News from the Underground

Here’s a selection of newsworthy things over the past week.

Nice to see you. Can you help me? — New to the Slack? Here’s a friendly post that if you do in fact introduce yourself like Elvis did stating some of your interests and ambitions, the first connections may come from other people reaching out to you with their technical questions. How cool is that?

Real-time coding collaboration — Ever wondered if there are platforms where you and your chums could collaborate in real-time on your code? Check out the handful of options that came up in this post.

Rendezvous for the hackathon — The next Rendezvous is on Wednesday (not the usual Friday), 7 April at 4 pm UTC. This one is a bit different because it will be a group chat about the projects happening at the upcoming TRANSFORM hackathon. So if you have something in mind, this is your chance to pitch it. Better yet, start a discussion in Slack right now!

Kudos and logos and merch — Doing a shoutout to Software Underground in some graphical format such as a presentation, video, or poster? Make sure your acknowledgements look crisp with the official logos. And while representing, colour coordinate your video calls with a coffee mug, T-shirt, or stickers from the shop.

Shear advisory — A bit of rock physics in the #machinelearning channel as Mads asked for help predicting a shear sonic log. This is a classic seismic geophysics workflow because shear sonic is seldom acquired but allows rock physicists to get into elastic properties.

News from the Underground

What’s new this week? This is what…

Find work fast — Earth science is undoubtedly experiencing something of an employment crisis at the moment. Happily, the #jobs channel has been busy lately, with nine positions posted in the last seven days. Three of them at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute.

Virtually no rain… or pubs — A question about virtual geological field trips highlighted some good resources, including this excellent resource — and map, below — from the MicroMyEarth website, which is run by Arthur Adams, a Canadian geochemist based in Switzerland. If you teach earth science, you should definitely check it out!

Spot the difference — The #python channel is probably the most active channel on the Software Underground Slack, and often sees great debate. This biggest thread this week was in reponse to a question about the difference between Jupyter Notebook and Jupyter Lab, but the answers go well off piste. Check it out.

Arrrrrr, treasure — Although Python wins the popularity contest, there are a great many earth science libraries for the R programming language. Calgary-based geoscientist Danny Coutts took the trouble to find them all, and told everyone about it in the #r-stats channel.

📈 Interactive plots — everyone loves widgets! Later today, at 1600 UTC, Wesley Banfield and Steve Purves will be looking at ways to sprinkle a little bit of JavaScript into your Python to get some next-level interactivity. And if you’re reading this after the fact, not to worry, it’ll be in the Rendezvous playlist on our YouTube channel.

That’s it for this week. Don’t forget to sign up for TRANSFORM!

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.”

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.