Friday, October 2, 2015

Pantone Inc. is a corporation headquartered in Carlstadt, New Jersey.  The company is best known for its Pantone Matching System (PMS), a proprietary color space used in a variety of industries, primarily printing, though sometimes in the manufacture of colored paint, fabric, and plastics.  In October 2007, X-Rite Inc., a supplier of color measurement instruments and software, purchased Pantone Inc. for $180 million.  Read more and see "colors of the year" from 2000 (Cerulean) to 2015 (Marsala) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone

The Graphics Interchange Format (better known by its acronym GIF is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.  The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, allowing a single image to reference its own palette of up to 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space.  It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame.  These palette limitations make the GIF format less suitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF  See also GIF - graphic interchange format b   http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/G/GIF.html

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."--Truman Capote (born in New Orleans in 1924 as Truman Streckfus Persons)  Capote died in 1984 at the age of fifty-nine, having apparently made no progress on what some thought would be his greatest work, Answered Prayers--which was published posthumously in its unfinished state.  https://www.bookbrowse.com/quotes/detail/index.cfm/quote_number/209/failure-is-the-condiment-that-gives-success-its-flavor

Robert James "Bobby" Fischer (1943–2008) was an American World Chess Champion.  At age 13 Fischer won a "brilliancy" that became known as The Game of the Century.  Starting at age 14, Fischer played in eight United States Championships, winning each by at least a one-point margin.  At age 15, Fischer became both the youngest grandmaster up to that time and the youngest candidate for the World Championship.  At age 20, Fischer won the 1963–64 U.S. Championship with 11/11, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament.  Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games (1969) remains a revered work in chess literature.  In 1970 and 1971, Fischer "dominated his contemporaries to an extent never seen before or since".  During that period he won the 1970 Interzonal Tournament by a record 3½-point margin and won 20 consecutive games, including two unprecedented 6–0 sweeps in the Candidates Matches.  In July 1971, he became the first official World Chess Federation (FIDE) number-one-ranked player, spending 54 total months at number one.  In 1972, he captured the World Chess Championship from Boris Spassky of the USSR in a match held in Reykjavík, Iceland, publicized as a Cold War confrontation which attracted more worldwide interest than any chess championship before or since.  In 1975, Fischer refused to defend his title when an agreement could not be reached with FIDE over one of the conditions for the match.  Afterward, Fischer became a recluse, disappearing from the public eye until 1992, when he won an unofficial rematch against Spassky.  It was held in Yugoslavia, which was under a United Nations embargo at the time.  His participation led to a conflict with the U.S. government, which sought income tax on Fischer's match winnings, and ultimately issued a warrant for his arrest.  In the 1990s, Fischer patented a modified chess timing system which added a time increment after each move, now a standard practice in top tournament and match play, and created a new variant of chess called Fischer Random Chess or Chess960.  During the 1990s and early 2000s, Fischer lived in Hungary, Germany, the Philippines, Japan, and Iceland, and made increasingly anti-American and anti-semitic remarks on various radio stations.  Possibly as a result, his U.S. passport was revoked.   Fischer, unaware of his passport's revocation, traveled to Japan, where he was arrested by Japanese authorities  and detained for over eight months (in 2004 and 2005) under threat of deportation.  In March 2005, Iceland granted Fischer full citizenship, leading Japanese authorities to release him from prison.  Fischer flew to Iceland, where he lived until his death on January 17, 2008.  References in popular culture:  The musical Chess, with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, tells the story of two chess champions, referred to only as "The American" and "The Russian".  The musical is loosely based on the 1972 World Championship match between Fischer and Spassky.  During the 1972 Fischer–Spassky match, the Soviet bard Vladimir Vysotsky wrote an ironic two-song cycle "Honor of the Chess Crown".  The first song is about a rank-and-file Soviet worker's preparation for the match with Fischer; the second is about the game.  Many expressions from the songs have become catchphrases in Russian culture.   The 1993 film Searching for Bobby Fischer uses Fischer's name in the title, even though the film is about the life of chess prodigy Joshua Waitzkin.  Outside of the United States, it was released as Innocent Moves.  The title refers to the search for Fischer's successor after his disappearance from competitive chess.  The author feels that his son could be that successor.  Fischer never saw the film and complained bitterly that it was an invasion of his privacy by using his name without his permission.  Fischer never received any compensation from the film, calling it "a monumental swindle".  The 2015 film Pawn Sacrifice tells the story of Fischer's attempts to defeat Russian Boris Spassky and become the World Champion.  The film is directed by Edward Zwick and stars Tobey Maguire as Fischer.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer

Boris Vasilyevich Spassky was born on January 30, 1937, in Leningrad, Russia, and displayed his chess genius at an early age.  Forced to flee the city during the Nazi invasion of 1942, he learned to play chess while riding a train.  At the age of 10, he beat World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik in an exhibition.  He attained the rank of International Grandmaster in 1955, and was the World Chess Champion from 1969 until his loss to American Bobby Fischer in 1972.  In 1992, he lost a highly publicized rematch against the reclusive Fischer in Yugoslavia, which was then subject to United Nations trade sanctions.  Fischer had already been in trouble for tax evasion; after his arrest in 2004, Spassky wrote a letter on his friend's behalf to U.S. President George W. Bush, stating, "Bobby and myself committed the same crime.  Put sanctions against me also.  Arrest me.  And put me in the same cell with Bobby Fischer.  And give us a chess set."  http://www.biography.com/people/boris-vasilyevich-spassky-9489899

Local Chess Players Weigh In On Fischer-Spassky Match And ‘Pawn Sacrifice’

Game 6:  Fischer vs Spassky - 1972 World Chess Championship

According to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, U.S. paper currency is made up of 75% cotton and 25% linen.  There are three-fourths of a pound of cotton in each pound of dollar bills.  There are 454 bills in a pound of currency.  See a table comparing value of cotton and value of currency printed at https://www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/cotton-currency.cfm


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1356  October 2, 2015  On this date in 1889, in Colorado, Nicholas Creede struck it rich in silver during the last great silver boom of the American Old West.  On this date in 1925, John Logie Baird performed the first test of a working television system.

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