Part 2: The n=1 Trap — My Friend Was the Hypothesis, Not the Proof
Nobody Said Take My Money — Part 2 of 7 Mother Hen started the way a lot of doomed products start: with a real person and a real problem. A friend of mine keeps chickens. Like every chicken keeper, he had a door problem — the coop door has to be closed after the birds go in at dusk and opened again in the morning, and the cost of getting that wrong even once is dead birds. He had automated parts of it, but automation without monitoring just moves the worry: now instead of wondering whether you closed the door, you wonder whether the machine did. He wanted to know, from the house, at any hour, that the coop was actually secure. ...