The Tech Museum of San Jose

A couple weekends ago, Tom, Erin, and I decided to check out the Tech Museum of San Jose. We had heard good things about it, but had never made the trip down.

Boy was it fun. Anyone who comes to visit us in the future will hereby be taken to the Tech for at least a day.

True to its name, the Tech had a bunch of cool technologies on display. One of the first exhibits we enjoyed was a huge 3 dimensional globe that had satellite images of the entire earth projected on it in very high definition. They were linked to a bunch of different databases, so you could bring up images of the world at night, or during hurricane Katrina, or heat based images of the wildfires or a whole bunch of other things and then manipulate them to your heart's content. It should be no surprise that Tom particularly loved this exhibit.

Throughout the museum there were little ticket scanners related to individual exhibits. Then, for example, if you stand in front of a thermal camera and scan your ticket, it will take your "picture" and post it online for you to retrieve at home. Can you tell which one of those hot people is Kate, Tom, and Erin?

I also got a 3-d scan of my head done at one point, which was pretty cool. Unfortunately you have to download some software onto your computer to view it from home, so I probably won't post it online. It is very surreal, though, to be able to spin your own head around at will.

Another exhibit worth mentioning was the hover-craft space vehicle that you could sit in and drive around. They had a cool "laser" attached to the top and you could try to hit various light-reactive targets on the ceiling within a one-minute time limit. Erin got 3, Kate almost got 1, and Tom got 5, which tied the all-time high that the ride operator had ever seen.

Still another exhibit worth mentioning was the earthquake simulator. They had the shock wave patterns from various large historical earthquakes (Loma Prieta, 1906 San Fran earthquake, etc) programmed into a shaker table that you could stand on and feel. Those quakes are definitely more violent than anything we've felt in our tenure here in earthquake country.

Still another exhibit worth mentioning... well, you get the point. I could go on all day. And believe it or not, regular adult admission to the museum was the bargain basement price of $8 (which included an IMAX dome movie)!

So if any of you guys were debating taking another trip out here to visit Tommenkate, add the Tech museum of San Jose to the "pros" column...