We took considerable care to measure the bud diameters to 6 or so decimal places. Later on, we will discover that the buds aren't exactly circular, so the 'diameter' is ill-defined. What we've measured is the width, from east to west, for buds 5 and above. The horn locations are trivially computed from the cardiod equation. 0.25024660 0.00000775 Well, lets figure that maybe there is some sort of conformal magic that is throwing things off.
Lets start doing some guesstimating.
The buds get small as they approach the scorpions tail. This perl script computes this quantity. Surprisingly, the prediction remains off by about this much up to at least bud 200, as shown by the graph below. This graph plots the ratio of the experimental bud size to the predicted size. One can now start guessing big-time, and discover that ones guesses are on the spot.