An interesting random fact, learned from Arcadian Functor:
12 + 22 + 32 + ... + 242 = 702
This doesn't seem quite so weird if you recall that the sum of the first n squares is n(n+1)(2n+1)/6; then the sum of the first 24 squares is (24)(25)(49)/6.
But are there any other n for which the sum of the first n squares is also a square? Not under a million. I tested. It seems kind of tricky to prove this directly, because knowing the factorization of any of n, n+1, or 2n+1 doesn't tell you much about the factorizations of the others.
Let f(n) = n(n+1)(2n+1)/6; for what proportion of values of n is f(n) squarefree? For random integers it's π2/6. Let g(n) be the number of integers [1,n] such that f(n) is squarefree; then g(1000) = 504, g(10000) = 5029, g(100000) = 50187.
Hmm, it looks an awful lot like g(n) ~ n/2, doesn't it? I have no idea if this is true. It seems quite obvious that g(n) ~ cn for some constant c, but I'm not sure if c is exactly 1/2. (And I'd be surprised if it did come out to be 1/2; these sorts of probabilities are rarely rational.)