One quarter of George Washington's head, half of George Washington's head, . . .

In my January 16 post "The Doors," I discuss seeing seeing lemniscates and the letter D together three times -- for example in the logo of a cafe called D&D but stylized as D∞D -- and then seeing this logo which is a lemniscate in the shape of two Ds:

This past Friday, I wrote the date -- February 3, 2023 -- on the whiteboard in my classroom. During a break, one of the kids took a marker and modified it thus:

As you can see, he changed the threes to eights, the u to a, and the b to -- the D-lemniscate logo rotated 90 degrees. (The logo is from a ceiling fan remote at my school, but it's in a room that is always locked and inaccessible to students.) I asked him what it was supposed to be, and he said it was an eight.

What it really looks like, though, is a truncated dollar sign. I suppose the dollar sign, which looks like S but means D (US$ = USD), fits right in with our theme, which has included Euler's S-shaped infinity sign as well as the double-D variant.

We've already seen a US-currency lemniscate, too, in "Wigner and the infinite quarter." Note that the shape my student drew also resembles a combination of the lowercase letters q and b.

In a comment on the Wigner post, I noted that a quarter can be called "two bits," and that 00 (I had originally thought D&D was called D00D) is "two bits" in the computing sense -- a bit being a binary digit, either 0 or 1.

About the only time you hear the dated expression "two bits" these days is in football cheers: "Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar! All for the Gators, stand up and holler!" (cf. the defunt sync blog g8ors.blogspot.com). In the context of American football, QB means quarterback. The band name Nickelback is supposed to be an indirect reference to "beaver," the animal featured on the tails side of a Canadian nickel. I guess quarterback means an eagle, then -- or, in Canada, a caribou.

I assume these lines from the They Might Be Giants song "Violin" are a reference to the Two Bits cheer:

One quarter of George Washington's head

Half of George Washington's head

Three quarters of George Washington's head

All of George Washington's head

George Washington's head appears on two denominations: the quarter and the dollar. Four Washington heads are equal to one Washington head: e pluribus unum.

A dollar and a quarter is $1.25. I followed up my original "Q*bert" post with one called "a five and a twelve."

Note added: I just noticed that Q*bert's asterisk is paired with the lemniscate on standard keyboards

and that the keyboard comes very, very close to spelling out the name Q*bert itself.