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’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.”