"Doug Kanter" wrote in message
...
"John Crichton" wrote in message
news:Mndie.688$796.482@attbi_s21...
I second the spot treatment with "weed d gone". This stuff is very
reasonably safe. The extreme tree huggers here will tell you that
you can
have a green weed free yard using only "natural" herbicides and
mechanical
removal but it just ain't so.

It's not so much tree huggers as it is people who look for
information from
more than product labels, or the first 2 pages of the newspaper,
John. An
interesting example (which proves nothing, and disproves nothing): A
recent
story on NPR talked about prostate cancer, and how researchers had
modified
the theory that Japanese men in Japan (as opposed to here) had an
extremely
low rate of the disease. Initial assumption were that diet or
genetics were
the reason. But, they ruled out genetics by finding Japanese men
who'd spent
their lives here, and discovering that their cancer rate was pretty
much
identical to the rest of the American male population. The
researcher who
was interviewed cautioned against any conclusions because he said
they had
not yet tabulating results based on other factors - which of the men
ate
(here) the way they would if they lived in Japan. He went on to say
that if,
by some magic, they could rule out diet as a significant factor, it
would be
a mixed blessing because they would be left with the unknowable:
What kinds
of crap was the survey population exposed to simply by living here.


It's called ascertainment bias.


Here (Rochester NY), we hear the same thing when scientists talk
about
whatever Kodak spews out of its chimneys. If you lived right next
door to a
manufacturer who was known to be releasing a specific chemical, and
you knew
that chemical was, beyond a shadow of a doubt to be toxic, it would
be easy
to say that this was the chemical making neighbors sick. But, that's
rarely
the situation. Now, it's next to impossible to isolate any single
chemical
as the cause of a cancer cluster because people are exposed to so
many
things, most of which are difficult to pin down.

So, why add to the mix? To support a crop that is unrealistic, such
as
grass, and force it to grow in ways it's not designed to?