News from the Underground

The reverberations from TRANSFORM 2021 have started to dampen, so we’re back with our weekly round-ups.

Badges of honour — Did you know that you can slap a Software Underground badge on your projects and webpages? These badges aren’t just for showing off either. They can links to other places, for instance to your project’s channel in the Swung Slack, if it has one.

Geothermal Hackathon 2021 — is taking place at the end of next week with much activity to be going on in the #geothermal-hack-2021 channel. Here are some of the proposed projects. Even if you aren’t registered in the hackathon you can still follow the action.

Superstar with LiDAR — Are you dealing with .las files, but not of the wireline kind? Then this discussion will serve you up a platter of resources and advice for working with point-cloud data sets.

Feature combo pipelines — If, like Brendon, you’re doing some machine learning and you find yourself building a boatload of models all with different combinations of inputs and pre-processing steps, you’re life is going to be much easier if you have a way to keep track of these different permutations so you can apply it all again on other data.

Need a license for work — Pythonistas using Anaconda might be shocked to find out that it’s no longer free to use. Sort of. It depends on who you work for and the kind of work you are doing. This thread discusses the issues and reveals a shared frustration in comprehending the terms and conditions. There are also some thoughtful perspectives on supporting the free (or nearly free) software that many organizations become increasingly dependant on.

Tools for seeing — Geoscience very often relies on making graphics and visualization. This post pointing to the Python-only compilation called PyViz.org, shows you the collection of tools that are out there. It looks to be a comprehensive resource, particularly because the number of tools in the tool shed can seem so daunting.

News from the Underground

Another week, another batch of highlights from the world of Software Underground.

Before we get to the nuggets from Slack, there have been a few changes to the website. The front page is new, and there’s a new page explaining why Slack is so cool, in the hope that more people sign up and take part in those conversations. There’s also a new page for potential sponsors, and you can now register for TRANSFORM virtual conference — or buy a T-shirt!

You don’t have to wait for TRANSFORM to hear about subsurface geophysics. There are two Subsurface Rendezvous events coming up in February — from Sean Walker and Matteo Ravasi — read all about them on the website. Both promise to be unmissable… and they’re free!

As usual, the Slack chat has also been active; here are some highlights:

Entwine – A posting about a USGS service for viewing and analyzing lidar datasets in your browser caught my attention. It’s always fun when you can click on a link and immediately start playing around.

Look at all those buttons!

Plan for redundancy. There was a post about the Women in Geothermal (WING) organization this last week. Their vision is short and brilliant and worth repeating: “The aim is to one day become redundant, where no group needs to advocate for gender equality.”

Can you see my faults? Elwyn Galloway posted about a Voila app that makes a forward model of a normal fault. Go and slide the sliders. Apps like this are fun to see — interactive, single purpose, on the web, shareable. And built entirely using open source code, with attribution.

Yet another visualization library for Jupyter? Yes! If you’re looking to make interactive 3D visualizations in Python you’ve got load of tools to choose from: PyVista, IPywidgets, Bokeh, IPyVolume, and more (info and links at PyViz.org). There’s new one to check out called ipygany with all sorts of cool features made awesomer by using your GPU.

As usual, if I missed something cool, let us know in the comments. And if you spot anything hot in the coming week, drop tips in the comments or in Slack.