Scout Archives

How can societies enhance written records and dialogue? Has Google obliterated Guttenburg? And what is with all of these emojis? These are some of the many questions pondered in The Future of Text, a collection of articles delving into where text came from and where it is going. At the link above readers can download a PDF or EPUB version of the book, which in many ways reads as a time capsule for...

Bringing together both professional and amature mycologists, Fungimap records the geographic "distribution of fungal species over time around Australia." Readers may wish to begin by checking out the informational pages under the About Fungi tab, including the Glossary of Useful Terms page. The site's Blog (accessible via the Categories drop-down menu on the right-hand panel) covers topics ranging...

BRL-CAD is a computer aided design system. It was originally created in 1979 at the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory to perform simulation and analysis of "combat vehicle systems and environments." It retains an emphasis on engineering analysis but has grown to become a general purpose system for both Computer Aided Design (CAD) and 3D modeling workflows. BRL-CAD follows the UNIX design...

Goxel is a 3D drawing program that uses "Voxels" (short for "Volumetric Pixels," or cubes) to describe scenes. Most other 3D editing software (such as Blender) represents scenes as meshes of 2D triangles. Voxel-style art appears in a number of video games, most prominently Minecraft. In the Gallery section of the site, users can locate a number of examples that were created with Goxel. The Web...

Here is a fun(gi) fact: "Some fungi have more than 20,000 'sexes.'" While the genetics behind fungal mating can be quite complex, Lisa J. Vaillancourt (University of Kentucky, Lexington) created this game to distill some of the basics for mycology students. Educators will only need to gather a few decks of cards, the exact amount dependent on class size, to bring the activity to life. Instructions...