BARNES
BALD SPOT THREATENS CITY
SCIENTISTS
EXPRESS CONCERN
There
is probably no more ubiquitous and memorable image in Buffalo
than that of the bald head of Steve Barnes, the more solar-reflective
half of the famed personal-injury legal duo Cellino and Barnes.
Like a satellite orbiting the city, the head is everywhere;
perching on billboards above the highways, floating across
your television screen with a legal pad in its hand, leaping
off the page as you turn the pages of your local newspaper.
It's effective self-salesmanship, no doubt; you only need
to be in Buffalo for about 22 hours to know exactly where
to go for help once you contract your inevitable case of mesothelioma,
or find yourself the victim of a dog bite following an accident
involving an asbestos-laden watercraft that rams into your
construction site, toppling you from your scaffold onto a
malpracticing physician pedestrian. When life deals you a
bad hand in Buffalo, fear not: the Head is there to defend
you.
But is
there enough Hero-Head to go around? The Beast decided to
investigate. With little more than a ruler and a copy of our
local phone book, we were able to generate a solid estimate
of the minimum area of Steve Barnes's bald spot in Erie County.
You can follow along with our math if you like; here's what
we came up with.
Take the
Steve Barnes photo in the center spread of the phone book
and measure the diameter of Barnes's bald forehead. Measuring
the width of the head at 3.75 cm, and using the calculation
ßr2, we can determine,
rounding to three places, that the area of the bald spot in
this picture is .011 m2.
We called
Verizon to ask how many copies of the Yellow Pages were distributed
in Erie County this year. They told us that this year's circulation
was 514,251. We multiplied that number by the above bald-spot
area number--as well as the areas of the same bald spot on
other Cellino and Barnes ads on pages 43, 459, 472, 488, 494,
the outside cover, and the flip side of the insert--and, along
with a few calculations about total width and height, came
up with some interesting results:
DID
YOU KNOW?
To
date, the total area of the Steve Barnes bald spot is
2152 square meters. While this is smaller area than
some notably large areas, it is still MUCH LARGER than
an NBA basketball court!
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DID YOU KNOW?
If
you laid out all the Steve Barnes bald heads in all
the Erie County phone books end to end, they would stretch
an incredible 88.194 kilometers--more than enough to
reach from one end of Manhattan Island to the other
AND BACK! |
DID
YOU KNOW?
If
Cellino and Barnes place the same ads in the yellow
pages next year, that will mean the Barnes bald spot
will be growing at a faster rate than the hole in the
ozone layer! |
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