Lifespan

ME: What’s your query query?

Well, it’s a pretty obvious one…

Can we ask questions in reverse…?

Like…

“What happened to this thing on this date?”

Yes, that’s where things get interesting 👍🏻

We can query pretty much anything, in all sorts of ways.

So we can ask:

“what was this person doing when they were the same age as that person when that thing happened?”

…which lets us look for different perspectives and reflections and comparisons… whatever makes sense.

You mean like…

“Where was my mum when JFK was assassinated?”

Yeah, classic questions like that. But also… y’know… anything and everything else.

And how do you present this information?

…and does it even make sense to people?

…and more importantly, why would anyone care?

…and…

…and…

Well, these are the kinds of questions I’m exploring.

I think there’s something here to be discovered.

Well… how about this…

Are these queries how you could get a generative feedback loop going? 🪴

That’s what I was thinking.

If there’s a question that you don’t know the answer to yet, that’s when you’re prompted to add information to the system.

Yeah, this is when you fill in the gaps… either for your own lifespan or someone else’s.

You could ask your parents what they were doing when something happened… and add it.

A personal temporal Wikipedia, in other words 💡

There’s a bit of a problem here, though, isn’t there?

I mean, you said you could get lots of information from Wikipedia, right?

But I’m not in Wikipedia, and nor is anyone or anything in my personal life.

So that’s a lot of gaps to fill… manually.

Right. But you can bring in some things automatically.

What do you mean?

Well, you can import your work history from LinkedIn, if it’s there. And you can import photos from places like Flickr, or even your Photo library on your Mac.

What??

Well, you probably have loads of photos, right? They all have timestamps, and they also have EXIF data with geolocation data.

We can import this information into Lifespan to get a kind of skeleton of the places you’ve been at different times.

And you’ve got this working?

Sort of. It’s a bit experimental.