As a family man, finding a topic that can involve the kids may fit into your life better. If you like making, optical telescopes can be rewarding. There's the optics, telescope manufacturing and sky trackers (robotics). Nowadays digital photography goes with telescopes.

If you really want to contribute peripherally, there are lots of open data sets. Contributing code is especially useful.

Emacs dammit.

If only there was a Protocol to Simply Transfer Messages.

Why is this called Steinhardt's paper? Anna Ijjas is first author and she's a post-doc at Harvard.

Build something with your hands. Travel. Trek. Try something you've never done before. Do something out of doors.

I didn't, I wish I had.

P.S. Graduate as soon as possible. You don't get more points for doing more work as a graduate student. Your post-doc record is way more important if you are trying for the academic track.

In span of time between missions, there is usually incredible progress in a few key parameters, detector noise, spacial resolution, and frequency range. While you can argue that a "refueled" IRAS could beat down the noise by observing for years and years, changing out detectors and telescopes is effectively launching a new mission. Also, as our knowledge of astrophysics grows, we design missions to answer the unanswered questions. 10 years of IRAS is not necessarily as interesting as a couple of years of a significantly more advanced mission.

Ray Bradbury,

Is that you?

This is a great article describing how difficult it is to control systematic errors with clocks in this kind of Time Of Flight experiment. An undergraduate level of understanding of relativity is all that's required and it makes you think. Also contains some snarkiness.

It's a product called "Kidzui". It consists of a bunch of whitelisted sites, videos and other content whitelisted by parents and teachers.

By paying for a service you can avoid it being brought to you by Fruity Pebbles, which is what "Google Kids" would be.

That top down central planning will get you every time.

Trust and faith or belief are not the same thing. I can trust people but still verify or need to verify the veracity of their assertions. Scientists rely on the network of trust among themselves but if something doesn't work they will call each other out on it. With faith, there is no need to verify. In fact, with faith I don't need trust because I'm not relying on the words of a man but my belief in the divine. This is different from following a demagogue, which is not faith but obedience.

Comparing Apple vs PC/Android to Protestant vs. Catholic makes me want to defenestrate somone...

PTSD...