.

THE 36 VOLUNTEERS

Dr Ancel Keys wanted 40 volunteers for the study, but once all volunteers had been evaluated and screened, there were only 36 … 32 completed the year-long study. Among the 32 who completed the study, all said that they would volunteer for such a study again as it gave them a since of accomplishment beyond their service to their country, but a sense of accomplishment for the world. Surprising to Keys at first was that the majority of volunteers were intellectuals, those aimed at bettering the world or with altruistic leanings. These were the men who volunteered to starve so that through the study future medical workers could better know how to administer to the healing of the starved.

Minnesota Starvation Experiment

Of the four who didn’t complete the study were:

Watkins, a 24-yr-old man who early in the starvation period took to stealing and shoplifting to get food. He unsurprisingly reported dreams of cannibalism, but what he got removed from the study for was this threats to Keys of “I’m going to kill you” and beyond worse “I’m going to kill myself”. After five days in a mental ward with large recuperating meals, he was stabilized and sent home.

Weygandt, a man who worked in a grocery store but took to uncontrolled binging so quit the job. He became morbidly neurotic but when blood appeared in his urine, he had to be dropped from the experiment. Weygandt did stay and help in the kitchen for the remainder of the experiment—kudos to him and his sense of teamwork and continuing to the end in what capacity he could play!

Willoughby and Plaugher, the two jocks in the experiment. To cope with hunger, they were chewing 40 packs of gum a day, which was acceptable, however Plaugher took to snitching sandwiches and routinely raiding the garbage. He was “caught” when his weight numbers failed to decline, and so admitted to his history of cheating. Willoughby, his close friend and fellow jock also didn’t show the decline of numbers that the others showed so was accused of cheating also. He was appalled (1) that he was so accused, and (2) that his friend would lie to him and cheat while telling him all was well. Willoughby finished the experiment but Keys, not wanting to risk Willoughby’s questionable data, didn’t include Willoughby’s data in the final conclusions.

Sam Legg was almost scrapped from the study as well. During the starvation period, Sam suffered the most weight loss and was undergoing painful aberrations of behavior—making weird noises over his food, mangling his finger by dropping a jacked up car on it (originally he tried to mangle his hand but pulled his hand away just in time to only catch a finger … all because of his distorted almost hallucinating concept of a plan to get removed from the study), and then the week following the car incident actually axing three fingers off while chopping wood. He begged to remain in the study, and surprisingly was allowed.

STARVATION STUDY CONCLUSIONS

Of the 32 men who made it to and through the rehabilitation phase—they had dropped on average from 152.7 pounds to 115.6 pounds, an average weight loss of 24.29%. They had lost on average 1/3 of centimeter in height. Their total blood volume had been reduced by almost 500 cubic centimeters. The heart that pumped that blood had shrunk by 17%. They were always cold and body temperatures had dropped from 98.6°F to on average 95.8°F, with the original average heart rate dropping from 55 beats per minute in control to just 35 beats per minute, barely one beat per two seconds. Keys did, surprising himself, corroborate rumors from other starving individuals that hearing ability intensified in starvation, which he concluded might be to the wasting of fat in the ear canal which widened the canal. The starved men all said their hearing was sharpened with hunger, and they could hear the scraping of plates and the clink of silverware as they passed houses in the community or listened to food preparation in the research kitchen.

More significantly and more difficult to measure, the volunteers’ world shrank—the men had come to Minnesota to be a part of a global mission to help all of humanity. Now they didn’t care about starving refugees, or VE day, or self-government inside of CPS Unit 115 (their unit). None had continued dating as the experiment progressed. TV and News was paid little attention. Now their world consisted only of the food line, and they didn’t like dawdling in it at all!

Tips, compiled by Keys, to be offered to future care workers in starvation centers:

Don’t play with food or make individuals stand in long lines to get food. Food is serious business and when offered, should be readily given!

Don’t exhibit unnecessary displays of strength or vitality, or take two stairs at a time—this is annoying behavior to those suffering from hunger weakness.

Dr Ancel Keys - Source

Other data collected by Keys:

In terms of starvation, women consistently across the globe seem more durable than men. In German-occupied Greece, males above the age of 20 died at much higher rates than females of the same age. In the Netherlands, during the famine of 1944-45, the mortality rate of females rose by 73% while the rates for males rose 169%. In internment camps run by Japanese, men made up 89.5% of all deaths deemed “natural” by the captors. Strikingly, 100% of suicides in one Japanese camp were men. Listed as logical reasons for women thriving better under starvation circumstances—men need more food than females, men work longer after onset of starvation, women seek assistance sooner, and Keys speculated that the “traditional woman’s attitude of self-sacrifice and resignation” might be helpful.

ULTIMATE CONCLUSIONS

Despite popular thought at the time that medical aid given to starving populations required IVs to initiate nutrition on rehab, Keys believed that the feeding of men, women and children who had reached a high-level of starvation could in fact take food and that the deterioration of their digestive tract could sustain normal eating and digestion (p193). IVs given to such people would not be well-received anyway as the starved people (as in those in Bergen Belsen and other concentration camps in Europe that were becoming known about) would view such IV and oral feeding measures as further experiments on themselves.

Finally, only high levels of calories could rehabilitate the starved. For the three months of rehabilitation, the 32 volunteers had been divided into four groups—an additional 400, 800, 1200 and 1600 calories per day. This was in addition to their basic 1500 calories per day that induced starvation. Weight hardly changed and so Keys realized that only large infusions of calories could actually and completely rehabilitate starved victims. Once the study was over and the volunteers had access to food, it was quite normal for them at first to seek out as many as 5,000 calories per day, and one individual even ate a whopping 11,000 calories in one meal without negative consequences.

MY REACTION

Rather a bizarre study to make when there were actually so many individuals in the world who had and were starving at the time, so I felt that creating starved humans for this study wasn’t actually necessary. Rehabilitating them should have been the greater focus, which unfortunately wasn’t. Nowadays such a study could never be approved, what with ethics to humanity. The Hippocratic Oath did exist at the time, strange to say, but I guess the study was accepted because the men volunteered, and were unpaid volunteers at that.

It seemed to me, however, that the biggest drawback of this study was the lack of consequences such a diet had on the 36 volunteers—what kind of health struggles occurred, loss of vision (although vitamin A was managed to some degree), how long it took for them to recover their lost weight and did they feel like they lost some of their former vitality? The consequences of the study were in the write-up to get volunteers but I feel like little time was given to long-term effects of the starvation experiment … probably because the experiment actually concluded a few months after World War II was over, and everyone just wanted to forget the war and take up life where life had left off!

Animal X-rays at the Oregon Zoo

Even animals need health care and, just like humans, animals under zoo care get preventative treatments to ensure a longer and more physically stable life. On October 17 and 18, the Oregon Zoo posted on Twitter some of the "rad radiography from health checks at [their] veterinary center". The "rad radiographs" were labeled as "amazing and gothy animal x-rays taken during health check-ups". Initially, the unnamed iguana got the most tweets with the undulating twists of the python the second. Many artists responded that they would appreciate these pictures being uploaded in high definition for artistic purposes to Creative Commons. Another suggested selling these types of picts as a way to generate money to support the many expensive eating needs of the zoo animals. But seriously, wouldn't these be fabulous in art?!?! I could definitely see a future in these types of "photography" entering mainstream art!

unnamed iguana

nature displaying the mathematical perfection of the Fibonacci Spiral

Rodriguez flying fox

ball python

beaver's tail

Toco toucan

three-banded armadillo

hedgehog (apparently gas in the stomach shows up as a dark spot)

wolf eel

flamingo legs

tiger's paw

screech owl

dwarf mongoose

fat-tailed gecko

unnamed turtle

The Bear Wojtek: Beer-drinking World War II Hero

Every semester in my Academic English class I have a speaking contest of some kind. One semester it might be "for 4 minutes talk about your favorite book", and the students are put in 4-5 student groups to battle out the "most interesting book" of the class. They start at small group level and then verbally battle it out in a second finalist round. This semester I thought we would have the speaking contest on "weirdest of the weird" news item, and again students had to "market their story" as the "weirdest of the weird" to win the prize. Much like the major leagues, the contest isn't just one-round of story-telling, but involves two before the students can choose the class pick for the weirdest story told to them. We had some amazing stories, but the most memorable story from the class was not the weirdest-of-the-weird, "The Ear That Was Made with Van Gogh DNA", but the beer-drinking bear Wojtek of World War II who was a war hero! My history-buff student loves war stories so he scrounged for a stunner, and indeed, he won "most jaw-dropping" story in the class! Total consensus!

How Wojtek The Beer-Drinking Bear Became A WW II Hero

How an orphaned Syrian bear named Wojtek became a Polish army hero 

Wikimedia Commons

Troops of the Polish 22 Transport Artillery Company watch as one of their comrades play wrestles with Wojtek their mascot bear during the Middle Eastern campaign of World War Two, circa 1942-1943. 

Amid a long journey to join forces with the British Army in World War Two, one unit of the Polish II Corps stumbled upon an unlikely, and invaluable, comrade: A Syrian brown bear. 

A New Army And A New Mascot 

Poland bore a bulk of World War Two-related traumas. After the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 — only to be followed by the subsequent Soviet invasion on the 17th — the country had only experienced a couple of decades of independence before it found itself under occupation once again. 

Following the invasions, Stalin and Hitler agreed to a nonaggression treaty, which effectively divided Poland in two. Hitler broke that pact on June 22, 1941, when he ordered an invasion of the USSR. 

In what came to be known as the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, Stalin declared all previous pacts between the USSR and Poland to be null and void. Among other things, this allowed Poles to create their own army, despite technically being on Soviet soil. That they did, and the army became the Polish II Corps led by Lieutenant General Władysław Anders. 

In the spring of 1942, the newly-formed army left the USSR for Iran, along with the thousands of Polish civilians released from Soviet gulags. On the way to Tehran, the traveling Poles encountered an Iranian boy in the town of Hamadan who had found an orphaned bear cub. Irena Bokiewicz, one of the civilians, was so enamored with the cub that one of the lieutenants purchased him in exchange for a few tins of food. 

The cub became a part of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company, and soon received its own Polish name, Wojtek (pronounced voy-tek), which translates to “joyous soldier.” Wojtek traveled with the company through the Middle East, as the unit made its way to join forces with the 3rd Carpathian Division of the British Army in Palestine. 

Wojtek the Bear 

Wikimedia Commons Wojtek sits with a Polish soldier, 1942

Growing up with soldiers, Wojtek adopted some rather curious habits. Indeed, reports say that the bear would drink milk from an old vodka bottle, imbibe beer and wine, and smoke (and eat) cigarettes with his army buddies, just as any soldier would. 

Wojtek quickly became a source of light in the midst of war. He would often wrestle with his fellow fighters, and even learned to salute when greeted by his company men. 

Wojtek’s fate with the company fell on uncertain times in 1943, when the unit prepared to board a ship and join the Allied campaign against Italy in Naples. Officials at the Alexandria, Egypt port refused to let the bear on as he was not officially part of the army.
In a quick, if not bizarre, workaround, soldiers made Wojtek a private of the Polish II Corps, and gave him a rank, service number, and pay book to legitimate his status. It worked, and Wojtek joined his comrades onto the Italy-bound vessel, this time as a legal member of the army. 

By the time the unit arrived in Italy, Wojtek had grown significantly from cub to a 6 ft tall, 485 lb. adult Syrian brown bear. Making good use of his size and strength, the company taught Wojtek how to carry crates of mortar rounds, which he reportedly did without fail during the bloody battle of Monte Cassino. 

Wojtek not only survived the conflict — soon after, he achieved legendary status. Indeed, following Wojtek’s valiant performance, Polish high command made Wojtek the official emblem of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company. 

When the war came to a close in 1945, Wojtek retired from army life and traveled to Scotland with his fellow soldiers. Unlike his fellow veterans, Wojtek retired to the Edinburgh Zoo. 

Wikimedia Commons

While 21-year-old Wojtek would die at the zoo on December 2, 1963, his memories of army life would stay with him for the rest of his days. Reports say that the bear would perk up when he heard visitors speak Polish.

__________________________________________________________________

My student did further studies on the bear for relating his story. Once curious story he found was that initially the bear, as he was sitting up with his arms out, was given ammunition for a moment. When the bear didn't drop it but accepted holding the ammunition, the soldier or officer thought of getting the bear to actually carry ammunition to the front. Wojtek willingly did it! As Wojtek became even more loved in his company, the emblem patch on the uniforms of the Twenty-Second Artillery Supply in which Wojtek belonged came to be that of a bear ... carrying ammunition!

       Wojtek, the Bear of Monte Cassino

The "wartime memoirs of Stanislaw Kroczak, an officer with the Twenty-Second Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps ... [puts a lot of human-attributed behavior stories like carrying ammunition in his forepaws to the front] to rest but does note the bear’s role in helping maintain the troops’ high morale during the bloody campaign up the mountainous Italian peninsula, culminating in the capture of Monte Cassino by the Poles on May 18, 1944. After the war, Wojtek shared the lot of most of his Polish friends who chose not to return to their Soviet-dominated homeland. Many of them settled in Scotland, and Wojtek was placed in the Edinburgh Zoo, frequently visited by his old army buddies, journalists, and crowds of admiring fans. Wojtek died in Edinburgh in 1963, but his fame lives on in several Polish and English children’s books, a BBC film documentary, and commemorative plaques in the Edinburgh Zoo, Imperial War Museum in London, and the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. His story is now also documented in the Hoover Archives." -- Hoover Institution, 21 March 2012

Over My Head - Story of a Brain Injury

Claudia Osborn wrote her autobiography of being a doctor but losing her occupation and almost her life through a serious brain injury. Claudia, a 42-year-old doctor and clinical professor of medicine, describes the aftermath of the brain injury nine years previous. She was stripped of her occupation and therefore her livelihood, for years deprived of intellectual companionship, and was challenged to do even the simplest tasks like reading a book, shopping for groceries or even sorting the mail. 

In Over My Head: A Doctor's Story of Head Injury from the Inside Looking Out she writes her story. After extensive therapy she regained a lot of function (she takes copious notes on all aspects of what she's doing, what she did already, leaves herself phone reminders, has her GPS programmed to get her to key places and also programmed to get her home when leaving from unfamiliar places). She is capable of writing, although her sentences are a bit stilted at times. She has very reliable people supporting her emotionally, and physically when necessary, and her mother, a very strong woman and advocate for Claudia to maintain her independence as much as possible, was the editor and advisor for this book. 

Some interesting points in the book:

Immediately after Claudia's catapult from the bicycle to the pavement and lying unconscious, she moved. A policeman and his son were the first on the scene, having witnessed the accident. The policeman was exulted when Claudia finally moved, but Marcia, the doctor-friend and housemate riding with Claudia, was not reassured as Claudia rigidly pulled her arms up to her chest in a reflexive, involuntary gesture of someone with serious brain stem injury. The extensiveness wasn't apparent with testing and a few hours later Claudia was allowed to go home under the indirect care of Marcia. Claudia was never the same again.

She attempted to go to work the next day, but circled in the bathroom aimlessly not remembering why she had gone in there. Marcia handed her her toothbrush and asked how she could practice medicine if she couldn't brush her teeth without guidance. Claudia responded "I know medicine" as she proceeded to put hand lotion on her toothbrush. 

After going to the office for a month, letters and mail were really beginning to pile up. She opened a letter which contained "The ... lab ... results ... on ..." but had no idea which lab, what results could they possibly be, and tossed the letter aside. Daily she faked her way through work with phrases like "it's interesting", the staff around her picking up the slack allowing her recovery time.

Her family and friends encouraged her but with her not getting better and frustration mounting, Claudia felt pushed to go to the recommended Head Trauma Program (HTP) in New York City. To be admitted she had to have a two-week screening-evaluation and then would be in the program for five months. 

Her mother would often call her, encouraged her, get her to talk, and then help her make simple decisions for her day, like the first day Claudia had gone to NY for brain injury assessment and was staying with a friend who was out working:

"... The good part is that the search will show that I'm basically okay." 

"That is true, darling. All the tests will reveal your strengths. Eat now, please don't forget." 

I wrote EAT on my phone pad and underlined it. "Lori has food here." 

"I'm sure. Why don't you make a simple list. It would remind you to eat and help you choose the menu." 

"Why? I know what I'm going to eat." I've done it often enough. Who needed to plan to eat? 

"You often forget. Tell me, what will you eat tonight?" 

"I'm too tired to think." Silence. "Uhm ... twisted juice, for one thing." I'd become better with multiple-choice questions than essays. 

"I've never heard of it." 

"Well, it's common." I had an image of the carton with the picture of oranges. "You know, flattened oranges." 

"Ah! Squeezed, not concentrate. What else?" 

"Postage ... crumbled cereal." I add quickly, "That's not quite right. I only have the brand name right." 

"Postage isn't a brand. It's Post, like Post Raisin Bran." 

I rolled my eyes and said with studied patience, "Mama, I was using the past tense." 

"Postage ... paste tense for Post." She laughed. "That would be fine. Now humor me.  When we hang up, go to the kitchen and see what's in the refrigerator and cupboards.  Write down two things. Then fix them. Will you do that?"

I curled up on the couch and closed my eyes. "OK, Mama." 

"Then you'll go to bed, right?" 

I didn't need to write it down. I did it first.

Claudia's day was filled with confusing moments. On one particularly day she was sure she had rolled up tissue and put it in her pocket, but in public when she pulled out the tissue, out came her bra ... the one she had forgotten to put on that morning. That was once, but oh so frequently she would go to get groceries but without a list, she couldn't make decisions, once coming home with $20 worth of Pepsi. When asked how she carried it home, she replied it was only a six-pack. She hadn't bothered to get the change. 

Ronald Geller said, 'Words are the clothes that thoughts wear.' 

My thoughts were pitifully naked.

Claudia perceived quickly that she was not on friendly terms with spoken language. To quote her, "Words elude me and refuse to come to my aid. I am incredulous, not to mention irritated, by the poor quality of my conversation. Ronald Geller has written, 'Words are the clothes that thoughts wear.' Frequently my thoughts were pitifully naked."

She was fascinated by Ronald Reagan's reputation as The Great Communicator during his presidency. She said he was a great speech reader, but his deficits became apparent when he was asked direct questions. For instance, when he was asked, "Can nuclear war be limited to tactical weapons?" he replied, "Well, I would, if they realized that we -- again if -- if we led them back to that stalemate only because that our retaliatory power, our seconds, or strike at them after our first strike, would be so destructive that they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off." People expected Reagan to perform well because he was the president and so the public made excuses for such oddity and rationalized the strangeness away. Like Reagan, people who didn't know Claudia didn't understand the extent of her not being able to function. What they perceived as "normal" was hidden behind the wall of limited interaction with her.

Claudia misses the person who she once was, the intelligent, snappy-minded, full-of-energy person with ambition and leadership. But that person died in 1988. She admits she wasn't a fun person, had a limited social life, steeped herself in work and was often unavailable for family and friends. She misses who she once was but has adjusted herself to accept who she presently is, a person with a very poor memory, a person who burns meals, loses car keys (and sometimes cars), forgets appointments, fails to return library books, and embarrasses herself (and others) regularly in public. That said, she can do things now she never did before. Now she paints .... and she writes. She has dreams now too, not her former dreams, but dreams nevertheless. Achievable dreams which she is carving out for herself. And she closes the book thinking of her dreams:

"I was a happy woman before my injury. 

I am a happy one today."

Finding Gobi: The Bond between a Man and a Dog

Dion Leonard, age 42 and seasoned ultra-marathon runner, is adopted by a stray dog in his 155-mile race through the Gobi Desert. The multi-day race starts at 8am on the first four days, a run each day of about a marathon distance, and the final and fifth day of the race, the run is a 50-mile endurance race to the finish. On ultra-marathon races, the runner must carry his own gear and food for the entire distance. Only water and a tent is provided, the most basic of elements to facilitate in the run. So to pare down the excess ounces of weight, Dion was carrying only 2,000 calories of food per day—mostly in power hydrating gels—even though he would be burning about 5,000 calories a day.

At the end of day 1, the leg of the race through high elevation in the Tian Shen Mountains, Dion was placing third in the race. He chugged into camp and moved to his tent space, passing a small dog that was charming people for food. Getting people to give it food so early in the race was no mean feat, and Dion’s thoughts, “Clever dog. There’s no way I’d feed it.”

Day 2 of the race the cute dog was out at the starting line, fascinated with the line up of runners. Dion took his place near the front to get in position for a tight squeeze he knew would be coming up in the trail early on. The dog fastened its attention on Dion’s yellow gaiters and started playing with the shoe strings, and once Dion burst into motion, the flashing yellow gaiters became even more fascinating to the little dog, and thus became the race for Day 2 … Dion running and being paced by a small dog with legs no longer than Dion’s hands. At the end of Day 2 Dion sacrificed a morsel of calorie-giving food to the dog, which happily curled up beside Dion and claimed its spot for the night.

Day 3 kicked off with the dog adamantly attached to Dion’s side and they sped off through an increasingly hot desert. Running for Dion is not pleasure like it is for his wife, a running trainer. In fact, he hates running; he just likes competing. Frustrations bother him, his scarred childhood affects his performance, and running without his wife Lucja to emotionally support him is hell. But the dog running beside him soothes him and his mind reaches out … and he starts to care. The dog is determined but when culverts appear, the short-legged dog struggles to keep up, and when a knee-deep river appears and the dog whines and barks behind him, Dion finally does something he’s never done before, the competition takes second place and he turns around … giving the dog priority. Losing race-breaking minutes, he wades back, scoops up the dog, and crosses the river. From then on he carries the dog over other culverts, and stops every hour or two to give the dog water out of his own bottle and in his own hand.

At the end of the race, a race that Dion placed second in and could have been first if he had sacrificed the life of another runner who collapsed and would have died without Dion’s attention and all of his water, Dion triumphed over some of the evil demons that had haunted him from his childhood. He was content placing second, saying second felt good because he was a trail player who recognized that priorities affect life and one’s ultimate satisfaction in it.

Source

The cover of the book says “A man, a dog, and the love that changed both their lives forever” is not an understatement. About two-thirds of the book is about the bonding relationship of Dion and the dog he named Gobi as he went through the process of immunizations and immigration to the UK. He sacrificed another ultra-marathon he was scheduled to run in Chile in order to eliminate the stress to Gobi a four-month quarantine time period in the UK would create. Priorities were priorities, and by this time the story of Gobi and her bonding with an ultra-marathon runner had become one of the international heart-throb stories of 2016.

From Jonathan Brown’s write-up in the Daily Mirror which brought the story of Gobi and Dion to the press (July 2016), Dion interviewed with BBC Radio Live, BBC UK and World Services, CNN, Washington Post, ESPN, ABC, Fox News, USA Today, Huffington Post, Reuters, the New York Times, Inside Edition, Times, Canadian Post, Channel 7 Australia, Good Morning Britain, Eric Zane Show podcast, and more. The story went even more viral with crowd funding with contributions from all over the world—Australia, India, Venezuela, Brazil, Thailand, South Africa, Ghana, Cambodia, and even North Korea. The book Finding Gobi: The Amazing True Story (2017) ends with Gobi at home in the UK with Dion, Lucja, and Lara the cat. But does the story end or … will Dion take Gobi out on subsequent ultra-marathons as the dog is clearly a runner?!

Stones Turned to Animal Art

Japanese artist Akie Nakata (known simply as Akie) turns found stones and rocks into adorable animal paintings you can hold in the palm of your hand. Inspired by the natural shapes of each stone she comes across, Akie chooses the ones she believes already have their own destined characters. Ever since she was a child, the self-taught artist has loved collecting stones. She began her stone paintings in 2011 when, while taking a walk along a river bank, she encountered a particular pebble that looked like a rabbit. The artist tells My Modern Met in an email, “Stones have their own intentions, and I consider my encounters with them as cues […] to go ahead and paint what I see on them.”

After sourcing the animal-shaped stones, Akie considers each character carefully. She asks herself, “Am I positioning the backbone in the right place? Does it feel right? Am I forcing something that disagrees with the natural shape of the stone?” She then carefully paints the stone’s surfaces with acrylic paint. From cats and dogs to owls, mice, and even an entire opossum family, each of Akie’s stone animals look remarkably lifelike. Painting the eyes last, Akie considers her work complete when she sees “the eyes are now alive and looking back [at her.]” She tells us, “To me, completing a piece of work is not about how much detail I draw, but whether I feel the life in the stone.”

While some might contest that a stone is not a living organism, when Akie holds one in her hand, she feels everything it has “silently witnessed over the millennia.” Believing each rock has a story to tell, the artist decides to breathe life into each one with her paintings. She reveals, “Sometimes I paint while I talk to the stone as I hold it in my hand.” Akie hopes that her stone animals will be treasured by those who hold them, as they treasure their own lives “because we all stand on the same earth, and we come from the same earth.”

You can find more of Akie’s incredible artwork on Instagram, and if you're lucky enough, you may get the chance to own one of her unique pieces when she announces their availability on Facebook. Japanese artist Akie Nakata turns found stones and rocks into adorable animal paintings you can hold in the palm of your hand.

Sources article: Artist Transforms Found Stones Into Animals You Can Hold in the Palm of Your Hand

Inspired by the natural shapes of each stone, Akie uses acrylic paint to bring their creature characters to life.


Each stone animal looks remarkably lifelike.

Talking Hands: Signing in an Israeli Village

Margalit Fox, a New York Times reporter trained as a linguist, is the only Western journalist to have set foot in the remarkable Bedouin community in Israel where there is an unusually high rate of deafness. Margalit’s book Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind (2007) is the outcome of her three-day immersion visit to the village with expert sign linguists. To be allowed into the village as an observer, Margalit had some background in American Sign Language but was under no circumstances to “speak” to anyone during the three days. She was allowed to document but not allowed to contaminate the pure sign language that had evolved in the previous 70 years into a third-generation language. Margalit explored the visit with an analysis of the unique syntactic sign language which was very different from the Israeli Sign Language (ISL), the sign language of the country.

Of Al-Sayyid’s 3,500 residents, about one in 25 is deaf—4% of the population! In Israel and the United States, the incidence of deafness in the general population is about 0.1 percent or one in a 1,000! Unlike in those areas, in Al-Sayyid there is no stigma against being deaf, and because of the high rate of deafness, and because of the remoteness of the village, the rest of the village sees deafness as normal and the majority of hearing villagers are bilingual, signing their local sign language while also speaking Hebrew.

Seventy years ago the first deaf child was born to the community and soon followed by nine more. In this first cohort of deaf children sprouted the pidgin sign which blossomed into the highly communicative local sign language three generations later. However, in the present generation the young deaf children are bussed to a neighboring village to be educated with Israeli Sign Language and linguists are madly trying to document the local sign language that is now  being infiltrated with more and more ISL. Thus, Margalit’s visit with linguists to Al-Sayyid.

Speakers and signers work side by side with almost no job being exclusive for either a speaker or a signer. In fact, the whole village has evolved into a speaking-signing village, but this is not new. From the early 1700s to mid-1900s Martha’s Vineyard had two up-island towns (West Tisbury and Chilmark) where the villagers had so intermarried that their incidences of deafness was one in 49 in Tisbury and one in 25 in Chilmark, just as it is in Al-Sayyid. Also like in Al-Sayyid, signing among all of the townspeople had evolved but was very difficult if not impossible for signing outsiders to understand. Apparently and unique to signing in the United States, Martha’s Vineyard sign language evolved from British Sign Language as 40% of the signs were found to have British cognates while only 22% had overlap with ASL. Martha’s Vineyard sign language was active for about 250 years until islanders started marrying off-islanders, diluting the recessive deaf gene. No deaf signers from Martha’s Vineyard are alive today. Similarly, the demise of the local sign language at Al-Sayyid is expected to rapidly decline, also to marriages outside of the village and with the more globalized education of bussing the young to broader educational opportunities outside of the Al-Sayyid community.

Interesting Points Related to Signing Noted by Margarit Fox

• Al-Sayyid sign language has not evolved differently because of differences related to gender. However, sign language for Dublin’s deaf children was introduced in the mid 1800s by two Dominican nuns but taught in two gender isolated institutions—St. Mary’s School for Deaf Girls and St. Joseph’s School for Deaf Boys. The schools rarely mixed and thus their language evolved radically differently. However, the deaf girls frequently married the deaf boys with the girls learning the dialect of their husbands, making them bilingual Irish Sign Language users. Husbands rarely deigned to learn the dialect of the women as it was viewed as an inferior dialect. With children using the “male” dialect for schooling and interactions, the women’s dialect gradually disappeared.

• In 1917 Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc opened the Connecticut Asylum for teaching the French version of sign language (the British refused to teach Gallaudet).

• Nicaragua had no widespread education for the deaf until the 1970s. In 1977 a small 50-pupil school was opened and this cohort brought their many home-signs which started a more universal Nicaraguan sign language. The first cohort of students never really attained fluency but they did establish a mean of communication, much like a pidgin language. The second cohort came in 1983 and attached grammar, fluency and syntax to the pidgin, creating a Creole. In the space of just a few years the full-blown Nicaraguan Sign Language had evolved.

• American Sign Language (and perhaps Al-Sayyid Sign Language) evolved into signs for complex words on seemingly an infinite rage and nuance, from compounds to constellations of inflections. As one researchers states, “The existence of such elaborate formal inflectional devices clearly establishes ASL as one of the inflecting languages of the world, like Latin, Russian, and Navajo.”

• Spoonerisms are the reversal of two speech sounds, often with a humorous effect, and were made famous by the Oxford don, Reverend William A. Spooner (1844-1930). Examples:

“the queer old dean”
“noble tons of soil”
“You have hissed all my mystery lecture. I saw you fight a liar in the back quad; in fact, you have tasted the whole worm.” (said to reprimand a student)

Or others not attributed to Spooner:

“Don’t throw your cigarette down, there’s a hire fazard.”
“Who am I to sneeze at a flee runch?”
“We’re having a rot post for dinner.”
“fash and tickle”
“Wing’s babliography”

• Linguists study slips of the tongue to reveal info about language—language structure, language acquisition and historical language change. For signers, slips of the hand can similarly reveal the structure and organization of language.

• Sign language is of “vertical” construction. People can speak faster than they can sign, with the ASL signers producing about two signs per second to typical speakers of English saying about four words per second. However, sign language has “vertical” construction which allows words to be pluralized by a shift in the hand or questions asked by the tilt of the head. In fact, these subtle sign cues make signing easier comparable to spoken English.

• The most commonly word order for spoken languages in the world is SOV, e.g. Japanese and Korean. The local languages of Al-Sayyid are Arabic, a SVO (Standard Arabic is VSO) and Hebrew, also SVO. Israeli Sign Language, however, is relatively free, but the most common orders are SVO and OSV. The local sign language wasn’t specified, but it is modality-driven, has WH-questions tagged on the end, and is clearly a structure consistent language. Imagine that--a language evolving in a mere 70 years!