News from the Underground

Here are some highlights from the Software Underground Slack this week.

Increasing dtype diversity — Progress is being made within NumPy to handle more diverse datatypes which would allow for ndarrays to carry information about units and other things. There’s been lots of other chat in the #python channel this week; check it out.

Micro-editors wanted — The collaborative book project, 52 Things You Should Know About Geocomputing has amassed the requisite number of articles and is undergoing review. And what better way to edit a collection of essays than with a collection of editors? The articles are less than 800 words and cover a very wide range of topics. So if you’re interested in helping with the review, pop into the #52things channel and say hello.

Quantitative blobology? — One question this week spurred a lot of discussion about how to do more quantitative things with amplitude maps. The thread brings up uncertainty, subjectivity, and information theory. Threads like this are always a goldmine of insight and information, check it out.

Choosing open licences — A discussion on open licences for content, code and data brought out some useful links, and led to Matt writing a blog post about choosing licences for open science.

Digital rocks — One of the great challenges of subsurface science and engineering is that we usually cannot directly measure the thing we are interested in. Interested in lithology down a borehole? You can count gamma rays. Want to know the amount of pore space? Scatter some neutrons or bounce some sonic pulses around. Check out this thread discussing synthetic forward modeling and inversion of petrophysical data, and pointing at GebPy (pictured here), an interesting new tool for petrophysics.

GebPy, as pictured in Maximillian Beeskow’s Twitter post.

That’s it for this week, what did I miss?

News from the Underground

What’s new? Here are the highlights from the last seven days.

Strikes and dips and tadpoles — What tools would you recommend for working with structural data in boreholes? Lots to choose from, among them fractoolbox — as well as the wireline log and standard image processing libraries.

Geovisual — Speaking of interesting plots, some new visualization libraries came under the spotlight: one a d3.js library for ternary plots, and the other discussing pyrolite, a Python library for doing all sorts of geochemistry-related plots.

All the colours – Seismic interpreters have likely heard of spectral decomposition – the partitioning of seismic into three frequency bands that you can plot as RGB blended images. This work in progress uses a bag of different tools, some of which might get stitched closer together given the right motivation and use cases.

Thermal under-where? The World Geothermal Congress has been virtualized and spread out across several weeks, and the Swung-powered Geothermal Hackathon is starting to take shape. Chime in now to influence the agenda and help shape the happenings.

NetCDF to ipygany — I wrote about ipygany a couple of weeks ago, and here Wes is showing off how to take your NetCDFs and drop them right into the notebook environment.

No mouse clicks allowed — Lastly, In a heartwarming testament to the nature of our connection to science and software, John Armitage tells a short tale about the time he met a little library called GemPy and how it helped him build an earth model entirely out of code. No mouse clicks allowed! Sadly, external forces intervened and John had to build his model all over again using proprietary point-and-click software which worked of course… until it didn’t.

Stories like this remind us why reproducible science is the best science. If you have tales of open science glory — or woe! — consider sharing them in the Software Underground.

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.

News from the Underground

Welcome to the news post! Here’s what’s hot this week in the Underground.

Just in time help — One of the hallmarks of the Underground is fast help with digital workflows. It easily beats Google for those occasions when you’re not even sure what to search for. On Monday, Mads asked how to get a horizon slice through a 3D seismic volume. Within minutes he had suggestions using the awesome segysak tool, or just xarray on its own, or pure SciPy.

How does your river flow? — Got an elevation model but it’s too low resolution for your watershed model? There were lots of good recommendations for software that may be helpful here. And don’t forget about the glorious geospatial tool that is QGIS — free and open source.

Unfolded Studio – Not to be confused with a room where structural geologists do palinspastic reconstruction, Justin Gosses posted a link to this new project from the folks at Uber who built kepler. If you’re into geospatial analytics, you need to see this, it looks beautiful.

The maestro of the meandering – Zoltan Sylvester’s 3D stratigraphic displays got a mention in the #viz channel. It’s worth checking out the README to his repo, it has plenty of the fluvial stratigraphic eye candy you’d expect from Zoltan.

Sedimentary logs as data — Sometimes data is locked away in Adobe Illustrator drawings. John Armitage asked about converting a pile of drawings of sedimentary logs into structured data, and got lots of suggestions. He eventually got striplog to work on most of the data. The power of Swung!

Contests and openness – Bobbing in the wake of the SPE contest we mentioned last week, Matt wrote an open letter to TGS about the licensing of the data and there was some chat about it on Slack. If you care about data science contests, community engagement, and how to maximize innovation and impact, give the post a read.

See anything else in the channels I may have missed? Leave a note in the comments.