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.

Not a member yet? Here's why you should join

The Software Underground Slack is one of the things that make this community so phenomenal. I hope you’re in there already, participating in the daily conversations. But did you know that there’s another step to becoming a voting member of the Software Underground?

If you’re interested in a friendly bunch of digital subsurface professionals who get pumped learning about data, dirt, or anything in between, and you want to help shape the digital revolution in subsurface, we’d love for you to take the next step and join the society. The good news is that it’s completely free.

So what does becoming a member mean?

• When accepting the Terms and Conditions, you will help sustain a fair and friendly environment for everyone here in the Swung community. We’re united in our mission:

“To provide technical and professional development opportunities to the global community of earth scientists and engineers who program computers in the course of their work, and to promote the use of open source digital technology in the exploitation of natural resources and investigation of the earth.”

• If you feel inspired about a change you want to make that can improve the Swung society, you can vote at a meeting of members. It’s inclusive for a reason, we want to hear your ideas! Only members can vote.

• All events are posted in the #events channel on Slack to get a feel of our extracurriculars, but as a member you can be notified of membership related activities.

If you’d like more of the nitty gritty on membership, you can read the details in the Software Underground’s draft By-Law No.1. The first order of business at the upcoming Annual General Meeting on 21 April will be to vote on adopting this by-law.

We hope you’ll sign up here and help propel us into the next chapter for Software Underground.

News from the Underground

Before jumping into the highlights from the Slack channels, just a reminder that the schedule is lining up for TRANSFORM 2021 conference in April. Go to the event page and register now!

Colour by numbers — There is a bit of art and a bit of science involved in making data visualizations — but it’s mostly science. For instance, this thread is an absolute showcase of pure helpfulness and enthusiasm about colouring a 2D array of numbers. Not always as easy as it sounds…

Scraping open the earth — A post about Pangaea, a data publishing service dealing with a variety of datasets in the earth and atmospheric sciences. Oh, and wanna loop through thousands of geospatial datasets in the inventory, Wesley’s got you covered.

Coordinate system correctness — Need to fix an erroneous coordinate reference system (CRS) in a shapefile? GeoPandas has got what you need.

Confused about type hints in Python? You’re not alone. There was a massive conversation about it this week on Swung. Conclusion: Yes.

Open all the wells — How many signatures will it take to open an entire country’s well data? No idea, but we might get to find out. A post was shared about a petition to the Dutch government to open all the well logs in the Netherlands. The petition, originating with one of the dGB founders, is still open.

Five star open data — Still on open data, is the post pointing to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Five Star Open Data plan. Some other frameworks, models, and concepts were discussed in this thread. What should Swung be doing to adopt, modify, or accelerate these initiatives?

What caught your eye on Software Underground this week? Let us know in the comments.

TRANSFORM 2021 is coming

Mark your calendar: 16 to 23 April. The virtual conference for the digital subsurface is returning, a little earlier this year, so that it can incorporate the Annual General Meeting of the Software Underground on Wednesday 21 April. It will be a rather momentous occasion, because it is the first AGM since we incorporated the society last spring. Please come and help us celebrate — and determine the future of this organization!

If you just want to get to the sign-up, click the button. If you want to learn more, read on!

As last year, the conference will focus on expanding the horizons of our members. This means helping people acquire new skills, meet new people, and find out about new problems in applied subsurface science and engineering. Here’s how the schedule looks from a very high level:

An outline schedule for TRANSFORM 2021. We will publish the timing of these blocks in the near future. For now, it’s just a guide and is subject to change.

You may not have encountered some of these components before, especially not in a virtual world, so here’s a bit more detail:

• Hackathon — Teams of up to about 8 collaborate on all sorts of projects, from Python libraries to open data to reproducing papers. Check out the report part one and part two from last year.

• Tutorials — Get started on a new tool or skill! These 2-hour sessions will be 100% hands-on and can be consumed live or at your own pace. Check out the TRANSFORM 20 lessons.

• Unconference — This is the bit of the conference where we tackle the big questions. We’ll announce these components as we get closer to the event.

• Birds of a Feather (BOF) — Software Underground aims to be a platform to elevate other communities and projects. BOFs are where people with big ideas in common flock together.

• Annual General Meeting (AGM) — The Underground incorporated in April. Our first AGM will see our first elections and voting on our constitution. You’re invited, please sign up here.

• Lightning talks — Five minutes is not long, but it’s long enough to get a crowd stoked about your latest project or keenest insight! Watch the lightning bolts from Day 1 and Day 2 last year.

TRANSFORM 2020 brought over 700 digital subsurface professionals together to talk and learn about their craft. The virtual format means anyone can join us, wherever they are. And our Pay What You Like fee means that cost is never an issue. If you are planning to join us, sign up now and we’ll make sure you’re kept up to date.

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💡 If your organization would like to sponsor TRANSFORM 2021 and grow the learning opportunities for scientists in our field, we’d love to hear from you! Find out more about supporting our programs.