Rough Draft

Tech Museum

Erik and I went to the Tech Musuem in downtown San Jose last weekend. The musuem is geared towards younger kids around 10-14, but we still had a good time. Erik highlights most of the fun stuff we did.

We killed a (fake) guy with gamma rays. Gamma rays are used in surgery, and with a buttoned hemisphere, we were supposed to choose only the paths that wouldn't hit the brain stem (etc.). The first time, we did so properly. The next time, well, the guy wouldn't have made it out of surgery?

We went down the up escalator. The ends are the tricky parts

We rode in an astronaut "seat" that floated like a table hockey puck (a hovercraft of sorts) and steered a red beam into targets above us.

We raced wheelchairs and defended a goal from hockey pucks.

We toured the Intel section (with silicon wafers, microprocessors, etc.) and noted that soem of the demo machines (iMacs) were running HyperCard stacks.

We rode a Segway.

The only other thing I can think of that wasn't in that list was playing a game of Operation on a really large Operation board. Although we determined it was physically impossible to get the pencil out, at least without bending the tweezers.

Riding the Segway was the most fun part of the Tech Museum. It was pretty easy to control, although a lot of people that got on would try to fight its motion and almost fell off. Apparently the Segway has 3 keys with each one allowing it to go up to a certain maximum speed.