Wednesday, February 15, 2023

DD-lemniscate time travel pill

Synchronic is a movie I watched on July 4, 2021, after which I posted a brief notice on how it was "Pinging all the syncs" -- DMT, alligators, Joan of Arc, and the Battle of New Orleans. The movie is about a designer drug that allows people to travel through time.

Today, I was randomly watching an old video from LXXXVIII finis temporis (yes, that's "88 end of time") called "TIME TRAVEL movies... Sirius DOG STAR symbolism SUPERCUT" -- a montage of scenes from time travel movies in which there's a dog, or someone says "serious," or Canis Major is visible in the sky in the background, etc. Synchronic puts in an appearance, because at one point the main character, Steve (Anthony Mackie) tries to take his dog with him on a trip. One of the clips included shows Steve dropping the Synchronic pill into his open palm, and I noticed the marking on the tablet:


That's a lemniscate, or figure-eight, with the two loops in the shape of the letter D. And it's on a pill that induces time travel.

Here's another view:


Note added: Apparently, it's meant to be stylized S. No idea why it's a mirror-image S (i.e. Euler's lemniscate) in some of the shots.

10 comments:

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Anthony Jackie’s debut film had a lemniscate in the title: 8 Mile. He has also played Tupac Shakur, whose likeness I recently posted for no particular reason.

jason said...

It has a certain similarity to the CERN logo and CERN discovers time travel in Steins;gate.

WanderingGondola said...

Eyyy, Steins;Gate! I haven't watched a huge amount of anime, but it's one of my favourites. Eventually I'll get around to the sequel, and the visual novels...

For those unfamiliar with the series, CERN wasn't the only one with time travel. John Titor was an important character, too (regardless of the real-life Titor story's legitimacy). And of course the main character, Okabe, has his PhoneWave -- sending text messages back in time, through a modified microwave, which moved him between various timelines as a result. Also, Okabe named the ability to keep memories of events from before such moves as "Reading Steiner". (I synched on that a while back.)

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

I see from the link that the PhoneWave is “Future Gadget No. 8” and the messages it sends are called “D-mail” — so another D-lemniscate link.

The main character in the O. Henry story “The Green Door” is named Rudolf Steiner.

WanderingGondola said...

Well, well, well... Reading further down the PhoneWave page, it starts talking about black holes.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

The stein knot (used in rappelling) is based on the figure-eight knot. (Yes, I was a Boy Scout.)

No Longer Reading said...

Steins;gate => stone gate (from stein = stone in German)

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

The D in “D-mail” stands for “DeLorean,” a reference to the time machine in Back to the Future. In order to travel through time, the DeLorean had to accelerate to 88 mph.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

@NLR
So . . . Rudolf "Stoner"?

No Longer Reading said...

humorous

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