I interpreted this as a question about the expectation of a discrete random variable. And I used octave to solve this weeks riddler express . Suppose a new pill bottle has whole tablets. Each day you pull a tablet, if it's whole, divide it and return the unused half. What's the average number of days until you pull a half tablet? The outcomes are going to be 1 whole 1 half, 2 wholes 1 half, 3 wholes 1 half. And so on and on until all whole tablets are pulled. So call each outcome w i h: meaning pull i whole tablets then a half tablet. For a new bottle w 0 and h 0 are 100 and 0 respectively. Assume some present state of the bottle w,h. When a whole tablet is pulled, half is consumed and half is returned, so the state becomes w-1, h+1. Which means the bottle always has 100 tablets. So odds of pulling 1 whole tablet are 100/100, for 2 whole tablets we have 99/100, and so on, note we must take the product of pulling 1 and 2 because the odds of pulling 2 are conditio
My work e-mail had become a mess. Over the last two months I've been assigned about 4+ new projects to work on and track progress on, and I've been noticing I'm feeling lost and unproductive. Too much attempting to remember tasks and progress and requests, and not enough work pushing those items out of my memory and out of unsearchable, unstructured, untrackable e-mail threads. Today I went through every e-mail in my inbox and did the 4 Ds. Delete, do, delegate, defer. I deleted the majority of them, most e-mails are simply zero information status garbage. It only takes about a second to know something is garbage so these are pretty low overhead. I did almost nothing while actually combing through. Most e-mails were so old I'd either finished the project associated or some deadline had passed and it was irrelevant anyway. Otherwise the doing was moving information out of e-mail and in the wiki page I'd created. I delegated almost nothing. But I may later.