🚀 go-pugleaf

packer@cais.cais.com (Charles Packer) wrote:

>On Friday some news media may carry an Associated Press story
>that scientists at Boston University found another 600,000
>people at the Million Man March in Washington that the Park
>Police somehow didn't see. 
> The Park Police had
>released a figure of 400,000.

>The absurdity of BU's estimate can be seen by a simple
>calculation:  The Mall plus the west grounds of the Capitol is
>an area of about 3.7 million square feet.  A million people
>assembled there would have no more than 3.7 square feet of
>ground each, a square 23 inches on a side. 

I went to the big abortion march, and I remember similar oddities of
measurement. The default number seems to be 400,000, which the NY
Times used then and is using now. Given the expense and difficulty of
getting there, it's still an impressive number of people.

Alice Turner
al@interport.net