Best Websites for Elderly Genius

September 2, 2008 7:15 PM

Recommend websites for my grandad.

My grandad is finally online, and I'm looking for websites to send him. He's a true polymath and loves learning. He's also a retired physician. What sites would you recommend for him? Thanks!

I am not sending my sweet grandfather any variation of goatse. PG, you naughty people.

posted by LittleMissCranky to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Shorpy has tremendous American vernacular photography.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:25 PM on September 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

If he's a retired physician, he may enjoy 6YearMed, a site maintained by a brand-new pediatrician. She's a wonderful writer, and seems to have a really sweet nature as well.

Poking around the collection of blogs on Scienceblogs.com and finding his favorites may also be fun.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:31 PM on September 2, 2008

He would probably like to answer questions on this site.
posted by lee at 7:35 PM on September 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

National Geographic
Google News (Even better if you help him set up an iGoogle page that has mostly news about things he likes and/or his hometown)
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Scientific American

I found, when helping some elderly acquaintances get online, that it's easier to start small and with something that they really care about (say, the news from home) and then to branch out from there, rather than trying to offer a huge amount of places to visit all at once.
posted by gemmy at 7:45 PM on September 2, 2008

I find the Big Picture photography blog posts by Boston.com to be fascinating. Maybe you even could explain RSS feeds to him and set him up with Google Reader to get the weekly blog posts as they come down?
posted by sharkfu at 8:22 PM on September 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

Here's a miscellaneous list. It would help to know more about his interests...

http://boston.com/bigpicture/"> Boston Globe's Big Picture blog , with large-size pictures on new events of the day.

Newseums' Today's Front Pages with the front pages of hundreds of US and international newspapers, updated each day.

National Weather Service
Wunderground for lots of weather info.

USGS for info on earthquakes, water resources, etc

Live road conditions for your state are probably available - eg Texas road conditions

CDC realtime data on various illnesses across the country

Strange Maps blog, with interesting maps and nice descriptions of them

Arts and Letters Daily - a huge listing of articles on various humanities topics, sometimes sensationalistic, sometimes wonderfully scholarly

weather and position of ships at sea

info and map of current emergencies around the world - kind of cool but frankly not all that useful

Astronomy Picture of the Day
Curious about astronomy? Ask an astronomer

What's that Bug? - great info and pics, a bit hard to navigate

bird identification guides; there are a bunch of these (another guide with songs).

Your state or area government probably has useful sites (eg, Cooperative Extension Service) for gardening, wildlife ID, etc that are tailored to your area. Ditto for the state archives.

Library of Congress
National Archives

Snopes to debunk urban legends or email hoaxes he might be sent

Roads - more than you ever wanted to know about various roads

Abandoned and Little-Used Airfields

Map of impact craters in North America

Knight Science Journalism Tracker

Scientific American, ask the experts columns

Usenet physics FAQ

list of fun math links
interactive mathematics miscellany
math gems

What foods were people eating at various times in history?

Lots of cooking sites eg epicurious
search by ingredient to get nutrition info

There are a lot of great sites about photography
Meccano
building small boats

Lots of educational TV shows have good web content associated with them. PBS's Do You Speak American? is one example. IF he finds a show he likes, he can check online to see if the station offers additional content.

Engineering failures due to water
Sheldon Brown on bicycles

MIT open courses: physics

optical illusions
Satellite images from European Space Agency
A list of sites with daily images of various things

Magazines like The Atlantic and New Yorker etc have some of their content online. Atlantic article about apple cultivation; New Yorker article about Burma

You might walk him through how to get the most from
Google
Google Maps and Google Earth
Amazon
IMDb if he likes movies
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:47 PM on September 2, 2008 [7 favorites]

I'm with lee. Get him a Metafilter account.
posted by turgid dahlia at 9:24 PM on September 2, 2008

My new favorite site for stimulating the old grey matter is Mirabilis.ca.
posted by roger ackroyd at 9:26 PM on September 2, 2008

Check the answers in this one, too: What websites will my 80-year-old grandfather love?
posted by mediareport at 5:55 AM on September 3, 2008 [1 favorite]

http://games.aarp.org/
posted by PenDevil at 6:19 AM on September 3, 2008

I Am Not A Grandad but man, do I love to learn. I'd recommend the Open University's Open Learn site. They've got a ton of short courses in myriad subjects taken from accredited wider degrees.

Users don't have to register but he might need some help navigating the site, depending on his comfort with surfing etc, but the content itself is mostly just text pages with next and back click-throughs, so really simple format for newbies but fantastic content with structured outcomes. Caution - it can be addictive ;)
posted by freya_lamb at 6:29 AM on September 3, 2008

Strange Maps
BBC News in Pictures
3 Quarks Daily
posted by lukemeister at 7:47 AM on September 3, 2008

Because sometimes it shouldn't be about the practical:
Time Cube
Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie
Google Books
Reptilian Agenda
Stupid.com
ReligiousTolerance.org
Google Images: Rube Goldberg
posted by notashroom at 2:52 PM on September 3, 2008