Free Republic

Against the backdrop of major events in American history like the Civil War and the Great Depression, “The Toys that Built America” shares a different story—one that brings new products and nostalgic toys to the forefront as driving forces behind untold cultural and economic shifts

At this bar, blockheads are welcome. A clever rooftop bar in Braunschweig, Germany, allows guests to play Tetris and other classic arcade games on the side of a tall building

The images look like they showcase toy sets of miniature soldiers, their gear, and their vehicles, but they are indeed very real.  Twitter is a fascinating thing. Communities within the larger community can take on a life of their own. "National Security Twitter," which includes everyone from foreign policy wonks to missile tech geeks to open source intelligence gatherers, is no different. Earlier in the month, Military Giant Cats—literally a Twitter user that posts photoshopped giant cats interacting with military hardware—was all the rage. This week the "Tetris Challenge" meme has risen to prominence, and for good reason. The photos—which are...

Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people to share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it's as weird as it sounds. It works through a combination of electroencephalograms (EEGs), for recording the electrical impulses that indicate brain activity, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), where neurons are stimulated using magnetic fields. The researchers behind the system have dubbed it BrainNet, and say it could eventually be used to connect many different minds...

by Eddie Makuch on April 21, 2015 The William J. Clinton Library has posted a photo of Hillary Clinton doing what so many others did in the early 1990s: playing GameBoy. The photo you see below was taken on April 6, 1993 on her flight from Austin, Texas to Washington, DC. At this time, Bill Clinton was President and she was the First Lady. Hillary Clinton, the former US Secretary of State, is now herself running for President in the upcoming 2016 election. She announced her bid earlier this month and has been on the campaign trail since. It's tough...

a great history of the Soviets from Red October to Putin.(video)

Playing the classic puzzle game Tetris can boost your brain power, according to a new study. The three-month study, by the Mind Research Network, found adolescent girls who played Tetris not only displayed greater brain efficiency, but developed a thicker brain cortex, a sign of increased grey matter. Clinical neuropsychologist Dr Rex Jung said one of the most surprising findings of brain research in the past five years was that juggling game play increased grey matter in the motor areas of the brain. Study co-author Dr Richard Haier said Tetris had proved useful for brain researchers. "Tetris for the brain...

With the world's eyes turned to Normandy as President Obama and European leaders honor the sacrifice of Allied soldiers on June 6, 1944, Internet giant Google chose to honor this 65th anniversary of D-Day by memorializing the birth of a video game. The search engine's homepage, often the site of commemorative graphics interwoven with its Google name on special occasions, chose this day to display the multi-colored blocks of the classic game Tetris, which was created by Russian computer programmer Alexey Pajitnov and made playable for the first time on June 6, 1984. Scrolling over the blocks reveals the words,...

On June 6, 1944, the crucial Normandy Landings that formed the spearhead of the Allied invasion of Nazi held Europe occurred. D-Day ultimately led to the victory of the Allies over the despotic Nazi regime. Now here we are on June 6, 2009 and, in its inimitable way, Google has decided to memorialize the important occasion by adding an image on its homepage depicting... the computer game Tetris.Yes, it's far more important to Google to celebrate the anniversary of the invention of the video game Tetris than to memorialize D-Day. It just warms the heart, doesn't it?

Wonder what the largest looked like. LINK

With Tetris there are no aliens to shoot or banks to rob, just a charmingly simple and utterly addictive computer game. The drama was all behind the scenes. Fortunes were made and lawsuits fought as Tetris swept the world in the 1980s and killed a million conversations. But 20 years after the creation of this technological phenomenon, its inventor Alexey Pajitnov is only just beginning to make any money. Back in 1985, in the Cold War Soviet Union, the man responsible for one of the most addictive computer games in history was a jobbing scientist at the Russian Academy of...