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Get to a Maker Faire. Several years ago I spent awhile talking with Bre Pettis about his new machine from MakerBot without realizing who he was. Take the kids! Solder your own badge! Learn how to make your own air powered rockets! My kids aren't even into robots think it is a blast. A word of waring... they make you sign a serious waiver for a reason. They expect you to pay attention to your surroundings and not blindly walk into that quadcopter demo. Make sure your kids are not texting as they walk. Look for some of the small booths/tables with guys that brought in their home brewed stuff. They were you not that long ago and would love to talk about hot to get started. The fancy booths are people looking to sell stuff. If your not looking to buy your own laser cutter.... they will let you look and they will be polite but they are looking to sell stuff.
http://makerfaire.com/

If you decide you want to start now and want to learn how things work....

Get this kit for $49:
http://www.adafruit.com/products/193

Follow the tutorials starting here:
http://learn.adafruit.com/lesson-0-getting-started

Soon you will be a master of blinky lights. Think of it as "Hello world" for robotics.

If you think, "HOLY CRAP. I AM MAKING IT REALLY DO THINGS" Then continue. If you went, "HOLY CRAP, I JUST WASTED $50 AND A FEW HOURS OF MY LIFE TO MAKE A STUPID LIGHT BLINK" you might consider some of the more expensive options or re-consider your desire to do this. If you want to continue...

If you have an old printer laying around then rip some motors out of it. In fact anything that has a motor or is older electronics will soon be looked at with, "Hey, that has a nice transformer in it. Those are some nice through hole resisters. Would you look at those hardened steel rods! I wonder why they did it this way?"

Things to consider furthering the addiction:
motor shield with some basic motors
digital multimeter
Soldering iron, do not get one of those nasty Radio Shack $20 pieces of junk. You wouldn't try to build a small deck with a handsaw. This is one of the more expensive pieces you will buy, but it is one of those tools that you will use and will appreciate not having a junk one. This does not mean you need to get a super solder re-work station. Get one with a base station and dial control. Temp controlled would be great.
Go to a nearby electronics place that sells this stuff and buy some general wire, breadboard etc. They will appreciate the business and might be there someday when you really need that one part and don't want to wait for shipping. I was amazed to find one near me. They were rather knowledgeable compared to some certain chains (they had a soldering iron on the counter just in case)
An old computer with the following ports: MIDI(computers used to have a port with real IO, oh my), serial, USB, parallel. You might want to eventually talk to ports and individual pins without the OS in the way. Windows stopped allowing this with XP. A P4 is fast but gets warm and very power hungry. A PIII not so hot or power hungry but not as fast. An old laptop works great for this since it has a small footprint.

Start to follow a few web sites:
http://hackaday.com/
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?main_page=blog
http://blog.makezine.com/
http://dangerousprototypes.com/
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/
http://diydrones.com/
https://www.sparkfun.com/

People like this are the modern day inventors.

[0] - http://makerfaire.com/
[1] - http://makerspace.com/
[2] - http://www.instructables.com/index

... can build something like this full motion BSG Viper simulator http://makerfaire.com/pub/e/7541
what someone on a PA microphone said while introducing this to crowds at Maker Faire Bay Area.

There are a bunch of classic shows, CommVEx is coming up in under two weeks (July 23 &24) and there are many others in various places throughout the year. Several Commodore ones, and many others including the Vintage Computer Festival. Even the Maker Faires have usually a classic computer or five in their midst. Another to look for are the Arcade/Videogaming expos that pop up, you can play on 8-bit arcade hardware.

There's always the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA. Intel museum in San Jose, etc.

If you're any kind of geek, you should try to attend one of these. Make Faires happen in various spots around the world multiple times each year. There are more Faires planned in the Bay Area, Detroit, and New York this year. Check out their site for info.

Oh, they have. A friend of mine did her PhD on computationally-enhanced textiles.

Do-it-yourself rapid prototyping machinery is roughly in the same state that home desktop publishing was back in 1980. Fabrication devices like 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC routers, and soon robotic garment makers will eventually become cheap enough that you will likely have access to one (if not in your home, then perhaps at your school or local crazy artist co-op). The thing is, most people have such a consumption mentality that given the opportunity to design and make things for themselves, they really have no idea where to begin. Fortunately, this is starting to change as people realize they can take an active part in designing and making the world they live in. Communities like Make Faire and various local flavors of DorkBot (go find yours!) are around to help educate and support your inner nerd. Personally, I've made a sort of 3D Logo language for programming physical shape that can be produced on a laser cutter.

You've clearly never been to a DIY fantasy-land like Maker Faire. In many ways, electronics are becoming easier to hack together, because higher-level components and circuits are available for integration into something more powerful than one could do from the old electronics magazines (look at what FPGAs did). Instead of Legos, now kids can build their own robots. Instead of the simple Logo programming language (which I grew up on), kids now have: Scratch. It allows them to create whole games with just about the same learning curve as Logo. I will concede that patents are becoming a bit absurd.

Ditto votes for the CHM. I would rate it a must-see. If you go north on 101 a ways, there's also the Hiller Aviation Museum, with a nice collection of airplanes and helicopters. The Intel museum may also be worth a visit. Consider timing your visit to the Bay Area to match up with events like the Maker Faire or the various tech conferences / trade shows that come through San Jose or Santa Clara.

don't call it meatspace, it freaks out the normal people.

Yeah, but is that such a bad thing? Maybe he doesn't just want a mundane, he wants a relationship with a female geek.

To the original questioner: How about finding your local a Hackerspace? It's the perfect combination of meatspace activity and geekery. Plenty of geeky/artsy types at events like Maker Faire, or whatever your local equivalent is.

Where is my hacker space festival (in the US?) All we get is lame gatherings of steam-punkers doing the cosplay thing in the desert while modding their cases/cars/bodies to look like they were built by Jules Verne .. or commercial gatherings where it's free pencils and a few days at the poker tables in the area.

Pity -- you just missed Maker Faire in the Bay Area. There's one in Austin coming up.

It's like all the cool stuff from Burning Man got dumped onto the fairgrounds, but instead of being pretentious twits about how "artistic" they are, everyone wants to take the covers off and show you how they built it. "It" can be anything from the funky muffin cupcake cars from Burning Man, to high power rockets, to 3D printers that use sugar instead of plastic.

(Yeah, there are Steampunks too, but instead of just dressing up, they'll show you how they restored an actual steam-powered tractor from the turn of the century. It's the size of a small locomotive, which shouldn't be surprising, since it essentially is a small locomotive with tractor wheels on it. They had it running for the full duration of the fair, and drove around the fairgrounds with it towards the end of the day. Insane!)

The owner of the TinkerSchool site - http://www.tinkeringschool.com/blog/ spoke at the last Maker Faire http://www.makerfaire.com/ this year in San Mateo(something you should look into attending with your kids, theres also another one in October in Texas)

Anyway, he did a talk on "Make Your Own School" which was about his tinkering school he runs for kids, as well as "the Five Dangerous Things You Should Have Your Kids Do" Both were very informative and common sense. Write him and see if he has any publications you can read.

On his site he had a link to his five dangerous things talk at ted: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/202

You've been on Slashdot how long? I'd just think you would have found that out by now. I don't think anyone is "expecting" Nvidia to open source their 3D drivers anytime soon, but doing so gives control back to us, the consumers. Or at least, it helps. :) I know some of you may be used to buying things that are completely controlled by contracts/EULAs/DRM/binaries, but back in the old days, consumers actually had rights to do what they pleased with their stuff, for the most part that is, including tinkering, modifying, selling, duplicating, sharing, etc. :)
 
Equivalent to the open source movement in the physical realm is the Maker Fair http://makerfaire.com/ which promotes basically the same agenda. OK, so the Maker Fair is much much smaller, but still.
 
Just because some of you believe that we should all bend over for the Man because you're used to it, give up our freedoms for security or because some company would LIKE to control most every aspect of your life and force you to watch their dumb advertisements no matter how many times you click the menu button on your DVD remote (yes, it pisses me off), doesn't mean that we should, and that everyone who doesn't like it should shut the hell up about it and accept oppression.

I got to play with an XO laptop yesterday at the Maker Faire. It is not a gadget - it is a computer built for a child (small keyboard) with little prior experience with IT (simple GUI, etc). I wrote up a review (with pictures) on my blog.