Gadgetory

how many people attended the inauguration of Donald Trump this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration period both in person and around the globe it should be a simple question but it isn't aerial photos showed a much smaller crowd than in 2009 or 2013 and while everyone agrees Trump is exaggerating I looked out the field was it looked like a million million and a half people no one seems to be sure exactly how much the good news is we've been estimating the size of crowds for a while and we've gotten pretty good at the most popular tactic is called the Jacobs method you take a small section of the crowd and you use it to calculate the average square feet per person if you can reach out your arm without touching anyone that's about 10 square feet per person if you're packed in shoulder-to-shoulder that's closer to five square feet and if you're in a mosh pit we're closer to two and a half square feet per person once you've got an average density you apply it to the area the crowd takes up so if you've got a loosely packed crowd that covers half the area of the National Mall you end up with a pretty good idea of how many people are there of course the experts do it with a lot of different density estimates and a lot of different regions of the crowd but it boils down to the same tricks you use to guess how many jellybeans are in a big glass jar you know how big a jelly bean is so how big is the jar most experts say Trump's crowds are around 600,000 people which is a lot of people but when Obama took office he drew a crowd close to 1.8 million three times larger of course not everyone agrees with the math the Trump camp argues that the white tarp on the ground caused crowd counters to underestimate the density and with political rallies there's always a clear reason to second-guess the organizers of the Million Man March in 1995 actually threatened to sue the National Park Service over its crowd estimate which pegged the crowd at 400,000 in response Congress barred the Park Service from providing crowd estimates just to spare them the political outrage so this is an old tactic but with Trump this kind of active destruction of information has really heated up you're saying it's a falsehood and they're giving Sean Spicer our press secretary gave alternative facts to that but the point instead of mathematical crowd estimates we rely on less reliable sources like metro ridership it's not as accurate but you can't argue with it you see this dynamic in a lot of places discussions of climate change voter fraud even immigration issues that are a lot less clear-cut than comparing crowd photos the problem is we've gotten so good at discrediting facts and erasing truth that we can't even say one crowd is bigger than enough I should end on one crowd is bigger than enough I'm Jerri Blank okay yeah okay