A while back, I announced that we’re running some public courses in June. These courses will now be online.They have also decreased in price by 33% because we don’t need a physical space or physical sandwiches. So the 3-day Intro to Geocomputing class now costs only USD 1200 (or $300 for students). The 2-day Intro to Machine Learning class, which is only available on the Americas timing for now, is USD 800, or USD 600…

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It is thought that Euclid wrote Elements in about 300 BC, but Oliver Byrne turned it into one of the true gems of visualization — and made it about 100 times more readable. By seamlessly combining typeset text (Caslon, if you’re interested) with minimalist geometric drawings in primary colours, he didn’t just reproduce the text; he explained it in a new way. If you like the look of it, it’s even cooler in Nicholas Rougeur’s…

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First rule of criticism: balance it with something positive.Technical societies — AAPG, SEG, SPE, EAGE, and the many others — do important work in our discipline. They publish some quality content, they organize a lot of meetings, and they help attract talent to work in subsurface science and engineering.The door is wide open for them to play a central role in the change that’s coming to our lives as subsurface professionals.Second rule of criticism: stick…

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We ran the first geoscience hackathon over 7 years ago in Houston. Since then we’ve hosted another 26 subsurface hackathons — that’s 175 projects, and over 900 hackers. Last year, 10 of the 11 hackathons that Agile* facilitated were in-house.This is exciting. It means that grass-roots, creative, high-speed collaboration and technology development is possible inside large corporations. But it came at the cost of reducing our public events… and we want to bring the hackathon…

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Happy New Year! I hope 2020 is going well so far and that you have audacious plans for the new decade.Perhaps among your plans is learning to code — or improving your skills, if you’re already on the way. As I wrote in 2011, programming is more than just writing code: it’s about learning a new way to think, not just about data but about problems. It’s also a great way to quickly raise your…

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We did it! No-one thought 2016 could be beaten, but we nailed it. Yep, by many measures, 2019 was even worse. And, planning ahead this time, we left the door wide open for 2020 to really show everyone what it can do. But we survived! And we still have plenty to smile about, especially as it’s that time when we celebrate the end of the old year and the beginning of a new one with…

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The FORCE Machine Learning Hackathon and Symposium were a great success again this year (read all about last year). Kudos to Peter Bormann of ConocoPhillips Norge, who put the programme — held over 3 days at the NPD in Stavanger, Norway, together. Here’s a round-up of the projects. A visualization of how human-generated rock descriptions were distributed with respect to porosity measured from the core plug. from.cr.dscrptn.to.clssfctnThe team took up Peter’s challenge of translating abbreviated…

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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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