If you've always wondered what goes on at our hackathons, make 2018 the year you find out. There'll be plenty of opportunities. We'll be popping up in Salt Lake City, right before the AAPG annual meeting, then again in Copenhagen, before EAGE. We're also running events at the AAPG and EAGE meetings. Later, in the autumn, we'll be making some things happen around SEG too. If you just want to go sign up right now, head…

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I started my career in sequence stratigraphy, so I know a futile discussion about semantics when I see one. But humour me for a second.As you may know, we offer a multi-day course on 'geocomputing'. Somebody just asked me: what is this mysterious, made-up-sounding discipline? Swiftly followed by: can you really teach people how to do computational geoscience in a few days? And then: can YOU really teach people anything??Good questionsYou can come at the…

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Difficulty rating: EASYFollowing on from the post a couple of weeks ago about colourmaps, I wanted to poke into contour maps a little more. Ostensibly, making a contour plot in matplotlib is a one-liner:plt.contour(data)But making a contour plot look nice takes a little more work than most of matplotlib's other plotting functions. For example, to change the contour levels you need to make an array containing the levels you want... another line of code. Adding…

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Another year pulls on its winter boots and prepares to hurry through the frigid night to wherever old years go to die. From a purely Agile point of view, putting aside all the odious nonsense going on in the world for a moment, it was a good year here at Agile, and I hope it was for you too. If not — if you were unduly affected by any of the manifold calamities in 2017 —…

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"the rainbow color map can significantly reduce a person’s accuracy and efficiency"Borkin et al. (2011) File under "Aaarrrrrrgghhhhhhh" The world has known for at least 20 years that the rainbow colourmap is A Bad Thing, perhaps even A Very Bad Thing. IBM researchers Bernice Rogowitz and Lloyd Treinish — whose research on the subject goes back to the early 90s — wrote their famous article Why should engineers and scientists worry about color? in 1996. Visualization…

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It's nearly the end of another banner year for humanity, which seems determined as ever to destroy the good things it has achieved. Here's hoping certain world 'leaders' have their Scrooge moments sooner rather than later.One positive thing we can all do is bring a little more science into the world. And I don't just mean for the scientists you already know. Let's infect everyone we can find! Maybe your niece will one day detect…

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This kind of password is horrible for lots of reasons. The real solution to password madness is a password manager. The end of the year is a great time to look around at your life and sort stuff out. One of the things you almost certainly need to sort out is your online security. Because if you haven't been hacked already (you probably have), you're just about to be.Just look at some recent stories from…

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Normally in the x lines of Python series, I'm trying to do something useful in as few lines of code as possible, but — and this is important — without sacrificing clarity. Code golf, on the other hand, tries solely to minimize the number of characters used, and to heck with clarity. This might, and probably will, result in rather obfuscated code.So today in x lines, we set x = 1 and see what kind of…

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There's a great new geoscience blog on the Internet — I urge you to add it to your blog-reading app or news reader or list of links or whatever it is you use to keep track of these things. It's called Geology and Python, and it contains exactly what you'd expect it to contain! The author, Bruno Ruas de Pinho, has nine posts up so far, all excellent. The range of topics is quite broad:Calculating…

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In my recent Abstract horror post, I mentioned an interesting paper in passing, Durkin et al. (2017): Paul R. Durkin, Ron L. Boyd, Stephen M. Hubbard, Albert W. Shultz, Michael D. Blum (2017). Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Meander-Belt Evolution, Cretaceous Mcmurray Formation, Alberta Foreland Basin, Canada. Journal of Sedimentary Research 87 (10), p 1075–1099. doi: 10.2110/jsr.2017.59  I wanted to write about it, or rather about its dataset, because I spent about 3 years of my life working…

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