My cat Chester investigates the elusive relationship between the appearance in my hand of a silver laser pointer and that of a red dot on the wall, or on the floor, or on any other object that resides within the vicinity of the laser pointer. Chester first assesses preliminary establishments for causality, including mutual information, temporal precedence, and control for third variables. These assessments are all inconclusive for various reasons. In particular, mutual information fails to illuminate the problem due to a dearth of information regarding what the laser pointer might have been doing at times following Chester's first awareness of the dot. Next Chester performs a formal reconstruction of phase space via time-delay embedding, to unfold the gggggggggggfffgfgtredvteometry ,mmmm.........,.,,......,.mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm of the underlying dynamical system giving rise to the red dot's trajectory. The resulting attractor does not resemble a laser pointer. The reconstruction could, however, be flawed, for example, due to the short temporal duration of the dot's observed trajectory. Finally, the red dot could be a hallucination: a symptom brought on by COVID-19 - because, well, these days pretty much anything might be a symptom brought on by COVID-19. On this note, Chester's kitten brother Mad Dog Lapynski offers an independent check on the red dot's existence. Moreover, the results of this study are inconclusive and ca[pokilki[[[[[ll for follow-up.
My cat Chester's dynamical systems analysyyyyy7777777777777777y7is of the laser pointer and the red dot on the wall: correlation, causation, or SARS-Cov-2 hallucination?