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Jason and I went to the The San Jose Tech Museum today. I think it's actually called the "Museum of Innovation" or something, but whatever. It's a "museum" that encourages you to play around. Geared towards, oh, fourteen year olds or so, the museum was a bit of a let-down. Jason and I made the most of it, though.

• 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.

Re: the Segway, well, it was very easy and almost natural. Some people couldn't quite cope, and they'd step on, attempt to counter what they perceived as motion, and the Segway would rock back. They'd move forward and the Segway would move again. They'd counter, and the cycle would repeat. They'd finally calm down and just "balance themselves" and the Segway would react.

I had a little trouble turning and going backwards, but then again, that's not really a normal skill. You don't do it on bikes, and only sometimes do you really turn much skating backwards. Going forward, backwards (straight), and turning was fine. Jason did well also.

All told, we made our own fun. We played with things. It was a slow day, so not too many people were around and we weren't embarrassed to be playing with everything. Worth $9? Maybe not typically. Today? Sure.

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