Is Lilah Predictable?

Well, OK, in the strictest sense Lilah is predictable. For example, if you feed her at noon I can predict with 100% that you will have needed to feed her again before 5 pm. But that kind of predictability is not really all that useful. But one of the reasons we [well, ok, me] first started analyzing data was to determine if there is any way that we can use Lilah's previous time between feed times to predict Lilah's next time between feeds. This sort of information would be great to let us know if, for example, we had a three hour window to go to a movie, have dinner, sleep, or stare aimless at the wall.

We initial guess is that if I were to plot time between one feeding vs. time to the next I would find that Lilah's short sleeps are followed by a longer sleep. Or maybe you would find that short sleeps are clustered, as are long sleeps. I think my initial guess was that I would find something that I could try to make sense out of, but this is an excellent place to insert a quote from Crossing to Safety, one of my favorite novels by Wallace Stegner. This quote made its way into my Ph.D. thesis, but, really, it makes a lot more sense now:

Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is another word for
dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.
Certainly "witless chance" is the law of Lilah. I present the proof:
(note that this plot updates daily. at the time of the above writing there really was no obvious pattern whatsoever. But since about Day 30 the two armed pattern currently discernible has been forming. See the sleep log, Day 45 for example)

The x-axis shows the time between two feeds while the y-axis shows the time between the next two feeds. Each dot thus shows you how long she spent between two subsequent feed times. If Lilah were in any way consistent, we could use the plot to guess how much time Lilah would go until her next feeding based on how long she went to this one.

As of 6 August 2005, when I first put this plot up, there is absolutely no correlation (or anti-correlation) between feeds. If Lilah goes a quick 1 1/2 between feeds her next feed could be an hour away or three hours away. If Liliah has stretched out to 3 hours, the next feed might be an hour later. Or three. Thanks for helping us out with trying to bring order to our lives, Lilah.