Brian Romans (a geology professor at Virginia Tech) asked a great question in the Software Underground’s Slack earlier this month: “I was teaching my Seismic Stratigrapher course the other day and a student asked me about the origin of ‘side lobes’ on the Ricker wavelet. I didn’t have a great answer [...] what is a succinct explanation for the side lobes?” Questions like this are fantastic because they really aren’t easy to answer. There’s usually…

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It’s debatable whether neural networks should feature in an introductory course on machine learning. But it’s hard to avoid at least mentioning them, and many people are attracted to machine learning courses because they have heard so much about deep learning. So, reluctantly, we almost always get into neural nets in our Machine learning for geoscientists classes.Our approach is to build a neural network from scratch, using only standard Python and NumPy data structures — that…

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Looking to skill up before 2022 hits us with… whatever 2022 is planning? We have quite a few training classes coming up â€” don’t miss out! Our classes use 100% geoscience data and examples, and are taught exclusively by earth scientists. We’re also always happy to teach special classes in-house for you and your colleagues. Just get in touch. Special classes for CSEG in CalgaryCSEG Crash Course, 7 to 10 September — there are no prerequisites for…

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Yeah, mostly. But that doesn’t mean that we just need to get back to ‘normal’ conferences — those are broken too, remember?Chris Jackson, now at Manchester, started a good thread the other day:Just a reminder that when people say, “virtual conferences are awful”, what they might really mean are “virtual conferences don’t work for me for these reasons”…— Prof Christopher Jackson (@seis_matters) August 9, 2021 This led, in a roundabout way, to some pros and…

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Where would we be without seismic reflection? Is there a remote sensing technology that is as unlikely, as difficult, or as magical as the seismic reflection method? OK, maybe neutrino tomography. But anyway, seismic has contributed a great deal to society — helping us discover and describe hydrocarbon resources, aquifers, geothermal anomalies, sea-floor hazards, and plenty more besides.It even indirectly led to the integrated circuit, but that’s another story.Depending on who you ask, 9 August 2021…

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A few weeks ago I wrote about a new feature in bruges for making wedge models. This new feature makes it really easy to make wedge models, for example: import bruges as bg import matplotlib.pyplot as plt strat = [(0, 1, 0), (2, 3, 2, 3, 2), (4, 5, 4)] wedge, *_ = bg.models.wedge(strat=strat, conformance=’top’) plt.imshow(wedge)And here are some examples of what this will produce, depending on the conformance argument: What’s newI thought it might be…

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After reviewing a few code-dependent scientific papers recently, I’ve been thinking about reproducibility. Is there a minimum requirement for scientific code, or should we just be grateful for any code at all?The sky’s the limitI’ve come to the conclusion that there are a few things that are essential if you want anyone to be able to do more than simply read your code. (If that’s all you want, just add a code listing to your…

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This is an open letter to Equinor to appeal for a change to the licence used on Volve, Northern Lights, and other datasets. If you wish to co-sign, please add a supportive comment below. (Or if you disagree, please speak up too!)Open data has had huge impact on science and society. Whether the driving purpose is innovation, transparency, engagement, or something else, open data can make a difference. Underpinning the dataset itself is its licence,…

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There’s an SPE conference on openness happening this week. Around 60 people paid the $400 registration fee — does that seem like a lot for a virtual conference? — and it’s mostly what you’d expect: talks and panel discussions. But there’s 20 minutes per day for open discussion, and we must be grateful for small things! For sure, it is always good to see the technical societies pay attention to open data, open source code, and…

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The second Geothermal Hackathon happened last week. Timed to coincide with the Geosciences virtual event of the World Geothermal Congress, our 2-day event brought about 24 people together in the famous Software Underground Chateau (I’m sorry if I missed anyone!). For comparison, last year we were 13 people, so we’re going in the right direction! Next time I hope we’re as big as one of our ‘real world’ events — maybe we’ll even be able to…

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