Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Liverpool and the double-D lemniscate

I ran across this today in Arthur Koestler's 1972 book The Roots of Coincidence:


Liverpool:

Double-D lemniscate:

Note added: Wondering if I could find anything about the shape I have been calling the "double-D lemniscate," I ran an image search for two semicircles. Several of the results were from homework-help sites explaining how to calculate the area or perimeter of the following figure:


This is interesting because it incorporates both the double-D lemniscate (four of them!) and a paisley-type shape. If you look back up at the figure from The Roots of Coincidence, you'll see that the double-D lemniscate was Miss E's only incorrect reproduction of the figures drawn by "Liverpool notable" Malcolm Guthrie. Guthrie had actually drawn a paisley-like shape.


(By the way, I'm not the one who rotated the homework photo 90 degrees so that it would match Guthrie and Miss E's drawings; it was already oriented that way when I found it on Google.)

After writing the above note, I looked up paisley on Wikipedia and read this:

In the mid- to late 1960s, paisley became identified with psychedelic style and enjoyed mainstream popularity, partly due to the Beatles.

So there's a Liverpool connection again!

For whatever it's worth, the last time I mentioned paisley was in "Can an Indian be president?" in connection with Tarot, Time Cube, and a possible Kamala Harris presidency.

Additional note added: I never paid any attention to it until today, but this is the logo of a bank here in Taiwan which I have been to hundreds of times. It's as if the two tan paisleys from the math problem were fitted together to make a yin-yang symbol, but with a vertical line through the middle creating a double-D lemniscate:

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