  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.
