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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Today we'll look at finding and analysing global seismology data with Python and the wonderful seismology package ObsPy, from Moritz Beyreuther, Lion Krischer, and others originally at the Geophysical Observatory in Munich.We've used ObsPy before to load SEG-Y files into Python, but that's not its core purpose. These tools are typically used by global seismologists and earthquake scientists, but we're going to download and analyse data from three non-earthquakes:A curious landslide and tsunami in Greenland.The…

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Today is the 90th anniversary of the first well log. On 5 September 1927, three men from Schlumberger logged the Diefenbach [sic] well 2905 at Dieffenbach-lès-WÅ“rth in the Pechelbronn heavy oil field in the Alsace region of France. The site of the Diefenbach 2905 well. © Google, according to terms.   The geophysical services company Société de Prospection Électrique (Processes Schlumberger), or PROS, had only formed in July 1926 but already had sixteen employees. Headquartered…

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This morning a friend of mine, Fernando Enrique Ziegler, a pore pressure researcher and practitioner in Houston, let me know about an "interesting" new book from Elsevier: Practical Solutions to Integrated Oil and Gas Reservoir Analysis, by Enwenode Onajite, a geophysicist in Nigeria... And about 350 other people. What's interesting about the book is that the majority of the content was not written by Onajite, but was copy-and-pasted from discussions on LinkedIn. A novel way…

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A couple of weeks ago, in Murphy's Law for Excel, I wrote about the dominance of spreadsheets in applied analysis, and how they may be getting out of hand. Then in Organizing spreadsheets I wrote about how — if you are going to store data in spreadsheets — to organize your data so that you do the least amount of damage. The general goal being to make your data machine-readable. Or, to put it another way,…

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A couple of weeks ago I alluded to ill-formed spreadsheets in my post Murphy's Law for Excel. Spreadsheets are clearly indispensable, and are definitely great for storing data and checking CSV files. But some spreadsheets need to die a horrible death. I'm talking about spreadsheets that look like this (click here for the entire sheet): This spreadsheet has several problems. Among them:The position of a piece of data changes how I interpret it. E.g. a blank…

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Shapefiles are a sort-of-open format for geospatial vector data. They can encode points, lines, and polygons, plus attributes of those objects, optionally bundled into groups. I say 'sort-of-open' because the format is well-known and widely used, but it is maintained and policed, so to speak, by ESRI, the company behind ArcGIS. It's a slightly weird (annoying) format because 'a shapefile' is actually a collection of files, only one of which is the eponymous SHP file. Today we're…

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Where would scientists and engineers be without Excel? Far, far behind where they are now, I reckon. Whether it's a quick calculation, or making charts for a thesis, or building elaborate numerical models, Microsoft Excel is there for you. And it has been there for 32 years, since Douglas Klunder — now a lawyer at ACLU — gave it to us (well, some of us: the first version was Mac only!). We can speculate about…

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Where would scientists and engineers be without Excel? Far, far behind where they are now, I reckon. Whether it's a quick calculation, or making charts for a thesis, or building elaborate numerical models, Microsoft Excel is there for you. And it has been there for 32 years, since Douglas Klunder — now a lawyer at ACLU — gave it to us (well, some of us: the first version was Mac only!). We can speculate about…

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Mark your calendar: 22–24 September (right before SEG), at a downtown Houston location to be confirmed.We're filling the room with 50 geoscientists of all stripes. Interpreters, programmers, students, professionals... everyone is welcome. The plan: to imagine, design, and prototype some new tools in geophysics — all around the theme of machine learning. It's going to be awesome.  The schedule: we'll get started at 6 pm on Friday 22 September, and go till 10 pm. Then…

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