Kash Patel math

At a press conference on Tuesday, April 21, 2026, FBI director Kash Patel said, “This FBI director has been on the job twice as many days as every director before me. What that means is I've taken half as many days off as those before me. What that means is I've taken a third less vacation than those before me.” (Source: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DXal0fgDxd9/ )

Question:

How many days has Kash Patel worked compared to every FBI director before him?

Assumptions:

* Kash Patel is comparing his days on the job to the average of the number of days on the job of each individual director before him over the same number of days. That is, Kash Patel is NOT comparing his days on the job to the sum of days on the job of all preceding FBI directors. (For a list of previous FBI directors and duration of service, see https://www.britannica.com/topic/directors-of-the-Federal-Bureau-of-Investigation-2227605 )

* Because Kash Patel distinguishes between days off and vacation days, days off and vacation days are mutually exclusive.

* The sum of days worked, days off, and vacation days = Kash Patel's tenure so far at the FBI. Kash Patel was sworn in on Feb. 21, 2025. At the time of the press conference on April 21, 2026, Kash Patel had been FBI director for 424 days.

* The number of vacation days Kash Patel has taken since his swearing in = 17. (Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/04/19/kash-patel-promises-hell-sue-the-atlantic-on-monday-after-report-of-excessive-drinking/ )

Definitions of terms:

Dk = Kash Patel’s days on the job
Ok = Kash Patel’s days off
Vk = Kash Patel’s vacation days
Dp = average of Kash Patel’s predecessors’ days on the job
Op = average of Kash Patel’s predecessors’ days off
Vp = average of Kash Patel’s predecessors’ vacation days

Equations:

(a) Dk + Ok + Vk = 424
(b) Dp + Op + Vp = 424
(c) Dk = 2Dp
(d) Ok = Op/2
(e) Vk = Vp – Vp/3 = 2Vp/3
(f) Vk = 17

Solve for Dk, Ok, Vk, Dp, Op, and Vp:

From (e) and (f),
Vp = 3Vk/2
= 17 * 3 / 2
Vp = 25.5

From (a) and (b),
Dk + Ok + Vk = Dp + Op + Vp
Dk = Dp + Op + Vp - Ok - Vk
= Dp + Op + 25.5 - Ok – 17
= Dp + Op - Ok + 8.5

From (d),
Dk = Dp + Op - Op/2 + 8.5
= Dp + Op/2 + 8.5

From (c), Dk = 2Dp
2Dp = Dp + Op/2 + 8.5
Dp = Op/2 + 8.5

From (b),
Dp + Op + Vp = (Op/2 + 8.5) + Op + 25.5
= 3Op/2 + 34 = 424
3Op/2 = 424 - 34 = 390
Op = 2 * 390 / 3 = 260
Ok = Op/2 = 130

Dp = 424 - Op - Vp
= 424 - 260 - 25.5
Dp = 138.5
Dk = 2 * 138.5 = 277

Conclusion:

For every 424 days in office, Kash Patel has worked 277 days; taken off 130 days; and taken 17 vacation days. For every 424 days in office, Kash Patel’s predecessors on average worked 138.5 days; took off 260 days; and took 25.5 vacation days.

Normalized per year:

Days worked per year: Kash Patel 238.5, Predecessors 119.3
Days off per year: Kash Patel 111.9, Predecessors 223.8
Vacation days per year: Kash Patel 14.6, Predecessors 22

Discussion questions:

* Do you think Kash Patel's assessment of his predecessors' work is accurate? Why or why not? How might you check?
* How would these numbers change if Kash Patel meant "business days" instead of "days"?
* How would these numbers change if weekends are included in "days off"?
* How would these numbers change if (a) "days off" are counted as "vacation days"? (b) If "vacation days" are counted as "days off"?
* Kash Patel was confirmed in the senate by a vote of 51-49. How many votes too many was that?
* J. Edgar Hoover was FBI Director for 48 years and 358 days. How many days total does Kash Patel think Hoover (a) worked, (b) took off, and (c) used for vacation?

Die Durhaemmer

When I first started walking with greater intention (absichtswandern?) back in 2021, one of the motivations was that those trans-continental trails I wanted to traverse weren't going to hike themselves. Turns out I was thinking about trans-continental trails on the wrong continent, but whatevs. 

As S approaches retirement and we contemplate spending more months every year in Germany, I realized that my German language skills weren't going to improve themselves. My German is adequate, but not great, and if I'm going to have any kind of social or work life in Germany, it behooves me to be better than adequate.

Thus was born Die Durhaemmer, a German-language review club. The name sorta means The Durhamites--or The Minor-Key Hammers. We're using a free online textbook and reviewing one unit or so per week. Participation varies, but we're hobbling along with a core group of attendees after six months, and I continue to meet new and interesting people connected by a shared language interest.

Alongside Die Durhaemmer, I've started using an app called Seedlang, which was created by the same folks who appear in many of the videos used by the online textbook. They have enough of a sense of humor and offer enough grammar explication that I paid for a year's subscription, and I've been refreshing and newly learning swaths of useful vocabulary. The app incorporates enthusiastic verbal reinforcement from its makers: every time you finish an exercise, someone pops onto the screen and says something like "way to go!"--which is how I learned Du bist der Hammer! means "You're da bomb!" So now we have a third meaning for Die Durhaemmer.

I'm looking forward to inserting some of my new vocab into conversations this summer, such as:

Die Fortbewegungsmittel (pl. -) - means of transportation. Same number of syllables as in English. Vroom vroom!

Die Bedienungsanleitung (pl. -en) - service manual. Why use two words when you can just use one?

Der Tacho (pl. -s) - speedometer. How have I gotten by in Germany for the past 36 years without knowing the word speedometer? Plus it sounds like a mix between Taco and Tycho, like Tycho Brahe the astronomer, which makes it fun to say.

My favorite new word so far is Die Gleichung. Gleich means "same." Equations express equivalences, things that are the quantitatively the same on both sides of the equals sign. The word "equation" in English offers a similar conceptual self-awareness as die Gleichung. In fact, there's a shared conceptual origin in both languages, even if the words gleich and "equal" themselves don't share any etymological roots. I find these sorts of connections delightful.   

My current favorite new sentence, courtesy of the app: Was ist die schnellste Geschwindigkeit, die du je gafahren bist? ("What's the fastest speed you've ever driven?") So many useful grammatical tidbits and reminders to cull from that, plus a casual way to segue iinto using the word Tacho.

Fun facts are rapidly accruing, like why is it das Wort (the word) but die Antwort (the answer), when gender is usually determined by the gender of the final root word (wort)? The interwebs say it's because the formerly neuter noun Antwort hung around so frequently with the feminine noun die Frage (the question), that users gradually made Antwort feminine.

Speaking of linguistic evolution, here's a fun fact about many weak masculine nouns (which I love--masculine nouns are the only ones that can be weak, and whatever their weakness is causes them to add an -n to the end when they're in any case but nominative, because who knows why). Many weak nouns, such as der Friede (peace), are becoming permanently -n-ed (-n-ified?): speakers often now use der Frieden instead of der Friede when peace is the subject. Cool.

I learned at last week's Durhaemmer meeting that one linguistic evolution is the gradual abandonment of the genitive case, which apparently increasingly circumvented using von (of) with the dative case. Genitive is generally used to indicate a noun that is of something, e.g. "of good courage" in "Sei gutes Muts" ("Be of good courage"--thanks, Der Tod und das Maedchen!), or "the pleasure of the miller" in "Das Wandern ist des Mullers Lust" ("Hiking is the pleasure of the miller"--thanks, Die Schoene Muellerin!). As enthusiastic as I am about linguistic shifts, this one makes me a little sad, as one of my motivations for starting Die Durhaemmer was to correctly deploy the genitive case. We won't even get to it until the free German 102 online textbook, but here it is, already dying. Dang. And yet, to paraphrase the dying John Adams' last words ("Jefferson still lives"), at least we still have the dative. (Dative is the to/for case--e.g. Ich gebe dem Hund den Ball--"I give to the dative dog the accusative ball"). We won't get to dative until the next textbook either, but Die Durhaemmer are a precocious lot, and we're already dativing.

Gentle reader, as you can tell from this post (if you've stuck with it this far), German is giving me as intellectually vast a rabbit hole as I've found physically with walking. The immediate impact is that I speak German a tad more precisely but much more slowly (click click click goes my brain). Looking forward to speeding things up and putting refreshed skills good use this summer.

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Update: I don't think E has read this post, but he happened to email a long word yesterday that he came across in his research: das Fernwasserleitungsnetz (long distance water distribution network).