Yesterday's "Million Hoodie" rally at Union Square Park got a lot of media attention, as it should, with even conservative media outlets estimating there were at least several hundred protesters in attendance. But CBS 2 reporter Sean Hennessy is a newscaster, not a mathematician, dammit, and he counted "a few dozen." For this, he was heckled (perhaps by this master debater?) and heckled again, until he revised his count up to "a few dozen, maybe a hundred." But the hecklers weren't having it, and in this rather amusing video, the angry bystanders ultimately reduce Hennessy into admitting, "You're right. We lie. That's what we do." more ›

No fancy-schmancy tally counters here: many of the supervisors don't even use pen and paper to take census; they just "estimate" mentally and log the numbers later. As Deputy Parks Commissioner Liam Kavanagh explains, "Crowd estimates are notoriously difficult to do well or accurately...Beaches in particular pose a challenge because beaches are pretty dynamic places. People are flowing in and out all the time." more ›

They've tried vertical cameras and even lasers but nothing beats a Russian immigrant when when it comes to counting bodies Times Square, according to this fun article in the Times, which tells you all you never wanted to know about counting crowds at the crossroads of the world. It's almost exclusively Russian immigrants who get paid $8 an hour to stand around and count. An engineer who oversees the process explains that the Times Square Alliance—which spends up to $100,000 a year for the data—formerly employed Nigerians, but "at some point we switched over to these Russians." And most of them are overqualified. 66-year-old Alexander Turin, a former French literature professor who left Russia in 1976, says he counts because "sometimes you just need to do the simplest jobs." So thanks to Turin and his comrades, we know that half a million people recently passed through Times Square in a single day. more ›