I was writing up my main post reverse-engineering Skyrim pickpocketing and found myself going a little too deep into how Non-Player Characters gain skills. Once again the wiki had the wrong formula, which was making it hard to answer my question: who has the lowest and highest pickpocketing skill?
I was recently the willful accomplice victim of a successful plot to pull me back into Skyrim. I put hundreds of hours into the game back in high school but had mostly escaped — until my friend texted me when I was sick. While playing through it seemed like the pickpocketing chance was bugged. Follow me down the spiraling rabbit hole to reverse engineer what backs it, what causes the bug, and just how much gold I can get away with stealing.
Back in college I wrote The Mathematics Behind "Ride the Bus", detailing the mathematics behind expected drinking while playing a game of luck skill where someone deals a card off the top of a shuffled deck one at a time, and you have to answer four questions about the next card: get one wrong, and you go back to the beginning. I recently looked it up again and wanted to know the median — when adding it I noticed and fixed some mistakes I made in my original simulation, and while I was at it, found a closed form for the odds!
While I'm not lactose intolerant I have a lot of friends who are, and so as a generous host I like to keep Lactaid on hand. I noticed that the letters for the Tic Tac logo could be moved around to make Lactaid, so I figured rather than keep them in the normal packaging I could make a custom box!