Once we visited the Exploratorium, a science museum housed in the old Place of Fine Arts from the Pacific Exposition of the 1915... I really liked the music playing inventions that allowed random tourists to play strange devices that were controllers for synthesizers. They were pre programmed to play the "right" notes so we could jam and have fun without having any musical training or skill. There was another display of "virtual reality". It involved wearing a VR headset and wherever you looked that's where you went. It was a video game inside a long tunnel with floating spinning cubes with people's faces. One looked like Jerry Garcia. The goal of the game was to fly thru the cubes... They also had a strobe light dancing area where we cast shadows onto a wall that was painted with phosphorescent paint. Every second a light would flash and you left a shadow that lasted about 10 seconds... so you could "stack" shadows to form dancing images... FYI: You can see the building in the Movie "The Rock" with Sean Connery in the scene where he meets his daughter...
Dad's friend worked as a psychologist for the Jewish Boys Club and he had some very interesting "Mind Games". My favorite was a mirror game where you tried to do mechanical skill puzzles while looking at your hands in the mirror. Like "thread a needle" with a thick needle and rope... He also took us fishing for crabs in the bay.
We also went mining for Shark's Teeth in the Santa Cruz Mountains. There was a privately owned hill of sand that you could sift for teeth. We had a wooden box with a wire bottom that we would pour sand thru. The teeth would remain on the screen while the sand went through. It amazed me to think that this hill at high elevation had once been on the sea floor. However, there were shark teeth and sharks left them behind when they were swimming around a million years ago. Makes you wonder about the stories of Noah's Ark. Maybe it really happened!
Read more of my autobiography at:
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/03/growing-up-in-los-gatos-california-in.html
Dad's friend worked as a psychologist for the Jewish Boys Club and he had some very interesting "Mind Games". My favorite was a mirror game where you tried to do mechanical skill puzzles while looking at your hands in the mirror. Like "thread a needle" with a thick needle and rope... He also took us fishing for crabs in the bay.
We also went mining for Shark's Teeth in the Santa Cruz Mountains. There was a privately owned hill of sand that you could sift for teeth. We had a wooden box with a wire bottom that we would pour sand thru. The teeth would remain on the screen while the sand went through. It amazed me to think that this hill at high elevation had once been on the sea floor. However, there were shark teeth and sharks left them behind when they were swimming around a million years ago. Makes you wonder about the stories of Noah's Ark. Maybe it really happened!
Read more of my autobiography at:
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/03/growing-up-in-los-gatos-california-in.html
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