Monday, January 22, 2007

W.A.K.A.

You've heard them. The old guys sitting around talking about their trick knees. Maybe it happened during a war or a football game or when they fell out of a tree, but something screwed up their knees and now changes in the weather cause them pain.

"There goes my trick knee again. Feels like it's gonna rain."

It occurred to me earlier today that there's so many leg and knee injuries here on base — there's a war on, you might have heard about it — that we have access to probably the largest collection of trick knees in recent history. If only there were some way to network those knees. In the cities we can use cellphone towers to track a phone with greater accuracy than with GPS satellites. The more towers there are the greater the accuracy. I think we need transmitters in these knees. As the soldiers spread out across the country their knees would record the pressure and fluid levels in the knee and transmit them back to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) computers which would use the collective readings to predict weather patterns. We'll call it the Wide Area Knee Array, or WAKA for short.

What?
Stop looking at me like that.

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