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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

> Each of the outer planets: Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and of course Saturn have rings.

What? Really?

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Jupiter

OK, so there are things I don't know, and more importantly there is water in fairly easily accessible places dotted around our Solar System.

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When you have kids, your internal Wikipedia gets an update. :-) I had no idea about the rings until I read a book about planets to my kid. Then he started telling me that there were other dwarf planets besides Pluto. I told him that he was wrong. Then I went to a new book, and had to explain that "Even Papai makes mistakes."

Getting current on science is one of the great perks of having kids.

I agree. I get an amazing thrill from learning even some small new fact about our solar system. However, I'd argue that you don't have to wait until you have kids to get current on science. Maintaining general knowledge about the world around us is beneficial to everyone, and I believe that recognizing how much of a universe there is beyond our existence can help keep things in perspective.

And with all the Internet, Wikipedia, and several prominent science-oriented television shows today, keeping up is easier than ever.

Mee too! It touches me to have my kids begging me to see the next episode of Cosmos as if it was Games of Thrones.

> Then I went to a new book, and had to explain that "Even Papai makes mistakes."

Probably the most important thing for your kid to learn.

And oh boy he likes to remind me of this lesson. :-)

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know. —United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

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