Last night, the New York Times' Natasha Lennard donned the universal hobo disguise—fur trapper hat and crumpled up newspapers—to pose as a homeless person. Why? So an annual census of the city's homeless population wouldn't count her.

And when the census-takers found her, she told them she was fake, and so wasn't counted. Two-hundred fake homeless people did this last night, to make sure the census was working, because how can we know how many real homeless people there are if we don't know how many grad students there are pretending to be homeless? We wonder how much more accurate the census would have been if those 200 people had spent the night looking for homeless people.