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November 4, 2010
Using Maps to Lie
A few days ago, "Geographic Travels with Catholicgauze" had a great post about the size of the crowd at Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity".
It seems that conservatives have been passing around an image that shows Glenn Beck's rally with a much larger crowd, but the images were taken from slightly different viewpoints to make thing look different than they actually were. He uses some great images (with overhead maps) to show that the rallies were roughly the same size.
You'll want to read his full post to see how he put it all together, but it makes sense.
The reason I bring this up is because GeoEye just released a beautiful high-res image of the crowd that day. While it doesn't definitively answer the question of which rally was larger (and I'd rather avoid the politics of determining that), it certainly shows quite a huge crowd at Stewart's rally:
To view it in Google Earth, I've taken the high-res version of the image and created an image overlay
for it. Download that file and you can zoom down pretty close to check it out.
Posted by mickmel at November 4, 2010 7:21 AM
Comments
Posted by: nickvet419 at November 4, 2010 9:49 AM
Good comments. However, I have to ask the question,... when do photos transition from lies to a snapshot of truth...? The midterm elections told the real story.
Posted by: Rationalist at November 15, 2010 11:52 AM
Good comments. However, I have to ask the question,... when do photos transition from lies to a snapshot of truth...? The midterm elections told the real story.
Posted by: Rationalist at November 15, 2010 11:53 AM
I can't stand all the wretched fighting in politics, but thought that people who are reading this post would also find this entry on the Photosynth web log to be of interest.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/photosynth/archive/2010/10/31/comparing-crowds-on-the-national-mall.aspx
Posted by: Nate Lawrence at November 15, 2010 10:41 PM
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Hmm... I did my own calculations using an area calculation tool. I simply outlined the crowds and removed the area for the reflecting pool, street, and lawn where there were voids in the crowd. Here are the numbers I came up with...
Beck's Crowd:
100871.17 m²
0.10 km²
24.93 acres
1085768.26 feet²
0.03 square nautical miles
Stewarts Crowd:
112762.75 m²
0.11 km²
27.86 acres
1213768.16 feet²
0.03 square nautical miles
So, even though it seems like Beck has the bigger crowd from the pictures, Stewart did have the larger crowd area. Now, you still have to factor in the density of the crowd to get the true numbers of attendees, but this shows pics can be deceiving.