S and I were walking down the street today, and were thinking about the Internet of Things. Now, it’s a buzzword, and should be taken with a similar-sized grain of salt to all other similar buzzwords.

So we attempted to come up with the worst ideas possible for an Internet of Things.

The first idea was to put chips/sensors in each block in the sidewalk. But thinking about it, that would be really useful. Similar to rail lines[1], there is a widely distributed infrastructure, and checking each part individually is expensive.

Then we thought of putting individual chips/sensors in each tile in a person’s house. How silly would that be? But then you could know exactly what the person was doing, turn lights on and off correctly, rather than the current primitive motion sensors, help people track a daily routine, all kinds of things.

But the last idea we came up with led to the title of this post. What if every cracker you ate had a sensor/chip in it? You would have an almost continuous stream of data about your digestive system, what you were eating, how your body was responding to it. Think of the advances in nutrition science!

And we would owe it all to the Internet of Thins[2].

[1]Look it up! Think about the maintenance costs of surveying 140,000 miles of track.

[2]Gluten-free Wheat Thins for some.