Palindromes

Last night as I put myself into bed, I glanced at the ceiling to see the time, 10:01, and thought the number is symmetric to the colon. Michelle had a clock that projected her times onto the ceiling, and we discovered that Target has them, so we traded in our old clock radio for this new one and now can easily learn the time when waking up in the middle of the night, which seems to occur frequently at my age. In mathematics, people who like the subject frequently get caught up in some of the fun things you learn. Palindromes, or things symmetric, have always fascinated me. Words can be symmetric too, such as: toot, boob, dad, mom, etc. As a kid I learned the following phrase: Able was I ere I saw Elba. This phrase is symmetric in that you can start at either end, and you get exactly the same letters. Somewhat later, I learned that Elba was an island in the Mediterranean Sea west of Italy and that Napoleon Bonaparte was imprisoned there until he escaped.

Several years ago HW2, Mom, and I were traveling by car from Florence, Italy, to Pisa to see the leaning tower and then proceeded south along the west coast of Italy, when we began to see small blue road signs of a stylized whale with what looked like cars in its mouth.We had no idea what this sign meant, but we became so intrigued that we followed the succession of signs, which led us to a ferry. Upon asking where the ferry was going, we learned that it was going to the island of Elba. We quickly decided to take the trip, too, and spent the next three days on Elba, visiting among other things, the house where Napoleon had spent his prison years. See the adventures that palindromes can cause?