In between recent courses and hackathons, I’ve been chipping away at some new features in striplog. An open-source Python package, striplog handles irregularly sampled data, like lithologic intervals, chronostratigraphic zones, or anything that isn’t regularly sampled like, say, a well log. Instead of defining what is present at every depth location, you define intervals with a top and a base. The interval can contain whatever you like: names of rocks, images, or special core analyses,…

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Difficulty rating: Beginner We'd often like to load images into Python. Once loaded, we might want to treat them as images, for example cropping them, saving in another format, or adjusting brightness and contrast. Or we might want to treat a greyscale image as a two-dimensional NumPy array, perhaps so that we can apply a custom filter, or because the image is actually seismic data. This image-or-array duality is entirely semantic — there is really…

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So you’ve signed up for a hackathon — or maybe you’ve seen an event and you’re still thinking about it.First thing: I can almost guarantee that you will not regret it, so if you haven’t committed yet, I challenge you to go and sign up now.But even once you’ve chosen to go, maybe you feel nervous about your skills, or are worried about spending two days with strangers, or aren’t sure about the idea of competitive…

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Difficulty rating: Intermediate Have you ever wished you could carry units around with your quantities — and have the computer figure out the best units and multipliers to use? pint is a nice, compact library for doing just this, handling all your dimensional analysis needs. It can also detect units from strings. We can define our own units, it knows about multipliers (kilo, mega, etc), and it even works with numpy and pandas. To use…

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Last autumn Agile helped Peter Bormann (ConocoPhillips Norge) and the FORCE consortium host the first geo-flavoured hackathon in Norway. Maybe you were there, or maybe you read about the nine fascinating machine learning projects here on the blog. If so, you’ll know it was a great event, so we’re doing it again!Hackthon: 18 and 19 SeptemberSymposium: 20 SeptemberCheck out last year’s projects here. Projects included Biostrat!, Virtual Metering, sketch2seis, and AVO ML — a really…

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I saw this lovely tweet from PGS yesterday:Our basin studies team spotted this on fast-track imaging from Republic of Guinea. A 7.5 km diameter depression, with no salt or mobile shale, nor dissolution of fluid escape. We interpreted the structure as a complex meteorite impact crater. https://t.co/Z4TUOtsv54 #meteorite pic.twitter.com/hScJ31SoE3— PGS (@PGSNews) August 1, 2019 Kudos to them for sharing this. It’s always great to see seismic data and interpretations on Twitter — especially of weird…

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A rite of passage for a geologist is the making of an original geological map, starting from scratch. In the UK, this is known as the ‘independent mapping project’ and is usually done at the end of the second year of an undergrad degree. I did mine on the eastern shore of the Embalse de Santa Ana, just north of Alfarras in Catalunya, Spain. (I wrote all about it back in 2012.)The map I drew…

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Gulp. My first post in… a while. Life, work, chaos, ideas — it all caught up with me recently. I’ve missed the blog greatly, and felt a regular pang of guilt at letting it gather dust. But I’m back! The 200+ draft posts in my backlog ain’t gonna write themselves. Thank you for returning and reading this one.Recently I wrote about our continuing adventures in training; since I wrote that post in April, we’ve taught…

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How do you describe the indescribable?Last week, Agile hosted the TRANSFORM unconference in Normandy, France. We were there to talk about the open suburface stack — the collection of open-source Python tools for earth scientists. We also spent time on the state of the Software Underground, a global community of practice for digital subsurface scientists and engineers. In effect, this was the first annual Software Underground conference. This was SwungCon 1.The spaceI knew the Château…

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Diego teaching in Houston in 2018. It’s five years since we started teaching Python to geoscientists. To be honest, it might have been premature. At the time, Evan and I were maybe only two years into serious, daily use of Python. But the first class, at the Atlantic Geological Society’s annual meeting in February 2014, was free so the pressure was not too high. And it turns out that only being a step or two…

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