Real Hexadecimal Numbers Have Curves

by Andrew Martin

37-24-35  38-26-37  41-25-38  35-25-35  36-25-36  37-26-45  34-24-35  34-26-38  36-26-40
These are the "measurements" of famous, beautiful, curvy celebrities: Madonna, Kate Upton, Dolly Parton, Lynda Carter, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Kim Kardashian.

I was always perplexed as a kid when men fantasized over numbers like these. They were too abstract, I was too young to understand, and they seemed to be bantered about by the type of guys who also traded baseball and other sports statistics with each other that got decoded in their meaty heads into an actual performance, and in the case of the women's measurements, erotic visions of impossible pin-up girls. Maybe a lonely submarine sailor sending Rita Hayworth's 36-24-36 and other "bomber girls" measurements by Morse code to another poor enlisted seaman was the first instance of electronic sexting. Which reminds me of an article I once read about two former American servicemen who returned to Plzeň a half a century after liberating the Czech city during WWII. One shouted to the other "Incoming at 11 o'clock!" and his buddy spun around in time to catch a glimpse a Slavic beauty pass by.

I recently wondered if arrangements of these six numbers correlated to anything other than womanly curves. How might they look as a patch of RGB color space values? I envisioned a psychedelic matrix of hot pinks and purples.

When I tried that all I got was a dull grid of bluish black squares except for one slightly brighter area because Nick Minaj's big butt bumped up the blue value. A little disappointed by this, I converted the inches to centimeters and entered those values as RGB: a little lighter and brighter with a bump again from Minaj's rump. So I decided to switch over to CMYK color space and alter the K (black) value by another measurement unique to each woman. The greater the value of K, the darker the box.

The first time I did this, I used height as the variable, which is why the just-shy-of-six-foot Kate Upton (top middle of the left matrix) is the darkest. The next box, centered here, uses weight as a variable. And finally the far right box uses age as the variable, which is probably the most interesting of all the matrices because even though Dolly Parton, Lynda Carter, and Madonna are all attractive older ladies, there is a real sense of mortality in the darkening of the squares.

Despite all the variations I was still disappointed and was hoping for something more insightful. I tried placing the numbers as global coordinates such as 36°25'36" but the South West coordinates dropped everyone in the South Atlantic Ocean, South East in the Indian Ocean, and North West smack in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. 

And then finally, miraculously, the North East coordinates parachuted these beauties into Turkish territories, with Dolly Parton busting into neighboring Georgia. Maybe she figured Nashville was just a short haul from there. 

Most surprisingly, Katy Perry and Kim Kardashian were strategically positioned near the Syrian border not far from Aleppo. Maybe this new information will help Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate for US president, to remember this location of this war-torn Syrian city.