Though it predates all the high-tech gadgetry, baseball now benefits from it

Q. You’ve read palindromes such as “do geese see god,” “step not on pets,” “pull up if i pull up,” “madam i’m adam,” “a santa lived as a devil at nasa.” These sentences read the same in both directions. Now what’s unusual about the following: “Sator arepo tenet opera rotas”? A. It’s a Latin palindromic sentence from the 2nd century CE which commonly translates to “Arepo the sower (farmer) holds the wheels with effort.” It gave rise to the so-called “Templar magic square”–after the Order of the Templars– with the letters placed in a five-by-five square arrangement. Amazingly, you can read the sentence in all directions–back and forth and up and down! SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS This magic square is very old – “it’s been found in excavations of the Roman city of Pompeii, which had been buried in the ashes of Vesuvius. In medieval times, people attributed magic properties to it and used it as a spell to protect against witchcraft.” In 1937, five examples were discovered in Mesopotamia, and others in Britain, Egypt, Cappadocia and Hungary. Q. Try to summarize some of summer’s big numbers. A. Struck by wanderlust, some 25,000,000 tourists visited a foreign country in 1950; by 2012, the number had increased 40-fold, to top a billion (1,000,000,000), reports “Mental Floss” magazine. Each year, roughly 80,000,000 visit France alone–Eiffel Tower or otherwise–compared to fewer than 70,000,000 who actually live there.

Struck by the heat, US residents in 2014 visited one of their 300,000 public pools nationwide or jumped into one of the 10,000,000 residential pools. Yet it is reported that 4 in 10 people would rather go to the dentist than go bathing suit shopping. And in the quest to stay cool, Americans are turning to air conditioning big time, consuming some 85 billion (85,000,000,000) kilowatt hours each year.

In 2013, roughly 20,000,000 16-to-24-yearolds had summer jobs, taking a cue from our nation’s presidents when they were young: Barack Obama worked as an ice cream scooper at Baskin Robbins, George W. Bush as a sporting goods salesperson, Bill Clinton as a camp counselor, Gerald Ford as a Yellowstone Park ranger, and Richard Nixon as a pool boy.

And finally, consider this cool hot-weather treat: The annual ice cream consumption per capita ranks from 1.9 pints in Mexico to 30 pints in the USA (3rd out of 28). Australia tops the list at 37.8 pints per person annually. Q. How high tech are things becoming in the world of professional baseball? A. Ultra-new biometric gadgetry is transforming the way baseball players are trained, with “wearable sensors providing on-the-go physiological measurements... to help players both improve performance and ward off injury,” says Emily Waltz in “IEEE Spectrum” magazine.

One such wearable is the Motus compression sleeve, using sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes to track a baseball player’s throwing motions. (Previously, motion-capture imaging was needed.) Estimating the player’s arm mo- tions and basic biomechanical principles, the Motus app calculates elbow torque and charts arm speed, maximum shoulder rotation, and elbow height at ball release, then sends this data via Bluetooth to a smartphone. “Pitchers who use the sleeves to correct their technique may be able to prevent ulnar collateral ligament injuries, which have resulted in an epidemic of reconstructive procedures known as Tommy John surgeries.”

During this past spring training, pitchers from some two dozen professional baseball teams used the sleeve.