RicodJour wrote:
On Oct 25, 8:08 am, "HeyBub" wrote:

Correlation does not imply causation.

Ummm, yes, it does. Correlation does not establish absolute
causation, but it certainly implies a link.

You may be on to something. I recently read a report about pickles being
dangerous! It was observed that all the people who ate pickles before 1900
were, today, either: a) Dead, or b) Had white hair and no teeth.

To test whether this correlation implied a valid correlation, experimenters
force-fed five pounds of pickles per day to laboratory rats. They discovered
that the rats developed distended stomachs and became lethargic. (The rats
were already white, so they couldn't test that part of the observation.)

Why this discovery has not made it to the main-stream media is a mystery.
Obviously there is a conspiracy involving Vlasic and NBC.

Use caution around pickles, particularly eye-protection when drinking pickle
juice from the jar before all the pickles are gone.



Half the defective smoke detectors
being over ten years old may be due to other causes:

* They came from dirty homes and the dust-bunnies interfered with
proper operation. It's a fact that half the homes in America are
dirtier than the median.

This is true.

* Ten years ago, there was a big influx of Chinese smoke detector
circuitry made with Melamine.

This is an attempt at a joke.

We won't know for sure until we can tabulate the number of children who ate
smoke detectors and developed kidney problems.


* ALL of the failed smoke detectors had their batteries removed to
eliminate the nagging chirp.

This is nonsense.

Nope.

[Wikipedia]
"The first commercial smoke detectors came to market in 1969. Today they are
installed in 93% of US homes and 85% of UK homes. However it is estimated
that any given time over 30% of these alarms don't work, as users remove the
batteries, or forget to replace them."

[Department of Homeland Security, FEMA]
" First, the 12% of homes without alarms have more than half of the fires;
second, it is estimated that a third of the smoke alarms in place are not
working, often due to failure to replace a worn out battery..."
http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pyfff/smkalarm.html

[Western Journal of Medicine, National Institutes of Health]
"Some failures are due to malfunction of the alarm itself, some are due to a
dead battery, and some do not function because the battery has been
removed..."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071009/

And several thousand other references.




It's poor practice to make decisions based on assumptions about
cause and effect.

If one gets exercised over the "ten year = failure" business, here's
an even more shocking revelation: Virtually ALL of the failed smoke
detectors were colored white!

Beware.

If you don't have any information to add, you shouldn't.


You added: "This is true," "This is an attempt at a joke," and "This is
nonsense."

I applaud your significant contributions to the thread and stand in awe.

Your last admonition was somewhat confusing: If I don't have any information
to add, I can't very well add any information! I suspect, however, that's
there's a hidden meaning which I will eventually puzzle-out.