THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

As a conservative-leaning Minnesotan, I can tell you straight up - Bachmann is most *definitely* an idiot.

Amusingly, your Ad by Google at the bottom of this page decided to show me a big Tea Party / Michele Bachmann campaign ad, complete with her lovely visage.

I recall as far back as when the Pope said mass in Grant Park in Chicago around 1979 or 1980 that estimates of the crowds varied quite abit. No one agreed. From a couple hundred thousand up to a million.

I guess the two points I want to make are this:

1) Surely we have experts who can reliably estimate a crowd.

2) If you don’t know what these estimates are, shut up.  If you are there and want to make a wild ass guess, say so (that you are making a wild-ass guess and could be completely wrong).

Is there any reason not to believe a company that (presumably) specializes in estimating crowds (airphotoslive.com)?

Just a point of information, IIRC, the park service stopped doing estimates of DC mall crowds when the organizers of the original million man march strenuously objected to the estimates.

So, germane to your comment, when the fact of some matter is so fraught with political implications, it does seem quite difficult to extract the truth.

The estimates should be pretty straightforward.  I think I read that in a normal sarndine-like crowd, each person occupies one square meter (that’s about 10 sq feet).  That’s a simple enough rule of thumb.

So, get the area where there’s sardine-crowds in sq meters, and that tells you the number of people.

For the outskirts of that area, come up with a more reasonable number, say 4 sq meters per person, and get that area.  And to the outskirts of that, figure 8 sq meters per person.

Anyone want to put down some rough numbers for MGL based on this?

Consider the source and all, but here’s an attempt to figure out the crowd based on square footage and crowd coverage: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/8/29/897319/-Beck-rally-crowd-size-by-the-numbers. Personally, I don’t think the aerial pics are clear enough to say much with certainty. That said, their number is close to what airphotoslive said.

I came up with, very roughly, 87,000 sq. meters occupied by the crowd.

The area within the walkways bounding the Reflecting Pool area about 30 meters to its north and about 110 meters to its south seemed to roughly correspond with the boundaries of the crowd.  That area encompasses about 119,000 sq. meters, of which the Reflecting Pool itself occupies about 32,000 sq. meters.  Thus, my estimate of 87,000 sq. meters for the crowd area.

Great job Mike!

So, we now have confirmation as to what AirPhotosLive.com did: # of people = # of sq meters.

Good job if you can get it.

The 87,000 estimate sounds about right, maybe slightly on the low side but not much.  I’d put the upper bound at no more than 200,000 from that picture.  I’ve been to other events at the Lincoln Memorial (e.g. the inauguration concert) that were estimated in the 200-400 thousand range, and from the picture this rally was definitely a lot smaller.

Be careful with a headlines like that, as I’m sure you’ve been on the receiving end of an ignorant client telling you how easy or simple your job should be.

I could think you could get 2 people per square meter and not me too packed.  One might be able to take a football stadium and its capacity and figure out a decent people per square meter.

For decades there have been wild variations in estimates of crowds in DC. I spent 20 years living in the area, saw news coverage of many, and participated in a few.

I work in aerial photography, and have thought that to be the best method of estimation. Besides calculating area, it would be possible, although more time consuming, so superimpose a small symbol on top of the image of each person, and then count the symbols.

As mentioned above, the Park Service did provide the official estimates until the arguments in the wake of the Million Man March.

I was at Promise Keepers, which was at the opposite end, without a pool, and aerial photos of that event show people crowding the mall and spilling into the side streets.

I’ve performed in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and know that you can fit 5000 on the steps and the adjacent grass. The reflecting pool takes a lot of area behind that, up to the WWII Memorial, so it’s a difficult area to fit huge numbers of people.

So, I was comfortable with the 87,000 number - call it 100,000 but I wouldn’t go much further than that.

So we have a couple of intelligent guestimates herein of 80-100,000 people.  Yet one idiot says 500,000 and another idiot says more than a million.

Is it so important to inflate the numbers for political purposes that you have to make idiotic statements?  That is what irks me the most…

How can anyone seriously believe that being in a crowd qualifies her to comment on its total size?  How do you tell the difference between 50,000 and 80,000?  99,999 and 250,000?  Apparently it’s tough to do, since Bachmann confused 80,000 with one million.

It’s the Tea Party, doing its best to mutate a basic fact into an issue of faith and righteous indignation.  Don’t dare say that this crowd didn’t reach seven figures.  She won’t let you.  Don’t dare tell her that man evolved from the apes.  She won’t let you do that either.

But you’re free to do what you want, because this is America, land of the free, and the government needs to stay the hell out of our homes - unless it’s peeping in the bedroom window, to make sure Johnny and Jimmy aren’t spooning again…

#14, good one.  Spoken like a true liberal (I assume)!

I’d just offer this… if conservatives can’t do something as simple as add, why should we trust them to count votes or to be in charge of our budget?

Argh.  Snagged by the spam filter.

#16:
“I’d just offer this… if conservatives can’t do something as simple as add, why should we trust them to count votes or to be in charge of our budget?”

Hmm, well, let’s see. The Original Attendance Controversy was the Million Man March, right? As pointed out earlier in this comment thread, at least. Were you saying this in 1995, Terry?

“I’d just offer this… if blacks can’t do something as simple as add, why should we trust them to input on our budget or help fix society’s social problems?”

Or weren’t you born yet?

With baseball it’s nice to have a rooting interest, but, as an unabashed cynic, I can say that those of you who have taken a rooting interest in a political party have cut down your potential amusement by at least a third. 

Right, I don’t think it is only the conservative parties who seem to think it is OK to lie for political gain.

#18…

It’s extremely telling that race was used as a counterpoint to anti-conservative snark.  Extremely telling… Extremely.

MGL: Echoing #1, this is among the less stupid things I have heard Bachmann say.  Last year she thought that a push by China to have the dollar replaced as the world’s reserve currency was actually an effort to introduce a single currency for the entire world.  Watch this; the whole thing is great, but skip to 2:15 for the best part:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atxe1SWAyHc

#21

Is it also extremely telling that you managed to miss the entire historical context of my comment w/r/t crowd size estimation, despite the fact that those are basically the only words that weren’t between quote marks?

#23 You’re the one who was humming Hank Williams Jr’s “reneger” as you typed the message.... 

But ya, it’s not racist if it’s only alluded… Extremely, extremely, extremely telling.

I could think you could get 2 people per square meter and not me too packed. 

I don’t see how you could.  One square meter means 3.3 ft x 3.3 ft.  A person standing probably takes 2.5 x 1 ft of space.  Add 6 inches of perimeter, and that means 3.5 x 2 ft.  So, you could fit 1.5 people per square meter, and be barely comfortable.  If you add 9 inches of perimeter instead, that’s 4.0 x 2.5 ft, which is roughly 1 sq meter.

I think it’s a good enough rule of thumb.  I’m sure there is plenty of evidence and literature on the subject to either verify my memory or correct it.

How hard can it possibly be to talk about the issue at hand without degenerating into partisan name calling (on both sides)?

I think the problem is people believe the size of the crowd validates their message. Farrakhan organized the Million Man March, a million was in the name, so there better be a million people there, they would not accept anything less.

Same thing with Michele Bachmann, a bigger crowd proves the message is relevant. Thing is, if you pull a number out of your ass you will look like an idiot (and I usually like Bachmann).

Here’s a blog entry by one of the folks hired to use the aerial photos to do an estimate
http://stevedoig.com/archives/250

Here are some photos of Beck’s rally (warning: comes from conservative blog)
http://www.leftcoastrebel.com/2010/08/photos-aerial-pictures-of-glenn-beck.html

This a picture of Promise Keeper’s 1997 rally, where I was in the crowd, and it was so tight I don’t believe I was ever able to sit.
http://www.getreligion.org/?p=4189
(I have not read the accompanying article, I only googled for a photo).

Promise Keepers was said to have 850k. It was a freaking big crowd, elbow to elbow for the length of the Mall (the end without a reflecting pool) with some more people at the Washington Monument.

Beck’s crowd had the pond in the middle, and I can see a fair amount of green grass peeking between the people at the sides. Earlier in this thread I said I was satisfied with 100k. Absolute tops 150k. I don’t think it goes over 20% of Promise Keepers.

I would have liked to go, but I didn;t get home from work until 8am, so we watched on C-Span, then at noon I was online for the pitchf/x conference.

I was at every Red Sox game in 2005.  I estimate that Manny hit 74 Home Runs and broke the season record.  Don’t tell me me it was any less than 70, I was there damnit!

Who wants to try and predict the future?

After learning the word “prebuttal” in the last month (and finding that spell check here has yet to) I sense we are about to lose the word “estimate” from political dialog.

Will we get:

1. Agreed upon crowd numbers from objective sources presumably hired by the media; or

2. Crowd counting “experts” who provide counts from the promoters?

I think, in either case (and I would guess the first would, in the end, obtain though both may compete for a bit), crowd numbers will become more important going forward . . . the groups will just have to get the people there to inflate them.

Somewhat related, recently, the Red Bull Flugtag (homemade flying machines that are pushed off a ramp into water) came to the Twin Cities.  I attended and was astonished by the number of people there.  I checked into Foursquare, and there were ~350 other people checked into Foursquare at this location.  Earlier this spring I attended a Twins game at Target field, and when I had checked in there, there were ~150 people also checked in.  Doing some rough math, based on check-ins and the capacity of Target field (I was at a sell-out, which most games have been), I guessed that the attendance was around 90,000-100,000 people at the Flugtag.  Saint Paul police put the attendance at 90,000.  I impressed myself.

The only caveat is the assumption that the percentage of Foursquare users at any given event is consistent, which I think we can all agree isn’t true.  I was doing my back-of-the-hand math, I assumed that the Flugtag crowd would be slightly younger, and more likely to use Foursquare.  Likewise, I would expect Beck’s crowd to be older, and less likely to use Foursquare.

Regardless, I think in the future, with location aware services, guessing crowd size will be much easier.