• i) Books are all very well, but in this day and age aren't there other web-based resources that might be a good supplement? Does any know of any universities making material at this level available online for free?
• ii) On the "learning the maths" vs. "getting an intuitive understanding of the geometry" argument, I think some people are putting the cart before the horse. Doing the mathematical donkey work comes first. The intuitive understanding only comes after a long period of sweating over the formalism.

• i) telescope time is a scarce resource. If I need an image of a galaxy X I might have to wait years to get telescope time for it. If galaxy X has already been observed once and the data stored then I can do my new research (e.g. datamining) on the existing data. Nobody knows in advance which data is going to be interesting to future researchers so triage is almost impossible.
• ii) telescopes have finite lifetimes. Once the telescope/instrument ceases to exist the data cannot be reproduced.
• iii) Most of the interesting things in the universe are dynamic. You need to be able to compare observations of stuff over time.

That should keep him busy.

Is there other more obscure geek stuff? What about the Royal Institution?

Here in Denmark, "the Danish Bernie Madoff", Stein Bagger, just got 7 years. Of course he only swindled about 150 million dollars, so proportionately he got off worse.