Last week at the Canada GeoConvention in Calgary I gave a slightly silly talk on colourmaps with Matteo Niccoli. It was the longest, funnest, and least fruitful piece of research I think I've ever embarked upon. And that's saying something.Freeing data from figuresIt all started at the Unsession we ran at the GeoConvention in 2013. We asked a roomful of geoscientists, 'What are the biggest unsolved problems in petroleum geoscience?'. The list we generated was…

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In Calgary last week I heard the phrase "when the industry recovers" several times. Dean Potter even went so far as to say: “Don’t believe anyone who says ‘It’s different this time’. It isn’t.” He knows what he's talking about — the guy sold his company to Vermillion in 2014 for $427 million.But I think he's dead wrong.What's different this time?A complete, or at least non-glacially-slow, recovery seems profoundly unlikely to me. We might possibly…

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We were in Calgary last week at the Canada GeoConvention 2017. The quality of the talks seemed more variable than usual but, as usual, there were some gems in there too. Here are our highlights from the technical talks...Filling in gapsMauricio Sacchi (University of Alberta) outlined a new reconstruction method for vector field data. In other words, filling in gaps in multi-compononent seismic records. I've got a soft spot for Mauricio's relaxed speaking style and the…

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Matt and I are in Calgary at the 2017 GeoConvention. Instead of writing about highlights from Day 1, I wanted to pick on one awesome thing I saw. Throughout the convention, there is a air of sadness, of nostalgia, of struggle. But I detect a divide among us. There are people who are waiting for things to return to how they were, when life was easy. Others are exploring how to be a part of the change,…

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Mountain View, California, looking northeast over US 101 and San Francisco Bay. The Computer History Museum sits between the Googleplex and NASA Ames. Hangar 1, the giant airship hangar, is visible on the right of the image. Imagery and map data © Google, Landsat/Copernicus. A few days ago I was lucky enough to have a client meeting in Santa Clara, California. I had not been to Silicon Valley before, and it was more than a…

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Big news! Little-endian byte order is finally legal in SEG-Y files.That's not all. I already spilled the beans on 64-bit floats. You can now have up to 18 quintillion traces (18 exatraces?) in a seismic line. And, finally, the hyphen confusion is cleared up: it's 'SEG-Y', with a hyphen. All this is spelled out in the new SEG-Y specification, Revision 2.0, which was officially released yesterday after at least five years in the making. Congratulations to…

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The impending SEG-Y Revision 2 release allows the use of double-precision floating point numbers. This news might leave some people thinking: "What?".Integers and floatsIn most computing environments, there are various kinds of number. The main two are integers and floating point numbers. Let's take a quick look at integers, or ints, first.Integers can only represent round numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. They can have two main flavours: signed and unsigned, and various bit-depths, e.g.…

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