Trump Derangement Syndrome is only getting worse. The meltdown by much of the media over Sean Spicer is TDS as its worst. Media outlets are shrieking that Spicer is a liar at the top of their digital lungs. Their basis for it is highly dubious at best.
The left loves claiming the mantle of "science". And the media is citing "crowd scientists" to "prove" that their anti-Trump "women's march" had more people than the inauguration.
And "crowd scientist" absolutely does not sound like a job made up by an 11-year-old boy.
What really happened is that the New York Times hired Keith Still, a British mathematician, who claims to be an expert on crowds, to count Trump's crowd size. This seems like a rather odd thing to go to the trouble of doing unless the Times was planning on using that as a line of attack.
Manchester Metropolitan crowd scientist Professor Keith Still is on hand to find out - providing live analysis for the New York Times today from 3pm UK time.
Using sophisticated software and algorithms previously developed by Prof Still, he will give a running estimate of Donald Trump’s inauguration as 45th President of the United States of America, to decide just how many people are present at the historic Washington DC ceremony.
This wouldn't have come cheap and the Times was obviously after something more than accurate numbers.
Still seems to have invented his own science back in the 90s.
Still became interested in the nature of crowd dynamics and how to map the way in which crowds move when he visited a rock concert in 1991. In 2011, Still comments on his foray into crowd dynamics:
"When I started, in the early 90s, there was no formulated science on crowds," he says. Crowd-modelling was based on analyses that treated masses of people like fluids. "But people don't behave like that," he says. "They don't move in neat, linear ways."
There are a lot of bells and whistles, but it's ultimately just a better educated guess None of this is an exact science. Calling Sean Spicer a liar based on this is Trump Derangement Syndrome at its worst.
CNN and the Washington Post, aside from the usual chest pounding, have run the occasional intelligent piece explaining how hard it is to count crowds. But that's drowned in the bizarre claims about the size of the anti-Trump march and the Trump inauguration crowds. Falsely claiming that crowd size is settled science is an actual lie.