Blue

A bit of trivia on the color blue

• President Martin VanBuren is credited with introducing blue into the decorating scheme of the White House in 1837 and since then, there has been a "blue room" in the White House.

• Blue is one color that means "low" or "guarded" in the color-coded threat system established by presidential order in March 2002. This system quickly informs law enforcement agencies when intelligence indicates a change in the terrorist threat facing the United States.

• Blue is the favored color choice for toothbrushes.

• Powder blue is often used in products to promote cleanliness and purity.

• IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer to win a chess tournament against a reigning world champion chess master. Deep Blue had 32 processors and processed about 200 million chess moves per second in its historic six-game match against Garry Kasparov. Today, Blue Gene is the fastest supercomputer in the world and the descendent of Deep Blue. It uses 131,000 processors to routinely handle 280 trillion operations every second.

• The blue ribbon has been widely recognized as a national symbol of child abuse awareness.

• Owls are the only birds that can see the color blue.

• Over the past decade, scientists have reported the successful use of blue light in the treatment of a wide variety of psychological problems, including addictions, eating disorders, impotence, and depression.

• People are often more productive in blue rooms.

• The highest quality ultramarine blue is made with powdered lapis lazuli from Afghanistan.

• The 1993 film "Blue" consists entirely of the color blue with narration and soundbytes.

• "Alice Blue" is a light blue-gray or steel blue color that was favored by Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt; it sparked a fashion sensation in the United States.

• Mosquito's are attracted to the color blue twice as much as to any other color.

• In ceramics, a variety of ingredients -- including cobalt oxide, copper carbonate, and iron oxide -- produce the blue colors. The different variations are produced when each ingredient is combined with other materials or with each other. The application, thickness of the glaze, how it is applied, and the type of clay used also have an impact on the final color after firing. Unlike paint, raw glazes look nothing like their final appearance after firing.

• Blue Tigers (Maltese Tigers) have been sporadically reported in the mountains of the Fujian province in China. They are described as bluish-grey or slate-blue with white patches on the face and black stripes.

• Pablo Picasso's "Blue Period" refers to a series of paintings in which the color blue dominates and which he painted between 1901 and 1904. The Blue Period is a marvelous expression of poetic subtlety and personal melancholy and contributes to the transition of Picasso's style from classicism to abstract art.