CAROLINA NATURALLY: Jan 9, 2014

Thursday, January 9, 2014

The Daily Drift

Ahem ...

Carolina Naturally is read in 194 countries around the world daily.

That reminds me - Honey, where are my socks ... !

Today is - National Static Electricity Day

Don't forget to visit our sister blog: It Is What It Is

Some of our readers today have been in:

The Americas

Miguel Hidalgo, Mexico City and Mexicali, Mexico

Pikangikum, Saint John's, Dryden, Mississauga, Thunder Bay, Ottawa, Templeton, Guelph, Henry Farm, Montreal, Toronto, North York, Vancouver and Byward Market, Canada

Lima, Peru

Santiago and Lo Prado, Chile

Caguas, Puerto Rico

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

Europe

Krakow, Poznan, Plock and Szczecin, Poland

Ravenna, Ivrea and Rome, Italy

Bucharest, Romania

Neuchatel and Zurich, Switzerland

Kista, Stockholm and Linkoping, Sweden

Lucenec and Bratislava, Slovakia

Clichy, Rouen and Paris, France

Braga, Covilha, Funchal and Lisbon, Portugal

Dublin, Ireland

Ankara and Umraniye, Turkey

Budapest, Hungary

Ruse and Sofia, Bulgaria

Luqa, Malta

Santa Cruz De Tenerife, Ourense and Teo, Spain

Helsinki, Finland

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Vinicne Sumice, Czech Republic

Vienna, Australia

Sulzbach and Kolen, Germany

High Wycombe, Crawley and Kent, England

L'viv, Ukraine

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Zagreb, Croatia

Copenhagen, Denmark

Cack, Serbia

Asia

Kuala Lumpur, Muar, Bayan Lepas, Shah Alam, Kota Kinabalu, Puchong and Kajang, Malaysia

Jakarta, Pontianak and Tangerang, Indonesia

Pondicherry, Chhapar, Thiruvananthapuram, Calicut, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai, India

Port Louis, Mauritius

Seoul, Korea

Petah Tikva and 'Akko, Israel

Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Kuwait, Kuwait

Singapore, Singapore

Bangkok, Thailand

Colombo and Kandy, Sri Lanka

Tehran, Iran

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Doha, Qatar

Muscat, Oman

Rangoon, Burma

Africa

Port Said and Cairo, Egypt

Cape Town, Vaderbijlpark, Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth, South Africa

Lagos, Nigeria

Pacific

Homebush and Surry Hills, Australia

Quezon City and San Jose, Philippines

Today in History

1719		Philip V of Spain declares war on France.
1776		Thomas Paine publishes Common Sense, a scathing attack on King George III's reign over the colonies and a call for complete independence.
1792		The Ottomans sign a treaty with the Russians ending a five year war.
1793		Jean Pierre Blanchard makes the first balloon flight in North America.
1861		Southern shellfire stops the Union supply ship Star of the West from entering Charleston Harbor on her way to Fort Sumter.
1861		Mississippi secedes from the Union.
1908		Count Zeppelin announces plans for his airship to carry 100 passengers.
1909		A Polar exploration team lead by Ernest Shackleton reaches 88 degrees, 23 minutes south longitude, 162 degrees east latitude. They are 97 nautical miles short of the South Pole, but the weather is too severe to continue.
1912		Colonel Theodore Roosevelt announces that he will run for president if asked.
1915		Pancho Villa signs a treaty with the United States, halting border conflicts.
1924		Ford Motor Co. stock is valued at nearly $1 billion.
1943		Soviet planes drop leaflets on the surrounded Germans in Stalingrad requesting their surrender with humane terms. The Germans refuse.
1945		U.S. troops land on Luzon, in the Philippines, 107 miles from Manila.
1947		French General Leclerc breaks off all talks with Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh.
1952		Jackie Robinson becomes the highest paid player in Brooklyn Dodger history.
1964		U.S. forces kill six Panamanian students protesting in the canal zone.
1974		Cambodian Government troops open a drive to avert insurgent attack on Phnom Penh.
1992		The Assembly of the Serb People in Bosnia and Herzegovina proclaims the creation of a new state within Yugoslavia, the Rupublika Srpska.
1996		A raid by Chechen separatists in the city of Kizlyar turns into a hostage crisis involving thousands of civilians.
2005		Mahmoud Abbas wins election to replace Yasser Arafat as President of the Palestinian National Authority.
2005		The Comprehensive Peace Agreement to end the Second Sudanese Civil War is signed by the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement.
2007		Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, unveils the first iPhone.

Design revealed for Oklahoma Capitol's Satan statue

A NYC group called the Satanic Temple hopes to install a 7-foot statue of Baphomet at the Oklahoma State Capitol building. They've just revealed their design, seen above.

From Oklahoma's NewsOn6:

The Satanic Temple says Oklahoma's decision to put a ten commandments monument at the Capitol opened the door for its statute. Temple spokesman Lucien Greaves says it's moving forward with plans to have its monument approved, despite the Oklahoma Capitol Preservation Commission's decision to place a moratorium on new requests.
The commission says it's waiting until a lawsuit over the ten commandments has been settled.

Satanists Unveil Design For Oklahoma Capitol Monument

Did you know ...

That a woman sues because of invasive body cavity searches

Why we must expand social security

About fucking climate change deniers: How do they work?

That dolphins like to get high

Dear John:

A few weeks ago, the repugicans unveiled their 2014 agenda, and it was . . . nothing.

I kid you not. Here is how it was reported in Politico:

"Last Thursday, a group of House repugicans filed into Majority Leader Eric Cantor's Capitol office suite and received a blank piece of paper labeled 'Agenda 2014.' . . . A repugican aide . . . said . . . 'The problem is we don't know where we are headed . . . .'"

Many people saw the absence of an agenda as a problem. I think that it understates the problem. My concern is that the repugicans don't know where to go, not that they don't know how to get there.

To give you an idea of where they seem to think we should go, here are some actual bills that were actually introduced by actual repugicans last year:r

a bill to allow the states to nullify any federal law (didn't we settle that in 1865?);
a bill to require every high school student to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (mandatory libertarian indoctrination -- oh, the irony . . . .);
a bill to prohibit lap dancing and jello wrestling (which contained fascinating definitions of the terms "nudity" and "sexual device");
a bill establishing a state religion (not Islam, that's for sure); and
a bill authorizing restaurants, hotels, hair salons and other businesses to deny service to gay customers.

If you're trying to do stuff like that, then doing nothing is a massive improvement.

But more importantly, you just can't do nothing about nothing. You're always doing nothing about something. When the repugicans say that they have no agenda for 2014, then in effect, they're saying this:

"We're going to do nothing about the 20 million Americans who can't find full-time work."

"We're going to do nothing about the fact that America now has the highest inequality of wealth in history."

"We're going to do nothing about the fact that our military expenditures are roughly equal to that of every other country combined, even though we face no conceivable threat of invasion, and we spend approximately $50 billion spying largely on ourselves."

"We're going to do nothing about the fact that the United States has run a trade deficit of at least $350,000,000,000.00 every single year since 2000, with no end in sight."

"We're going to do nothing about the fact that the Arctic ice cap is disappearing, the release of methane greenhouse gas from tundra is snowballing ('snowballing' - hah!), and global temperatures may rise by 10 degrees by the end of the century."

"We're going to do nothing about the fact that there are so many corporate income tax loopholes that corporate tax revenue is at its lowest in 50 years."

"We're going to do nothing about the fact that according to some tests, American students have the lowest math scores in the entire world."

"We're going to do nothing about the fact that 434 out of 435 House Members and 99 out of 100 Senators raised most of their campaign funds from big donors [the only exceptions being Sen. Sanders (I-VT) and moi]."

"We're going to nothing about the fact that the federal minimum wage buys less today than it did in 1968, and the bottom 20% has a far lower household income today than it did in 1999."

"After we repeal Obamacare, we're going to do nothing about the 50 million Americans who can't see a doctor when they're sick." [The repugican healthcare plan: Don't Get Sick. And if you do get sick, Die Quickly.]

So it may seem that the repugicans are doing nothing about nothing. But they're actually doing nothing about everything. Whatever the problems we face, their infantile solution is always the same: close your eyes, and it will go away. Close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears, and repeat "La-la-la-la-la-la-la."

Will that work? No. All of these problems have solutions, but none of them is going to solve itself.

That's our job.

Courage,

Rep. Alan Grayson

“Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.
You've got to have something if you want to be with me.”

- Billy Preston, “Nothing From Nothing” (1974).

How gullible are wingnuts?

You Won’t Believe What Had to be Fact-Checked

by Allen Clifton

I get that wingnuts hate President Obama. Heck, I live in Texas — he’s despised by nearly every wingnut I encounter here. It’s caused me to avoid political discussions in public. You’d think that doing what I do for a living I’d talk politics all the time, but that’s not the case in my private life. Whenever a wingnut I meet finds out what I do, I usually avoid discussing politics if possible. I’ve been down that road before and it’s just not worth the headache.
The asinine “facts” I’ve seen these people spew are often so ridiculous I can’t even properly respond to them because I’m trying not to laugh. “Did you know Obamacare requires microchips in every American?” Who honestly would believe such nonsense?
Well, while checking out Politifact, I ran across what might be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen them fact-check. Now I’m not exactly sure what their process is for investigating something, but I’m guessing it requires quite a few inquiries about a particular situation before they take the time to investigate the claim and write their article displaying their results.
So when I saw that they fact-checked a claim that “Obamacare” coding would lead to executions by beheading in the United States – I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Not that some idiots believed this (when you’ve seen as many ridiculous “facts” uttered by wingnuts about “Obamacare” over the years, nothing surprises you anymore) but the fact that it was believed by so many people that Politifact took the time to fact-check it was the laughable part.
For the record, it was deemed a “Pants on Fire” lie — their harshest rating for factually inaccurate information.
Granted, I’ve seen wingnut friends and family post some really crazy things on Facebook that they believed to be true, but I can’t even wrap my mind around the idea that there were enough people who believed “Obamacare” allowed for execution by beheadings in the United States. I’ll admit that shocked the hell out of me.
As a liberal, if I read something with a headline that radical (even if it supports my side of the argument), red flags instantly go off inside my head. The first thing I do is Google the headline and see if any credible sources have reported anything about it. Then I go to the article itself to see what source they used. Then, if there’s even a source, I see where the source got their information — which more often than not isn’t cited or sourced at all. It’s just some blog filled with all sorts of lunatic fringe radical articles with no factual basis whatsoever.
It just goes to show how blind many wingnuts are when it comes to the Affordable Care Act. They’ve been programmed to hate the health care law to such an extent that most of them will believe just about any nonsense that flies across their TV screen, computer or smart phone. But seriously, beheadings? Absurd doesn’t even begin to properly describe that level of insanity.

Well, repugicans they just can't help themselves

Get this: repugican AGs defending Obamacare against Obama?

There really isn't a more perfect example of repugican Obama derangement syndrome than this, repugican attorneys general defending Obamacare against President Obama. Yes, the only thing they hate more than this law is the president.

Idaho is now among several states challenging how President Obama decided to let consumers keep their insurance plans this year even if those plans don't meet requirements set by the 2010 health care reform law.

Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden and 10 other attorneys general called the proposed rule "flatly illegal under federal constitutional and statutory law," in a letter last week [pdf] to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

So at the same time repugicans are raising hell over cancelled health insurance policies, they're raising hell over the administration's fix for cancelled insurance policies. Perfect repugican logic.

NSA: a threat to national security

In an excellent editorial, Bruce Schneier explains how the NSA weakens American security (because the NSA relies upon weaknesses in American technology to permit it to spy) without stopping terrorism (by General Keith Alexander's own admission, the only plot foiled by bulk NSA spying was a plan by a guy in San Diego to send $8500 to some Somali militants).

It's not just domestic abuse we have to worry about; it's the rest of the world, too. The more we choose to eavesdrop on the Internet and other communications technologies, the less we are secure from eavesdropping by others. Our choice isn't between a digital world where the NSA can eavesdrop and one where the NSA is prevented from eavesdropping; it's between a digital world that is vulnerable to all attackers, and one that is secure for all users.
Fixing this problem is going to be hard. We are long past the point where simple legal interventions can help. The bill in Congress to limit NSA surveillance won't actually do much to limit NSA surveillance. Maybe the NSA will figure out an interpretation of the law that will allow it to do what it wants anyway. Maybe it'll do it another way, using another justification. Maybe the FBI will do it and give it a copy. And when asked, it'll lie about it.
NSA-level surveillance is like the Maginot Line was in the years before World War II: ineffective and wasteful. We need to openly disclose what surveillance we have been doing, and the known insecurities that make it possible. We need to work toward security, even if other countries like China continue to use the Internet as a giant surveillance platform. We need to build a coalition of free-world nations dedicated to a secure global Internet, and we need to continually push back against bad actors—both state and non-state—that work against that goal.

How the NSA Threatens National Security

Random Celebrity Photos

ricksginjoint:

Marilyn Monroe photographed by Andre de Dienes (1945)

Marilyn Monroe (1945)

Device found on New York-bound plane forces emergency landing in Kansas City

An American Airlines flight made an emergency landing in Kansas City after a passenger left a USB flash drive in the bathroom. The FBI now says the device was taped to the bathroom ventilation duct and contained a small camera.

Car exploded after men sniffing lighter fuel lit cigarette

A car exploded after liquid gas from a cigarette lighter ignited when a man inside lit a cigarette.

Police said two young Arab men were sniffing the liquid gas in their car in Ajman in the United Arab Emirates when the explosion happened. A police official said pressurized liquid gas used in filling a lighter had accumulated in the car when the two men were snorting it to get intoxicated.

Lt-Col Khalid Mohammed Al Nuaimi, Chief of the Nuaimiya Police Station, said the duo admitted to sniffing the inflammable gas, saying they were addicted to it. “The car burst into flames after one of the two men lit a cigarette,” he said.
Lt-Col Al Nuaimi said the mishap took place at about 1am on Sunday. “The car caught fire, following which the two men managed to escape. They sustained minor burn injuries and were shifted to Khalifa Hospital for treatment and medical care. They are in a stable condition now,” he said.

USFWS proposes dropping 1.3 tons of rat poison into National Wildlife Refuge

Maggie Sergio shares US Fish and Wildlife Service plans to drop 1.3 tons of rat poison onto the Farallon Islands to kill non-native mice. The mice are attracting threatened owls who also eat endangered petrel chicks. Says Maggie, "As I read the document I couldn't believe what was being contemplated. USFWS wants to use helicopters to drop 1.3 metric tons of brodifacoum (in the form of loose rat poison pellets) over the Farallon Islands, an area that has been designated as a National Wildlife Refuge. Nonnative mice are the issue."

Before Street Lights, There Were Moonlight Towers

(New Orleans moonlight tower, c. 1882)

Before the United States became widely electrified, it was not practical to build individual street lights in many cities. That’s why some cities built “moonlight towers,” which were enormous carbon arc lamps rising hundreds of feet into the air and projecting light as far as 1,500 feet away.

(Detroit moonlight tower, c. 1900-1910).

They were called moonlight towers because their enormous lights served to replace the light of an obscured moon. They were useful, but ultimately not as practical as the street lights which replaced them. These provided more consistent illumination than moonlight towers, which could not illuminate any area blocked by a building. Changing the carbon rods could also be difficult.

Austin, Texas, though, still retains and lights 17 of the original 31 moonlight towers that it began erecting in 1895.

Ziggy

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Are gifted children getting lost in the shuffle?

Are gifted children getting lost in the shuffle?

Gifted children are likely to be the next generation’s innovators and leaders—yet the exceptionally smart are often invisible in the classroom, lacking the curricula, teacher input and external motivation to reach full potential. This conclusion […]

Reading creates changes in your brain — and that's a problem for neuroscience

At the Brain Watch blog, Christian Jarrett explains why that "reading a novel changes your brain" study really matters. Turns out, it has big implications for neuroscience. Not because it proves reading makes you smarter or anything, but because it demonstrates flaws in a fundamental assumption of most neuroscience research — that the "resting state" of your brain represents a neutral zone that you can easily compare to what happens when you do a given activity.

What does it tell you when someone says "I don't believe in evolution"?

Maybe not what you think, says Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale. In an interesting piece about the findings of a new Pew survey, he makes a case for why saying you don't believe in evolution isn't necessarily a sign of being anti-science, and points out how belief in evolution isn't as clearly broken down along political party lines as you might guess.

The oldest known decimal multiplication table would not have been terribly convenient to carry around

It's made of 21 half-meter-long strips of bamboo that were preserved for 2500 years in a tomb.

Random Photos

Eating nuts caused tooth decay in hunter-gatherers

Eating nuts and acorns may have helped hunter-gatherers survive 15,000 years ago in northern Africa but the practice wreaked havoc on their teeth, researchers said Monday. Eating nuts caused tooth decay in hunter-gatherers

Eating nuts caused tooth decay in hunter-gatherers Posted by TANN Anthropology, ArchaeoHeritage, Breakingnews, Early Humans, Forensics, Morocco 4:00 PM Eating nuts and acorns may have helped hunter-gatherers survive 15,000 years ago in northern Africa but the practice wreaked havoc on their teeth, researchers said Monday. Eating nuts caused tooth decay in hunter-gatherers From a site in Morocco and dated to more than 14,000 years old, these teeth are riddled with cavities and other signs of oral disease that may been been caused by eating nuts and acorns [Credit: Isabelle De Groote] Fermented carbohydrates in the nuts caused cavities, tooth decay and bad breath, said the study led by British scientists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a US journal. The findings offer the earliest evidence of nut harvesting and storage among African hunter-gatherers, and are based on dozens of hole-riddled dental remains found in Morocco's Taforalt Cave. Dental woes have long been believed to originate in later farming cultures some 10,000 years ago, when people began eating processed foods on a wide scale. Toothaches were presumed rare among hunter-gatherers. But this research suggests they arose earlier than previously thought by several thousand years. The study pointed to an "exceptionally high prevalence of caries," or dental disease, found in 51 percent of teeth among the adult remains. That is far higher than the rate of tooth decay generally seen in hunter-gatherers, which has ranged from zero to 14 percent, and much closer to the level seen in prehistoric farmers, said the study. "The majority of the people's mouths were affected by both cavities in the teeth and abscesses," said co-author Isabelle DeGroote of Liverpool John Moores University. "They would have suffered from frequent tooth ache and bad breath." The latest analysis was done on a total of 52 adults whose remains were found in the 1950s as well as during more recent excavations that were begun in 2003. Scientists used accelerator mass spectrometry to date the remains and potent microscopes to identify the fossils of plant material which included acorns, pine nuts, juniper berries, pistachios and wild oats. There were so many remnants of acorns that researchers came to the conclusion that they must have been harvested and stored for eating as a staple food all year long. Long esparto grasses were also identified in the excavation, and were likely used to weave baskets for carrying nuts, storing them and even cooking them, the study said. "This is the first time we have documented this set of behaviors in the Iberomaurusian," a distant culture that thrived in the Maghreb, said lead author Louise Humphrey of The Natural History Museum of London, in an email to AFP. "It is the earliest documented evidence of systematic exploitation of wild plant resources in hunter-gatherers from Africa." Iberomaurusian people inhabited Taforalt some 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. They are described as "complex hunter-gatherers" who performed elaborate burials of their dead, used grindstones to prepare food and engaged in harvesting and storage of wild nuts, the study said.

Read more at: http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2014/01/eating-nuts-caused-tooth-decay-in.html#.Usw2YrRlguw
Follow us: @ArchaeoNewsNet on Twitter | groups/thearchaeologynewsnetwork/ on Facebook

From a site in Morocco and dated to more than 14,000 years old, these teeth are riddled with cavities and other signs of oral disease that may been been caused by eating nuts and acorns

Fermented carbohydrates in the nuts caused cavities, tooth decay and bad breath, said the study led by British scientists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a US journal. The findings offer the earliest evidence of nut harvesting and storage among African hunter-gatherers, and are based on dozens of hole-riddled dental remains found in Morocco's Taforalt Cave.
Dental woes have long been believed to originate in later farming cultures some 10,000 years ago, when people began eating processed foods on a wide scale. Toothaches were presumed rare among hunter-gatherers.
But this research suggests they arose earlier than previously thought by several thousand years.
The study pointed to an "exceptionally high prevalence of caries," or dental disease, found in 51 percent of teeth among the adult remains. That is far higher than the rate of tooth decay generally seen in hunter-gatherers, which has ranged from zero to 14 percent, and much closer to the level seen in prehistoric farmers, said the study. "The majority of the people's mouths were affected by both cavities in the teeth and abscesses," said co-author Isabelle DeGroote of Liverpool John Moores University. "They would have suffered from frequent tooth ache and bad breath."
The latest analysis was done on a total of 52 adults whose remains were found in the 1950s as well as during more recent excavations that were begun in 2003.
Scientists used accelerator mass spectrometry to date the remains and potent microscopes to identify the fossils of plant material which included acorns, pine nuts, juniper berries, pistachios and wild oats. There were so many remnants of acorns that researchers came to the conclusion that they must have been harvested and stored for eating as a staple food all year long.
Long esparto grasses were also identified in the excavation, and were likely used to weave baskets for carrying nuts, storing them and even cooking them, the study said. "This is the first time we have documented this set of behaviors in the Iberomaurusian," a distant culture that thrived in the Maghreb, said lead author Louise Humphrey of The Natural History Museum of London, in an email,. "It is the earliest documented evidence of systematic exploitation of wild plant resources in hunter-gatherers from Africa." Iberomaurusian people inhabited Taforalt some 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. They are described as "complex hunter-gatherers" who performed elaborate burials of their dead, used grindstones to prepare food and engaged in harvesting and storage of wild nuts, the study said.

When deadly biology puts on a white hat

Prions — the misfolded proteins implicated in mad cow disease — have always seemed to be inherently a bad thing. But new research suggests that some kinds of prions may actually be beneficial, protecting from disease even as their scary cousins cause it.

How tube worms and bacteria can help underwater archaeology

Underwater archaeologists usually aren't big fans of the stubbornly clingy creatures that attach themselves to the sides of sunken vases and other shipwreck detritus. But now, ocean ecologists (who do like those life forms) are making a case for why the archaeologists should appreciate the stuff that grows on little bits of history.

There Are More Stars Than Grains Of Sand

There are 10 times more stars in the night sky than grains of sand in the world's deserts and beaches, scientists say. Astronomers have worked out that there are 70 thousand million million million - or seven followed by 22 zeros - stars visible from the Earth through telescopes. The total is said to be the most accurate estimate yet of the number of stars.

Daily Comic Relief

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The 'First' Giant Panda And How It Ended Up In Paris

The discovery of the giant panda took place less than 150 years ago, when a French Catholic priest got his hands on 'a most excellent black and white bear.'

The first westerner to clap eyes on a giant panda is thought to have been a French priest and naturalist known as Armand David. He'd been posted to China in 1862 to spread the Christian word, but was a keen naturalist too and went on several collecting trips over the course of his stay, sending specimens back to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

Cattle rustlers dumped car with four live cows inside

Two men had to abandon their Proton Wira car that had been modified for cattle rustling after it broke down in Malaysia on Sunday.

The car with the back seat removed was loaded with four cows, rustled from a cattle farm in Sungai Lembu, Bukit Mertajam, with the animals in the boot/back seat compartment. Kulim deputy police chief Chin Soo Song said the farm's owner had lodged a police report on the missing cattle at the Lunas police station at 5am.

"They (the thieves) had taken the Butterworth-Kulim Expressway in making their escape but after the Lunas Toll Plaza, they came across members of the public who were helping the owner to find the animals. They then drove away but their car broke down a short distance away, forcing them to abandon the vehicle and booty," he said.

He added that members of the public joined by a team from the Pertubuhan Perihatin Kemsyarakatan Daerah Kulim (PPKM) later found the animals at around 7am near Kampung Siam, about 15 kilometers from where they were stolen.

Dog found treading water two miles off Florida coast

At about 7:30 on Thursday morning, a fisherman saw a small dog's nose rising above the waves about 2 miles from the St. Petersburg shoreline in Tampa Bay. He pulled it from the water and took it to a marina at Demens Landing Park. It's not clear how the dog got into the water, nor how long she had been treading water before she was rescued.

Anthony Basile was going to pay rent for his boat slip when he saw the fishermen putting the dog on the dock. He took the dog, named Baby, to his boat and has been caring for her since. "It's sad," Basile said. "The dog is lost." Basile said Baby could barely take care of herself and it didn't take long for him to get attached. When he first took Baby to his boat he wasn't sure she would even make it.
"I tried to give her some food. She wouldn't eat, she wouldn't drink. Just shaking scared," Basile said. He sat with her for hours making sure she was warm while trying to calm her down. So far efforts to figure that out what happened to Baby lead to more questions. She has a collar on with her name on it, even a phone number to call, but it has been disconnected. Baby is well trained and friendly. She is clearly comfortable on Basile's boat and is now eating, drinking and making herself more at home.

YouTube link.

But Basile says she knows this isn't where she is supposed to be. "If you watch the dog, she's looking for somebody else," he said. Until he can find that person, he will treat her like she is his own baby. "I'm not going to leave the dogs side. I'll find a home for her or keep her as long as it has to be," Basile said. He also took her to the vet where they scanned the dog and found a micro chip. They found one and have tried to contact the person listed, but so far, no luck.