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!

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!