i noticed that while your last blog posts have an average posting time of 11:03 pm, the temporal distribution of your posts has become heteroskedastic, with more recent posts occuring around the same time, when there was previously greater variance. Thus, it's suprising that you would complain about recent confusion over the order in which you have recieved messages, since clearly your life has become more ordered and scheduled over the past 4 months.

(this is my attempt at combining Holmesian inference with social scientific analysis)

Well I looked at two definitions of 'heteroskedastic' and I still don't understand it at all. So you can take your fancy words and your book learnin' and just leave town.

Seriously, it's a good observation. I have been making more of an effort over the last few months to get to work at a vaguely reasonable hour, which has put an end to 4am entries, and I can never get around to writing posts early in the evening--even if I do, I often spend a lot of time on them and don't finish them until it's late. Another observation I had taken from the timestamps of my posts is that without having made any specific effort, none of my recent entries have been on weekends. What inferences would you draw from that?

i already am aware that you don't blog on weekends as you are typically "otherwise occupied" and not home.

Also, I give a simple definition of heteroskedasticity right in the message. If I am examining the average post time of blog entries across several months, I can easily determine the average time of day at which you post across this time span. If the variance or variability of post times (the deviance from the average time) is about the same in january as it is in april, I would characterize the pattern of post times as "homoskedastic." but if there is greater variability in january than there is in april (or vice-versa) I can characterize the pattern as heteroskedastic.

Granted, no one should be using the term "heteroskedastic" in firendly conversation, but when you spend every waking minute (approximately) working on a dissertation 7 days a week, doing a crude analysis of someone's blog site seems rather fun.

With regard to the question of whether you got the message - just say, "no", or "I don't think so". They'll send it again, and you can then determine whether you already have it. You won't seem irritating.

I learned this in self defense - people thought I was being irritating because I'd ask similar questions to yours.