Posted on 09/26/2005 1:35:27 PM PDT by Albertafriend
Well I was going to put this into some other thread but things have been moving so fast that it is going to be lost and I have been encouraged to give it one of its own. So since this is the first time I've posted like this, I hope I do it all right. I was feeling really frustrated by all the conflicting accounts of how many people were at the anti-war/anti-everything related or not related to Bush protest, that I decided to try to get a closer number based on the picture that came from Reuters of the crowd on the elipse and the sidewalk. I enlarged the picture a bit (about2X) and then printed it off. I divided it into a grid and decided to count, using a very stong magnifying glass,letting each pixel stand for 1-3 people depending on its size. After doing this for a while, I started using my clear ruler that is divided into 1/8 inch squares with about 16 pixels per square. This worked a lot better. So after working on it for a couple of hours, even allowing them that the same numbers could be obscured by the trees near the crowd, and being generous because some of the grays are probably pavement, I reached a grand total of---6749! The top number possible since there are probably some not in the picture would have to be about 10,000. Of course that's 10,000 too many but I"m wondering where are the other 90-93,000 hiding out?
The National Park Service used to make scientific estimates of crowd size on the mall.
It became very common for groups to claim the NPS had PURPOSEFULLY undercounted their numbers. This reached its peak with the so-called "Million Man March"...which drew about 600,000.
The NPS got tired of being doormats for accusations of racism, sexism and all other ism's and they no longer count crowd size.
OK.
So, what you've figured is that IF the "oval" (sidewalk to sidewalk) were jammed full of people, each standing in his/her/its own area of 10 ft^2 (which is reasonable only if the people REALLY like each other!), THEN there would be 76,000 people in the Oval.
So, on Saturday, the Oval was 1/4 - 1/5 full, but there were a few more people on the street, under the trees on the grass, and out of the picture entirely. But there weren't 200,000; 150,000; 100,000, or more on the area.
Exactly right.
Figured sidewalk to sidewalk.
BTW, the Official Ellipse website lists the park as 52 acres, but that must include the entire rectangular footprint surrounding the Ellipse.
XS, your thoughts?
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