What if Dot got in the Green Door?

A lemniscate is a figure-eight. D and Δ are the fourth letters of their respective alphabets, so a lemniscate made up of two Ds or two Δs encodes 4 + 4 = 8. A square also represents the idea of four, so a figure-eight made up of two squares would express the same idea.

Suppose there were a building with 11 windows, each in the shape of a digital-clock eight. The eleven windows would represent 8 × 11 = 88. I wonder what color door such a building might have.

H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Herbert Hoover = HH = 88.

Congratulations, Dot! We knew you could do it.

Dot is a short form of the name Dorothy.

The door Dot enters is that of a school. My last post was about an /x/ post called "Quantum Spacetime is the Holy Grail."

The Grail isn't anything you might have heard it is except for perhaps the generative principle of nature itself. We are all within the grail. This is how God comes to know us. We are like fish in a great ocean, bound to our school. When the question is asked the realm is restored.

The /x/ post also implicitly identifies the hourglass with the Holy Grail. The hourglass is a figure-eight, and the Grail is a cup. In my July 2022 post "Break on through to the other side" -- the post that prompted the email that started me on this whole Green Door wild goose chase -- I did a one-card Tarot draw, and it was the Eight of Cups. In the same post, I included this photo of a door in which I fancied I could see the image of an owl. I didn't notice it at the time, but the door also features a lazy-eight lemniscate.

I continued my discussion of the Eight of Cups in "The Wizard at the green door," which is also where the Wizard of Oz image above was originally posted. In that post, I connect the Green Door with the vesica piscis and the fish.

Looking at "The Wizard at the green door post" now, I find that the first comment is a cryptic one from ben: "Mr Owl's left side, her right side." I didn't know what that meant when he posted it, and I still don't, but running into it again now was a bit of synchronicity. A couple of days ago I read this in the preface to Paul J. Nahin's book An Imaginary Tale.

As a second example of "an error that wasn't," a reader wrote to complain that in figure 5.8 (the circuit diagram of a phase-shift oscillator) the voltage u is to the right of voltage v, but in the text I refer to the voltage u being to the left. This assertion stopped me dead in my tracks for a moment (I had confused left and right? -- my Lord, I must be dumber than an owl!), until I realized he was looking at the resistor-capacitor feedback network in the circuit, despite the fact that in the text I specifically state I am talking about the voltages on the input/output terminals of the amplifier connected to the network. (Thank the Lord, I'm not dumber than an owl! Such are the little things that give pleasure to the mind of an old mathematics writer at midnight.)

How often have you seen or heard a confusion of left and right mentioned in the same breath as an owl?

Note added: The story of Dot getting in comes from this old book (how old I'm not sure, as no date of publication is given. The "treasure" theme on the cover may be significant to at least one of my readers.

"Road Map to Success" -- and a picture of a map to an island, which can hardly be reached by road! "Thus saith the Lord, which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters; . . . The beast of the field shall honour me, the dragons and the owls" (Isa. 43:16, 20).

(Honor and owl were juxtaposed in "Break on through to the other side," too.)

As mentioned in "Green Door 101," in the H. G. Wells story "The Door in the Wall," the main character passes through a green door into an enchanted garden where he finds "two great panthers there... Yes, spotted panthers. And I was not afraid." I had found the reference to "spotted panthers" a bit odd, since the word panther as used today normally refers either to a puma, which is not spotted, or to a black leopard, whose spots are not typically visible. In the Journeys book, though, I found this:

"Black with spots" -- with black spots! -- a strange description. At any rate, this is pretty explicitly a spotted panther, like those seen beyond the Green Door in the Wells story. And a "big cat . . . with spots" is obviously related to a cat named Dot, a cat who also went through the Green Door. In Dot's case, it was the green door of an elementary school named after a president who had the same Christian name as Herbert George Wells.