Start there. Go for it.
My training in genetics was late 70s/ early 80s.
Infinitely fascinating, and as with lotsa things in science, it turned out to be the simplified version.
And now the world has expanded once again, telomeres, epigenetics, etc.
A foot and a half away from me is a copy of "The Joy Of Finding Things Out."
Man, this is a blast.

I've found only one suitable pre-made Keurig pod for me, Dark Magic Decaf.
Meanwhile, I still have opposable thumbs and can operate a french press or a Chemex or a porcelain cone or a Bialetti.
Choose your level of messiness (none horrible), but get much better coffee at at least half the price.
Yes, it can take up to ten minutes to get it, but there's something to be said for not making everything in life about pushing one button.
I can do them all with any heat source, from electric main to the trusty SnowPeak.

James Burke's "Connections" and perhaps "The Day The Universe Changed". How small incidents can create massive changes - Napoleon's near defeat at Marengo starts the path to refrigeration, how a botched souvenir production run and an grousing cleric leads to a revolution in printing and religion. Etc. Also "The Second Self" by Sherry Turkle - to see how an emerging thread in technology can have implications elsewhere. Yes, many sc-ifi books have done this predictively, but again it's valuable to see how this plays out as it plays out with a historical record.

Will cut a lot of nonsense out of reading stuff into the results.

...for the shop that has the lumbars to name their next 3D printer "Slarti Jr."

Jack Bauer and his pals already have 3D maps and schematics of every power plant, office building, warehouse, outhouse and chicken shack. Not to mention full control of the power, network and hot and cold water taps in each of them. And all in the time it takes Chloe to recalibrate the beam forming firewall protocols against the binary-coded output logs. Or something.

Heck, even following their rules results in abandoned purchases. Early-adopter the user end of Adobe Digital Editions. Freak show. Bloated install? Check. Mobo swap? DRM dies. HD upgrade? DRM dies. Resolving this? Days of back and forth proving who I was, explaining why I needed a larger hard drive... Tried it again this past year, thinking sure a large company like Adobe had learned their lesson from tolerable eBook implementations (Kindle, iBooks...) Nope. $100 worth of purchased books are still dead.

The organization is wonderful - clicking through serial maps of settlements, the movement of slave populations, native populations, transportation modes is incredibly informative. When my grandparents we born there were two - count'em - two - actual cities in Arizona. No wonder they stayed in New England. What happened between 1800 and 1810 in LA that moves slaves there? Or the same in TX from 1840-1850?

Yes, we've come a long way in cancer treatment, and some ways in cancer detection. Problem is that there are some cancers that start very small, and move faster than the annual physical. The bean counters are standing in the way of the ultrasounds that can in fact see small tumors sooner than CT. The rationale is that (2) it costs a lot to screen false positives and (2) it makes people worry more. I have news for you - after losing two immediate family members way too soon to cancers that were only discovered once the symptoms got dangerous, something needs to change. Too often we're not finding cancer when it starts but rather when it displaces and entire organ or produces blood. I'll take 6 months of worrying and a middling increase in cost to find out it it was nothing over ten or 50 years of death.

Some as a pro
Some as a hobby / interesting thing to know
Many just enough to know when you're being tweaked by a HW or SW salesperson
(So does this include USB3? Yup. iEEE1394? Sure. Full LRF support? Absolutely!)
(We have to have the pro package - this one doesn't do .MID to .OBJ - and it'll be extra two weeks of training.)

...it really doesn't need to be justified. It's a leash. Like your Sam's, BJ's or Costco membership. It makes you want to buy more stuff at Amazon (on account of you don't want to waste that $80 you handed them) and they make it all up on volume and margins. No way the $80 ever offset the shipping in any reasonable fashion. I get free shipping from Bean's and pay nothing up front for it.

They do need to get more money though, if only to replace the drones that will no doubt be used for plinking practice by the neighbor kids.

The one who dies with the most animal-emblazoned O'Reilly books on their shelf wins.

First, if your circadian rhythm is so exquisitely timed (and it is), why use a watch that arbitrarily cuts the day into four parts?

Second, there is no reason to believe that smelling things four times a day can synchronize your rhythms.

Third, these are "homeopathic" doses of the magic stuff she claims works. Sniffing a minute whiff of caffeine in the air around you has an indistinguishable-from-zero effect. Were it otherwise, heart patients would have a tough time walking past a Starbucks.

Finally, you can get a Ph.D. for writing this: "Does our psychological perception of scent- e.g. incense= relax, coffee= wake up, directly related to the chemical synapses they induce?"

Yikes.

"I will go up to the six-fingered admin and say. Hello. My name is I/O Montoya. You killed my data. Prepare to die."

...and thinking what no one else has thought.

John visited our science center years back, asked us for an old 8" floppy to tear apart and improve the mount action on our big DIY Dob. Signed it too. We also brought him to our mountaintop sundial that at 18' across is the "sun" for a 2" earth-scale solar system that goes out ~14 miles. We were pointing out the landmarks for the planets, and he started pacing. Dang. We figured we bored him with our little project. We asked him what was wrong. He said "Nothing - but watch this," He walked the diameter of the "sun" while counting "1..2..3..4.. See?! I can cross your sun's diameter in the same four seconds it takes light to travel the 865,000 mile diameter of the real sun - so on your model, walking is the scaled speed of light!" In ten years, a dozen of us had never thought of that. Bonus is when we have students do the annual bicycle "Tour de Solar System" on the local rail trails, we can tell them they're pedaling at warp 3 or whatnot...