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?