Nate Silver, The New York Times’ resident human calculator, has crunched the numbers, and Occupy Seattle is perhaps not as small-potatoes as was previously advertised. On Saturday, which was by most accounts the most well-attended single day of protests in the Occupy Movement’s brief history, at least 70,000 people turned out in cities across the country.In Seattle, where somewhat small crowds have been the norm, around 3,500 people showed up. That makes Seattle the fifth-most-attended Occupy in the country.Silver says his method to come up with his figures was to scan “hundreds of local news accounts for credible estimates of the crowd sizes for each gathering.”He says that he eschewed using estimates from protestors themselves, as those estimates are typically steeped in bullshit. Instead, he says, he relied mainly on journalist and law-enforcement estimates.The whole exercise was apparently to better compare the Occupy Movement with the Tea Party, which at its height brought out about 300,000 protestors nationwide on Tax Day, April 15, 2009.Of course, estimating crowd sizes has long been a political calculation, and the estimates themselves have proved so contentious that some agencies like Washington, D.C.’s fire department has stopped doing them at all.Whatever the exact numbers, it would appear that Occupy Seattle is moving away from being the laughingstock of the movement. Follow The Daily Weekly on Facebook and Twitter.