100,000? Wrong ANSWER

Lot's of talk out there about the size of the crowd at yesterday's "anti-war" protest in Washington, including posts by Jeff at protein wisdom, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds.  I put "anti-war" in quotes because it seemed to me it was more an "anti-everything" protest, but I digress.

I am way too of an analytical sort to have a totally fact free discussion so I thought I would give the crowd estimate a shot.

1. While not a perfect circle, the Ellipse is roughly 1000' in diameter.  Algebra class has been a (long)while, but that's 785,400 square feet.

2. After much discussion (with myself) I am going to use 7.5 square feet per person.  Some are standing, some sitting, laying on blankets, etc.  This should be a reasonable number, but you can pick your own if you're not comfortable with mine.  7.5 square feet per gives me 104,720 for a full Ellipse.

3. The picture I reviewed shows the Ellipse approximately 20% full.  That's 20,944 moonbats.  That doesn't consider space for the stage, audio, etc. 

4. Now let's add in the folks on the street in the front of the Ellipse.  For those out there who didn't grow up here, that's Constitution Avenue.  If memory serves me correctly, Constitution is 8 lanes wide, which is 108'.  The length of Constitution from 17th Street (not in the picture on the left) to 15th Street (the major street going away from you in the shot on the right) is 1584'.  So that part of Constitution is 171,072 square feet. 

5. If those 2 blocks of Constitution were full of people, that would be another 22,810 folks.  There is some fudging here with sidewalks etc., but I don't have any data on the size of those.

6. Well, to my analytical mind there are somewhere around 43,754 people in this shot.  You can figure out for yourself what percentage of the folks out were there for Sheenanapolooza (don't forget last year's Book Fair drew estimates of 80,000).

Any way you look at it, 100,000 is the wrong ANSWER.  Like they used to say, "you just gotta believe, man". I guess ANSWER and the lamestream media were hoping we would "just believe".