User Panel
Well said, sir.
The big 9/12 protest certainly attracted a ton of people. How many seems to be an open question. The Washington Post
reported “tens of thousands,” so a conservative might reasonably expect
there to have been at least a hundred thousand. The low end of
estimates seems to be around 50,000–60,000, and the high end, in the
London Daily Mail was two million. That’s a pretty big spread.
In
the last story the Volgi read, it reported the police had declined to
give any estimates (despite earlier reports they were saying 50K-60K),
and the Park Police are out of the crowd-estimation business (if one
recalls right, they got too much flack for saying the Million Man March
was actually the Four-Hundred-Thousand-Man March).
So, let’s take a look at some pictures.
In
this one, taken from the Capitol, you can see the crowd extends past
the Grant Memorial (the equestrian statue in the middle ground).
In
this one, also taken from the Capitol, but looking northwest, rather
than due west down the Mall, you can see the Peace Monument with the
William B. Bryant Annex of the U.S. Courthouse at Third and
Constitution in the background, with the crowd extending up
Pennsylvania Avenue.
Ok, now click over to the Flash app at the top of this USA Today article on estimating crowd sizes in anticipation of the record crowd at President Obama’s inauguration.
I'd
guess that you've got at least a third of that 240K space filled up—so
say that's 80K, not counting whoever's coming down Pennsylvania.
Now look at this picture:
That’s a solid line of people from Fourteenth & E all the way to the Capitol. Fourteenth Street is where the USA Today
dot indicating the 1.2 million who attended LBJ’s inauguration. Of
course, this isn’t exactly right, because Pennsylvania is running
diagonally, so it’s actually a longer line, and because Pennsylvania is
narrower than the Mall (1.25 x 0.2 mi vs. 1.18 x 0.5 mi, by my Google
Earth measurements.)
So, if, for the sake of argument, the Mall
to Fourteenth, at [1.18 x 0.5 =] .59 sq. mi., holds 1.2M people, and
Penn. Ave. to Fourteenth is [1.25 x 0.2] = .25 sq. mi., then you've got
something just over 500K people in that picture.
So add that to 80K, and you're up around 600K.
Buuuuut, apparently there were people going from the White House to the Capitol “for three hours” according to the caption here.
Let's
assume the first person leaves at 0:00. At an average 3 mph, she'll
reach the Capitol in .42 hours, or 25 minutes. (I say she because 3 mph
is the average walking speed for women.) So, let's let her walk slowly
and get there at 0:30. At that point, you've got your first 500K
people, right? At 1:00, you're up to a million, and by 3:00, you're up
to three million. Now, let's say they were walking especially slowly
and that there wasn't a constantly solid 500K there. What do we bump it
down to? A million five? Two mil?
Now, let's go to the video.
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It
looks to your Volgi like people are milling around there for the first
16 seconds or so. It's not until 21 seconds that you see the whole
length of Pennsylvania covered (let's say that's our first 500K).
People then keep the street filled until the tail of the crowd appears
at 36 seconds.
So, if the 40-second video is an accurate
time-lapse of the 210 minutes from 8:00-11:30, then the 21-36 second
march portion actually represents the 78.75 minutes from 9:50:15 to
11:09:00—much less than three hours. Every second represents five and a
quarter minutes. If our 500K/30 minutes is right, then there are 87,500
people leaving every second of the video. Which, by the end of the
thirty-sixth second means that 1,812,500 people have left. We’re in
territory close to the Daily Mail’s number.
Now
your Volgi is smart enough to know that he’s not knowledgeable enough
to conclude that his assumptions are right. (He didn’t get to be
Œcumenical Volgi by overestimating his own abilities. 其言之不怍, 則為之也難!) So
he ran it by the Czar, who came up with two interesting points. First,
this photo:
[UPDATE: Turns out this is of a 1997 Promise Keepers’ rally. The Czar was right to note the missing metadata. Apologies.]
If we treat the USA Today
chart as authoritative, this shows well in excess of LBJ’s 1.2 million
people. Doing a quick-and-dirty estimate of the amount of ground the
crowds around the Washington Monument are occupying gives another
couple hundred thousand, putting the total around 1.5 million.
But, thus spake the Czar:
We,
by the grace of God, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, of
Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan,
Tsar of Poland, Tsar of Siberia, Tsar of Tauric Chersonesos, Tsar of
Georgia, Lord of Pskov, and Grand Duke of Smolensk, Lithuania,
Volhynia, Podolia, and Finland, and so forth, and so forth, and so
forth, took that photograph and put it on our left, jewel-encrusted
Fabergé monitor.
We went to Google maps and went to map view to
zoom into the exact area of the mall shown in the picture. We then
switched to satellite view, and took a screen capture of it.
We
opened up AutoCAD on our right-hand monitor. We pasted in the satellite
image. Using a polyline tool, we traced over the areas that people are
standing in, including the crowds that spilled over onto the streets,
around the curved pavilion behind the Castle, and even drew around
the trees because no one was in the thickets. We came up with four
distinct crowds: two at the Washington Monument, one between the
Monument and the Mall (a small one), and of course the Mall all the way
up to the Reflecting Pool.
We deleted the photo, leaving the
polylines. Knowing from the photo that 7/8" actual was equivalent to
500 feet, we scaled up the polylines to full size. AutoCAD computes
areas of enclosed polylines, and the grand total of all four crowd
shapes was 2,350,069 square feet.
Now. Here's what happens. If you use the usual
method of computing massed crowds (the one the journalists use), you
divide the square footage by two... and you get 1,175,035. That's where
the 1.2 million number comes from.
But to be honest, that
"divide by 2" trick is only used in extremely packed conditions...like
how many guys can you stuff into a locker. A more reasonable number for
a loose crowd—like at a concert in the park—is 4.5 sq. ft. per person.
If that's a better description for what you see in the photo, then
there are only about 522,238 people in that photo. We don't think this
crowd is tightly packed, especially if it was walking and converging.
We would say the crowd is tighter closest to the Capitol, and fading
back to about 9 square feet per person. We boldly suggest there are
between 600,000-750,000 people in this picture!*
We noticed that USA Today
is dividing by 2.5 sq. ft./person We think that's outrageously tight.
That's like sardines! We have ordered the execution of their statician.
Using that figure, we trace an even larger area than they did,
and we still wind up with 940,028 people. So not only do we conclude
2.5 sq. ft./person is wrong, we think they're wrong in their
computation of the Mall's area!
THUS SPEAKS THE CZAR! HEAR AND TREMBLE!
*Caveat:
the photo is cropped to the West, and more importantly, the Czar cannot
see around buildings to know precisely how big the spillover is. (We
have received no reports from the Okhrana on this point. The
responsible parties have been shot.) Further, we do NOT know if that
was the crowd at its height. Frankly, who knows what that photo was
from? Unfortunately, the photo was run through Photoshop or something
first, because the camera information and creation data is missing from
the file. If it had been the original photo from the camera, we'd be
able to determine the exact moment in time the picture was taken to
know if that was really the full extent of the crowd.
We do not
think the picture was edited to increase numbers: The Czar sees a
little repetition of colors—usually the sign of doctoring by cloning
one part of the picture to another—but those are small blotches in the
center of the mall. That's the least likely place to doctor a
picture...usually you do that at the fringes or sides to increase the
crowds furthest from the center. Conclusion: real photo. The shadow
lengths suggest afternoon, as the Washington Monument shadow is long
but pointing from the southwest. If it were evening, the shadow would
point East, and if earlier, the shadow of the Monument would be much
shorter. So we suspect the photo is legit, and from the later afternoon.
Still,
even at our worst case of 522,000 souls, that's way bigger than what
was reported. And like the Czar said, this photo does not cover
everything going on.
Ergo,
your unofficial Gormogons’ crowd estimate is, oh, let’s say 750,000 or
so. (Incidentally, recalculating the Volgi’s 1.8M above with the Czar‘s
4.5 sq.ft./person density gives a hair above an even million people in
the video.) But, given the math of previous crowd estimates, our
750,000 people probably outnumber those at some events put at a million
or more.
Just to show you how much of a shot in a dark all these
crowd estimates are: the “official” figure of 1.8M for Barack Obama’s
inauguration is, upon examination, quite sketchy. The Park Service
(probably having MMM flashbacks [or MMMM, as ’Puter would say]) chose
not to produce a number after “1.8M” got out there and simply adopted it as a record. Meanwhile, an Arizona State University professor looked at a satellite image and came up with 800K. Another analyst looked at the same photo and came up with almost twice that. The key issue, as the professor mentions in the second article is the crowd-density number.
Meanwhile,
for comparison, here’s the Obama inauguration crowd (at 11:19 a.m.).
Note the dense clumps of people in dark clothing. It was cold that day
and there were video screens set up for people to watch. So they
cluster around them. To the Volgi’s untutored eye, it looks like a
roughly comparable—or perhaps even smaller—crowd. What do you think?
