On Tuesday I wrote about the generally low quality of abstracts submitted to conferences. In particular, their vagueness and consequent uninterestingness. Three academics pointed out to me that there's an obvious reason. Brian Romans (Virginia Tech) — One issue, among many, with conference abstracts is the lead time between abstract submission and presentation (if accepted). AAPG is particularly bad at this and it is, frankly, ridiculous. The conference is >6 months from now! A couple…

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This isn't really a horror story, more of a Grimm fairy tale. Still, I thought it worthy of a Hallowe'eny title.I've been reviewing abstracts for the 2018 AAPG annual convention. It's fun, because you get to read about new research months ahead of the rest of the world. But it's also not fun because... well, most abstracts aren't that great. I have no idea what proportion of abstracts the conference accepts, but I hope it's…

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If you're into science, and especially physics, you've heard of arXiv, which has revolutionized how research in physics is shared. BioarXiv, SocArXiv and PaleorXiv followed, among others*.Well get excited, because today, at last, there is an open preprint server especially for earth science — EarthArXiv has landed! I could write a long essay about how great this news is, but the best way to get the full story is to listen to two of the founders…

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Welcome to the latest x lines of Python post, in which we have a crack at some fundamental subsurface workflows... in as few lines of code as possible. Ideally, x < 10.We've met curves once before in the series — in the machine learning edition, in which we cheated by loading the data from a CSV file. Today, we're going to get it from an LAS file — the popular standard for wireline log data.Just…

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Last time I wrote about different ways of calculating distance in a vector space — say, a two-dimensional Euclidean plane like the streets of Portland, Oregon. I showed three ways to reckon the distance, or norm, between two points (i.e. vectors). As a reminder, using the distance between points u and v on the map below this time:$$ \|\mathbf{u} - \mathbf{v}\|_1 = |u_x - v_x| + |u_y - v_y| $$$$ \|\mathbf{u} - \mathbf{v}\|_2 = \sqrt{(u_x - v_x)^2…

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How far away is the supermarket from your house? There are lots of ways of answering this question:As the crow flies. This is the green line from \(\mathbf{a}\) to \(\mathbf{b}\) on the map below.The 'city block' driving distance. If you live on a grid of streets, all possible routes are the same length — represented by the orange lines on the map below.In time, not distance. This is usually a more useful answer... but not one we're going…

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How far away is the supermarket from your house? There are lots of ways of answering this question:As the crow flies. This is the green line from \(\mathbf{a}\) to \(\mathbf{b}\) on the map below.The 'city block' driving distance. If you live on a grid of streets, all possible routes are the same length — represented by the orange lines on the map below.In time, not distance. This is usually a more useful answer... but not one we're going…

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Houston 2013Houston 2014Denver 2014Calgary 2015New Orleans 2015Vienna 2016Paris 2017Houston 2017... The eighth geoscience hackathon landed last weekend! We spent last weekend in hot, humid Houston, hacking away with a crowd of geoscience and technology enthusiasts. Thirty-eight hackers joined us on the top-floor coworking space, Station Houston, for fun and games and code. And tacos. Matt kicking things off Discussing projects Discussing projects Discussing projects Discussing projects Discussing projects Discussing projects Discussing projects Discussing projects The…

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The SEG Annual Meeting is coming up. Next week sees the festival of geophysics return to the global energy capital, shaken and damp but undefeated after its recent battle with Hurricane Harvey. Even though Agile will not be at the meeting this year, I wanted to point out some highlights of the week.The Annual MeetingThe meeting will be big, as usual: 108 talk sessions, and 50 poster and e-presentation sessions. I have no idea how many…

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A couople of weeks ago I wrote about a new publication from Elsevier. The book seems to contain quite a bit of unlicensed copyrighted material, collected without proper permission from public and private groups on LinkedIn, SPE papers, and various websites. I had hoped to have an update for you today, but the company is still "looking into" the matter.The comments on that post, and on Twitter, raised some interesting views. Like most views, these views usually…

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