News from the Underground

Things were pinging away in the main channels this week, with a few posts garnering loads of enthusiasm and important chatter.

The weirder the better — In the #viz channel, Nathan announced the latest Xeek challenge, Keep Geoscience Weird. This competition is all about new and novel ways of visualizing subsurface data. It’s a very open-ended competition — you can use any data that you like, as long as it’s related to the subsurface. I highly recommend reading the thread concerning the Terms & Conditions and motivations for engagement.

Sand vs shale — The longest thread of the week (150+ messages!) was in the #sedimentology channel. A simple question about computing running averages led to uncovering a bug in striplog, some plots (right), a hackathon project, and some weirdness in how Microsoft Excel exports CSV files.

Hello OSDU, how do you do? — The Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) Forum is a consortium of ~200 members and is rolling out the first production release of its platform this week. For a bit of history on how the OSDU came to be, who’s involved, and where it’s headed, this thread might be a good summary.

But seriously. Who’s with me? — Has anyone ever given any serious consideration to prospecting and mining asteroids or other planetary bodies for resources? Turns out they have.

Teeny weeny ancient plant bits — Kieran threw some Carboniferous kerogen samples into the SEM and shared these gorgeous images. The discussion drifted naturally to “should I put 300 of these images online somewhere for others to look at and play with?”

How to get lost — Kleo asked for recommendations for introductory Python exercises, and got a load of responses. A few folks pointed to last year’s TRANSFORM tutorials. In another channel, Heba got a somewhat philosophical perspective from Hallgrim on the pursuit of programming: “[it’s] all about getting lost, banging your head against the wall, and the extreme pleasure of breaking through the wall. You are already lost, you’ve already found this community, so you have a great talent for what is ahead of you…”.

What was your favourite thread of the week?

News from the Underground

Here are the highlights from the past week.

Less than one month until Transform 2021 – The Software Underground’s T21 virtual conference is less than a month away, so it’s time to register and schedule your life during 16 – 23 April, 2021. Check out the calendar of events and make sure that you are tuned into the #t21-general channel.

SWUNG Hackathon Inside Transform – T21 kicks off with the Hackathon 16 – 18 April, but momentum from those projects will likely carry on, gathering eyeballs and contributors throughout the rest of the conference as well. In the #t21-hackathon channel, Filippo shared some instructions for proposing and discussing any would-be hackathon projects on this GitHub Discussion page.

git for you – One month in advance of his tutorial on git and GitHub at T21, Thursday 22 April, Steve has set up a Q & A in slido. Talk about a tutorial that is truly in service of others! It also means that you can might still get your questions answered if you, say, get pulled too deeply into a hackathon project.

Perils of improper sanitation – Are you aware of the perils of not sanitizing your inputs? This thread in #python has some nice links to explain what this is and when you should care.

Mapping partnerships – There are those that make maps, and there are those who want to make maps of those that make maps. This post is looking about how to structure a database to create a network of co-authorship of geoscience publications.

Probabilistically going to read it – I’ve got loads of love for those who put in the extra effort to make their work open access. Take for instance, this new publication that Júlio announced yesterday: Probabilistic Knowledge-based Characterization of Conceptual Geologic Models.

News from the Underground

Here’s a selection of newsworthy things over the past week.

Nice to see you. Can you help me? — New to the Slack? Here’s a friendly post that if you do in fact introduce yourself like Elvis did stating some of your interests and ambitions, the first connections may come from other people reaching out to you with their technical questions. How cool is that?

Real-time coding collaboration — Ever wondered if there are platforms where you and your chums could collaborate in real-time on your code? Check out the handful of options that came up in this post.

Rendezvous for the hackathon — The next Rendezvous is on Wednesday (not the usual Friday), 7 April at 4 pm UTC. This one is a bit different because it will be a group chat about the projects happening at the upcoming TRANSFORM hackathon. So if you have something in mind, this is your chance to pitch it. Better yet, start a discussion in Slack right now!

Kudos and logos and merch — Doing a shoutout to Software Underground in some graphical format such as a presentation, video, or poster? Make sure your acknowledgements look crisp with the official logos. And while representing, colour coordinate your video calls with a coffee mug, T-shirt, or stickers from the shop.

Shear advisory — A bit of rock physics in the #machinelearning channel as Mads asked for help predicting a shear sonic log. This is a classic seismic geophysics workflow because shear sonic is seldom acquired but allows rock physicists to get into elastic properties.

News from the Underground

What’s new this week? This is what…

Find work fast — Earth science is undoubtedly experiencing something of an employment crisis at the moment. Happily, the #jobs channel has been busy lately, with nine positions posted in the last seven days. Three of them at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute.

Virtually no rain… or pubs — A question about virtual geological field trips highlighted some good resources, including this excellent resource — and map, below — from the MicroMyEarth website, which is run by Arthur Adams, a Canadian geochemist based in Switzerland. If you teach earth science, you should definitely check it out!

Spot the difference — The #python channel is probably the most active channel on the Software Underground Slack, and often sees great debate. This biggest thread this week was in reponse to a question about the difference between Jupyter Notebook and Jupyter Lab, but the answers go well off piste. Check it out.

Arrrrrr, treasure — Although Python wins the popularity contest, there are a great many earth science libraries for the R programming language. Calgary-based geoscientist Danny Coutts took the trouble to find them all, and told everyone about it in the #r-stats channel.

📈 Interactive plots — everyone loves widgets! Later today, at 1600 UTC, Wesley Banfield and Steve Purves will be looking at ways to sprinkle a little bit of JavaScript into your Python to get some next-level interactivity. And if you’re reading this after the fact, not to worry, it’ll be in the Rendezvous playlist on our YouTube channel.

That’s it for this week. Don’t forget to sign up for TRANSFORM!

News from the Underground

Here’s what happened in the Underground this last week in February.

Rendezvous numéro trois – Matteo Ravasi’s Rendezvous was on Friday, but don’t worry, you can catch what you missed on YouTube. He showed off some of the amazing things in PyLops and in a talk entitled, Solving geophysical inverse problems on GPUs with PyLops+cupy. If you’re into signal processing, inverse problems, and data reconstruction, you need to check it out..

Conflicts to declare – Kieran’s shared his frustration about a semi-anonymous reviewer on a manuscipt complaining that the open-source tool that was the topic of the paper was not novel, because closed-source commercial software exists that does the same thing. The discussion that follows has some interesting opinions on bias, conflict of interest, and fishing for the science in the murky waters where commercial software lurks.

Seismic unrest in Iceland – The geology hosting those gorgeous pictures of the Blue Lagoon in your Instagram feed, could soon see a once-in-a-millennium eruption, based on its current unrest and its historical record. A swarm of earthquakes are happening on the Reykjanes Peninsula.

A license to work together – What do you get when a software vendor wants to contribute to some open source software… but doesn’t like the licence? Discussion here. One quote:

“Digging in over BSD-3 vs Apache 2 seems like refusing to volunteer at your local soup kitchen because they serve Hunt’s ketchup not Heinz.”