To be honest, we’re not sure. We were hoping you could tell us, because we designed CuculCan to be a general purpose tool. If you’re working on a school project, graphing the decline of world fish stocks* or wondering whether to send 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, you can use CuculCan.

If you’re trying to decide the best date for the wedding, peering into the first picoseconds of the Big Bang† or wondering whether you should start thawing the turkey on Monday or Tuesday, you can use CuculCan.

The possibilities are endless and we can’t possibly guess what all you’ll do with CuculCan, but as we’re just starting out and there’s almost nothing in the database right now, we’ll make a few suggestions in the next column.

If you have own ideas of how to use CuculCan, please tell us about them in the Solutions forum.

Time trials

Show how the suspect could have made it back to the scene of the crime because the street closures hadn’t yet begun or why your client couldn’t have known that the stock would be devalued.

Trip planning

Planning that great vacation would be better if you knew that you can see the museum in the morning, catch the baseball game in the afternoon and still have time to meet old friends at night.

Tracking politicians

If a politician says he did or didn’t vote for something before a certain event, create a matchup that compares his voting record with the event.

We’re still working on the graphing function, so you might have to wait just a little bit, but line, bar and area graphs should be ready sometime around February 2010.

And we don’t have the ability yet to use scientific notation in timelines, but we are working on it. The current smallest timespan is seconds and the earliest possible date is something like 200,000 BCE.

Yes, I’m embarrassed by these weaselly footnotes, but give me a break; I’m peddling as fast as I can.