Here's an interesting exercise, take a look at the photo of Obama's crowd in Oregon, which you'll notice most of the time is showing up cropped to not demonstrate any empty spaces along the side.
Some news outlets have estimated the crowd at up to 75,000 persons but some bloggers have a different computation.
What they have done is take the size of the area from a Google Earth image and divide it by approximately 4 square feet per person and have arrived at a figure less than half of that size.
We have not had a chance to try the experiment ourselves but encourage our more technically minded readers to do so and see if this is correct.
Much of the mainstream media has a history of over estimating the size of crowds and demonstrations for causes and persons they seem to have an affinity. Witness the "Million Man March". A wider angle photo click here.
The crowd size when viewed in a complete image does generally appear to be less than the over excited numbers of some of the reporting- 75,000 is equivalent to a triple-decker NFL stadium.
