Visualising 2,000 People: 1 acre = 1 football pitch = 16 tennis courts
The lesson of High Functioning Autism (excessively high darrrrrrhling!) is that some people think numerically and many people don't. As a graphics teachers I always said "A picture tells a thousand words." I also encouraged my students to challenge me with "Prove it Miss!" Doing mathematical modelling in the aerospace industry means that I am very used to processing a table of numbers and identifying the numerical relationships but the need of this situation is to communicate that effectively to as broad an audience as possible. So I embarked on a mini-project to visualise 2,000 human beings standing on i) a football pitch ii) a tennis court.
Fun Fact #1: The World Land Trust tells us I have stumbled on a very comfortable comparison "An acre is a unit of area containing 4,840 square yards and approximately the same size as one football (soccer) pitch OR 16 tennis courts."
Fun Fact #2: MapaPlan tells us that the O2 stadium on the Greenwich peninsula in London has a seating capacity of 20,000.
Football Pitch: Wembley Stadium
A good example is the football pitch at Wembley stadium, whose UEFA Category 4 pitch is 105m x 69m a total of 7,245 m2".
Many people especially (biological) sex: male people relate to football pitches. "Ah my gender-non-conforming childhood, when I took my academic and totally uninterested in football 'father' to Elland Road to watch my team Leeds United". Down the road as it turns out from Jonathan Best whose descriptions of feeling completely out of place when taken by his Dad to Grimbsy Town footie matches are the total mirror-image of my own!
Tennis Court: Wimbledon Centre Court
Other people, especially lesbian people (female & homosexual for disambiguation) of my generation, think in terms of tennis courts, say Wimbledon Centre Court.
Figure 2: Singles: 23.77m x 8.23m = 196 m2 Doubles: 23.77m x 10.97m = 261 m2
Figure 3: Got the thumbs up from @Martina!
1 acre = 1 football pitch = 16 tennis courts
Only a numerically-minded autistic lesbian (of the British Flippin' Empire) with a familiarity with mathematical-modelling aerospace components, could be quite so happy! AeroSPACE - so rocket science innit! Did I mention that is HIGH Functioning Autism... or as I have been known to say "Excessively HIGH Functioning Darrrhling!"
Seriously: While we know that the physical size, in this case footprint of a human being varies according to an average female or male, for the purposes of this study I am going to assume average human being. Assuming the same 'people density', how many people would fit comfortably on a football pitch compared to a tennis court.
Crowd Density: Turns out people study this... and after the Hillsborough Disaster quite right too.Health & Safety often evokes eye-rolling but human beings not suffering seems like a perfectly motivating idea to me. Done a bit in my time too especially risk-assessing on safety critical aerospace manufacturing plant!
Figure 4: Crowd Safety & Risk Analysis - exactly the kind of graphic I was looking for
AMAZING! No sooner said than done. Email sent 00:30 & reply received 5.15am. Thank you Prof. Dr. G. Keith Still FIMA FICPEM SFIIRSM MEWI FIPM FHEA. Looking forward to graphical visualisations I can use.
1) Birdseye view of male (dark blue) and female (dark purple) - assumption the same human 'footprint'.
2) People on i) football pitch ii) tennis court - dimensions above. Plan view & 3D.
- 2,000 Female people on a football pitch
- 2,000 Male people on a football pitch
