# X lines of Python: Gridding map data

Difficulty rating: moderate.

Welcome to the latest in the X lines of Python series. You probably thought it had died, gawn to ‘eaven, was an x-series. Well, it’s back!

Today we’re going to fit a regularly sampled surface — a grid — to an irregular set of points in (x, y) space. The points represent porosity, measured in volume percent.

Here’s what we’re going to do; it all comes to only 9 lines of code!

1. Load the data from a text file (needs 1 line of code).

2. Compute the extents and then the coordinates of the new grid (2 lines).

3. Make a radial basis function interpolator using SciPy (1 line).

4. Perform the interpolation (1 line).

5. Make a plot (4 lines).

As usual, there’s a Jupyter Notebook accompanying this blog post, and you can run it right now without installing anything.

Run the accompanying notebook in MyBinder

Run the notebook in Google Colaboratory

### Just the juicy bits

The notebook goes over the workflow in a bit more detail — with more plots and a few different ways of doing the interpolation. For example, we try out triangulation and demonstrate using scikit-learn’s Gaussian process model to show how we might use kriging (turns out kriging was machine learning all along!).

If you don’t have time for all that, and just want the meat of the notebook, here it is:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy.interpolate import Rbf

# Load the data.
sep=' ',
usecols=[0, 1, 2, 3],
names=['x', 'y', 'thick', 'por']
)

# Build a regular grid with 500-metre cells.
extent = x_min, x_max, y_min, y_max = [df.x.min()-1000, df.x.max()+1000,
df.y.min()-1000, df.y.max()+1000]
grid_x, grid_y = np.mgrid[x_min:x_max:500, y_min:y_max:500]

# Make the interpolator and do the interpolation.
rbfi = Rbf(df.x, df.y, df.por)
di = rbfi(grid_x, grid_y)

# Make the plot.
plt.figure(figsize=(15, 15))
plt.imshow(di.T, origin="lower", extent=extent)
cb = plt.scatter(df.x, df.y, s=60, c=df.por, edgecolor='#ffffff66')
plt.colorbar(cb, shrink=0.67)
plt.show()

This results in the following plot, in which the points are the original data, plotted with the same colourmap as the surface itself (so they should be the same colour, more or less, as their background).

### Matt Hall

Matt is a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Scientific, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Matt is into geology, geophysics, and machine learning.

# Two new short courses in Calgary

We're running two one-day courses in Calgary for the CSPG Spring Education Week. One of them is a bit... weird, so I thought I'd try to explain what we're up to.

Both classes run from 8:30 till 4:00, and both of them cost just CAD 425 for CSPG members.

### Get introduced to Python

The first course is Practical programming for geoscientists. Essentially a short version of our 2 to 3 day Creative geocomputing course, we'll take a whirlwind tour through the Python programming language, then spend the afternoon looking at some basic practical projects. It might seem trivial, but leaving with a machine fully loaded with all the tools you'll need, plus long list of resources and learning aids, is worth the price of admission alone.

If you've always wanted to get started with the world's easiest-to-learn programming language, this is the course you've been waiting for!

### Hashtag geoscience

This is the weird one. Hashtag geoscience: communicating geoscience in the 21st century. Join me, Evan, Graham Ganssle (my co-host on Undersampled Radio) — and some special guests — for a one-day sci comm special. Writing papers and giving talks is all so 20th century, so let's explore social media, blogging, podcasting, open access, open peer review, and all the other exciting things that are happening in scientific communication today. These tools will not only help you in your job, you'll find new friends, new ideas, and you might even find new work.

I hope a lot of people come to this event. For one, it supports the CSPG (we're not getting paid, we're on expenses only). Secondly, it'll be way more fun with a crowd. Our goal is for everyone to leave burning to write a blog, record a podcast, or at least create a Twitter account.

One of our special guests will be young-and-famous geoscience vlogger Dr Chris. Coincidentally, we just interviewed him on Undersampled Radio. Here's the uncut video version; audio will be on iTunes and Google Play in a couple of days:

Comment

### Matt Hall

Matt is a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Scientific, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Matt is into geology, geophysics, and machine learning.

# x lines of Python: synthetic wedge model

Welcome to a new blog series! Like the A to Z and the Great Geophysicists, I expect it will be sporadic and unpredictable, but I know you enjoys life's little nonlinearities as much as I.

The idea with this one — x lines of Python — is to share small geoscience workflows in x lines or fewer. I'm not sure about the value of x, but I think 10 seems reasonable for most tasks. If x > 10 then the task may have been too big... If x < 5 then it was probably too small.

Python developer Raymond Hettinger says that each line of code should be equivalent to a sentence... so let's say that that's the measure of what's OK to put in a single line.

### Synthetic wedge model

To kick things off, follow this link to a live Jupyter Notebook environment showing how you can make a simple synthetic three-rock wedge model in only 9 lines of code.

The sentences represented by the code that made the data in these images are:

1. Set up the size of the model.
2. Make the slanty bit, with 1's in the wedge and 2's in the base.
3. Add the top of the model as 0; these numbers will turn into rocks.
4. Define the velocity and density of rocks 0 to 2.
5. Distribute those properties through the model.
6. Calculate the acoustic impedance everywhere.
7. Calculate the reflection coefficients in the model.
8. Make a Ricker wavelet.
9. Convolve the wavelet with the reflection coefficients.

All of the notebooks we share in this series will be hosted on mybinder.org. I'm excited about this because it means you can run and edit them live, without installing anything at all. Give it a go right now.

You can see them on GitHub too, and fork or clone them from there. Note that if you look at the notebook for this post on GitHub, you'll be able to view it, but not change or run code unless you get everything running on your own machine. (To do that, you can more or less follow the instructions in my User Guide to the TLE tutorials).

Please do take this notion of x as 'par' as a challenge. If you'd like to try to shoot under par, please do — and share your efforts. Code golf is a fun way to learn better coding habits. (And maybe some bad ones.) There is a good chance I will shoot some bogies on this course.

We will certainly take requests too — what tasks would you like to see in x lines of Python?

### Matt Hall

Matt is a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Scientific, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Matt is into geology, geophysics, and machine learning.

# On answering questions

On Tuesday I wrote about asking better questions. One of the easiest ways to ask better questions is to hang back a little. In a lecture, the answer to your question may be imminent. Even if it isn't, some thinking or research will help. It's the same with answering questions. Better to think about the question, and maybe ask clarifying questions, than to jump right in with "Let me explain".

Here's a slightly edited example from Earth Science Stack Exchange

I suppose natural gas underground caverns on Earth have substantial volume and gas is in gaseous form there. I wonder how it would look like inside such cavern (with artificial light of course). Will one see a rocky sky at big distance?

The first answer was rather terse:

### What is a good answer?

This answer, addressing the apparent misunderstanding the OP (original poster) has about gas being predominantly found in caverns, was the first thing that occurred to me too. But it's incomplete, and has other problems:

• It's not very patient, and comes across as rather dismissive. Not very welcoming for this new user.
• The reference is far from being an appropriate one, and seems to have been chosen randomly.
• It only addresses sandstone reservoirs, and even then only 'typical' ones.

In my own answer to the question, I tried to give a more complete answer. I tried to write down my principles, which are somewhat aligned with the advice given on the Stack Exchange site:

1. Assume the OP is smart and interested. They were smart and curious enough to track down a forum and ask a question that you're interested enough in to answer, so give them some credit.
2. No bluffing! If you find yourself typing something like, "I don't know a lot about this, but..." then stop writing immediately. Instead, send the question to someone you know that can give a better answer then you.
3. If possible, answer directly and clearly in the first sentence. I usually write it in bold. This should be the closest you can get to a one-word answer, especially if it was a direct question.
4. Illustrate the answer with an example. A picture or a numerical example — if possible with working code in an accessible, open source language — go a long way to helping someone get further.
5. Be brief but thorough. Round out your answer with some different angles on the question, especially if there's nuance in your answer. There's no need for an essay, so instead give links and references if the OP wants to know more.
6. Make connections. If there are people in your community or organization who should be connected, connect them.

It's remarkable how much effort people are willing to put into a great answer. A question about detecting dog paw-prints on a pressure pad, posted to the programming community Stack Overflow, elicited some great answers.

The thread didn't end there. Check out these two answers by Joe Kington, a programmer–geoscientist in Houston:

• One epic answer with code and animated GIFs, showing how to make a time-series of pawprints.
• A second answer, with more code, introducing the concept of eigenpaws to improve paw recognition.

A final tip: writing informative answers might be best done on Wikipedia or your corporate wiki. Instead of writing a long response to the post, think about writing it somewhere more accessible, and instead posting a link to your answer.

What do you think makes a good answer to a question? Have you ever received an answer that went beyond helpful?

Comment

### Matt Hall

Matt is a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Scientific, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Matt is into geology, geophysics, and machine learning.

# On asking questions

If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is. — Anonymous Yale professor (often wrongly attributed to Einstein)

Asking questions is a core skill for professionals. Asking questions to know, to understand, to probe, to test. Anyone can feel exposed asking questions, because they feel like they should know or understand already. If novices and 'experts' alike have trouble asking questions, if your community or organization does not foster a culture of asking, then there's a problem.

### What is a good question?

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question. — Carl Sagan

Asking good questions is the best way to avoid the problem of feeling silly or — worse — being thought silly. Here are some tips from my experience in Q&A forums at work and on the Internet:

1. Do some research. Go beyond a quick Google search — try Google Scholar, ask one or two colleagues for help, look in the index of a couple of books. If you have time, stew on it for a day or two. Do enough to make sure the answer isn't widely known or trivial to find. Once you've decided to ask a network...
2. Ask your question in the right forum. You will save yourself a lot of time by going taking the trouble to find the right place — the place where the people most likely to be able to help you are. Avoid the shotgun approach: it's not considered good form to cross-post in multiple related forums.
3. Make the subject or headline a direct question, with some relevant detail. This is how most people will see your question and decide whether to even read the rest of it. So "Help please" or "Interpretation question" are hopeless. Much better is something like "How do I choose seismic attribute parameters?" or "What does 'replacement velocity' mean?".
4. Provide some detail, and ideally an image. A bit of background helps. If you have a software or programming problem, just enough information needed to reproduce the problem is critical. Tell people what you've read and where your assumptions are coming from. Tell people what you think is going on.

If you really want to cultivate your skills of inquiry, here is some more writing on the subject...

### Supply and demand

Knowledge sharing networks like Stack Exchange, or whatever you use at work, often focus too much on answers. Capturing lessons learned, for example. But you can't just push knowledge at people — the supply and demand equation has two sides — there has to be a pull too. The pull comes from questions, and an organization or community that pulls, learns.

Do you ask questions on knowledge networks? Do you have any advice for the curious?

Don't miss the next post, On answering questions.

Comment

### Matt Hall

Matt is a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Scientific, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Matt is into geology, geophysics, and machine learning.

# How do I become a quantitative interpreter?

TLDR: start doing quantitative interpretation.

I just saw this question on reddit/r/geophysics

I always feel a bit sad when I read this sort of question, which is even more common on LinkedIn, because it reminds me that we (in the energy industry at least) have built recruiting patterns and HR practices that make it look as if professionals have career tracks or have to build CVs to impress people or get permission to train in a new area. This is all wrong.

Or, to be more precise, we can treat this as all wrong and have a lot more fun in the process.

If you are a 'geologist' or 'geophysicist', then you are in control of your own career and what you apply yourself to. No-one is telling you what to do, they are only telling you what they need. How you do it, the methods you apply, the products you build — all this is completely up to you. This is almost the whole point of being a professional.

The replies to Timbledon's question include this one:

I disagree with Schwa88. Poor Timbledon doesn't need another degree. Rock physics is not a market, and not new. There are no linear tracks. And there is no clear or useful distinction between rock physics and quantitative interpretation (or petrophysics, or seismic geophysics) — I bet there are no two self-identifying quantitative interpreters with identical, or even similar, job or educational histories.

As for 'now is not the time'... I can't even... 'Now' is the only time you can do anything about, so work with it.

### OK, enough ranting, what should Timbledon do?

It's easy! The best way to pursue quantitative interpretation, or pretty much anything except pediatric cardiology, is to just start doing it. It really is that simple. My advice is to use quantitative methods in every project you touch, and in doing so you will immediately outperform most interpreters. Talk to anyone and everyone about your interest and share your insights. Volunteer for projects. Go to talks. Give talks. To help you find your passion, take the time to learn about some big things:

• Rock physics, e.g. the difference between static and dynamic elasticity.
• Seismic processing, e.g. what surface consistent deconvolution and trim statics are.
• Seismic interpretation, e.g. seismic geomorphology and seismic stratigraphy.
• Seismic analysis, e.g. the difference between Zoeppritz, Fatti, and Shuey.
• Statistics, e.g. when you need multilinear regression, or K-means clustering.

Those are just examples. If you're more into X-ray diffraction in clays, or the physics of crystalline rocks, or fluid properties, or wellbore seismic, or time-lapse effects, or whatever — learn about those things instead.

Whatever you do, Timbledon, don't listen to anybody ;)

### Matt Hall

Matt is a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Scientific, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Matt is into geology, geophysics, and machine learning.

# Once is never

Image by ZEEVVEEZ on Flickr, licensed CC-BY. Ten points if you can tell what it is...

My eldest daughter is in grade 5, so she's getting into some fun things at school. This week the class paired off to meet a challenge: build a container to keep hot water hot. Cool!

The teams built their contraptions over the weekend, doubtless with varying degrees of rule interpretation (my daughter's involved HotHands hand warmers, which I would not have thought of), and the results were established with a side-by-side comparison. Someone (not my daughter) won. Kudos was achieved.

But this should not be the end of the exercise. So far, no-one has really learned anything. Stopping here is like grinding wheat but not making bread. Or making dough, but not baking it. Or baking it, but not making it into toast, buttering it, and covering it in Marmite...

Great, now I'm hungry.

### The rest of the exercise

How could this experiment be improved?

For starters, there was a critical component missing: control. Adding a vacuum flask at one end, and an uninsulated beaker at the other would have set some useful benchmarks.

There was a piece missing from the end too: analysis. A teardown of the winning and losing efforts would have been quite instructive. Followed by a conversation about the relative merits of different insulators, say. I can even imagine building on the experience. How about a light introduction to thermodynamic theory, or a stab at simple numerical modeling? Or a design contest? Or a marketing plan?

Per Avseth, Tapan Mukerji and Gary Mavko (2005). Cambridge University Press, 408 pages, ISBN 978-0-521-15135-1. List price USD 91, $81.90 at Amazon.com, £45.79 at Amazon.co.uk You have this book, right? Every seismic interpreter that's thinking about rock properties, AVO, inversion, or anything beyond pure basin-scale geological interpretation needs this book. And the MATLAB scripts. ### Rock Physics Handbook Gary Mavko, Tapan Mukerji & Jack Dvorkin (2009). Cambridge University Press, 511 pages, ISBN 978-0-521-19910-0. List price USD 100,$92.41 at Amazon.com, £40.50 at Amazon.co.uk

If QSI is the book for quantitative interpreters, this is the book for people helping those interpreters. It's the Aki & Richards of rock physics. So if you like sums, and QSI left you feeling unsatisifed, buy this too. It also has lots of MATLAB scripts.

Jack Dvorkin, Mario Gutierrez & Dario Grana (2014). Cambridge University Press, 365 pages, ISBN 978-0-521-89919-2. List price USD 75, $67.50 at Amazon.com, £40.50 at Amazon.co.uk This book seems to be a companion to The Rock Physics Handbook. It feels quite academic, though it doesn't contain too much maths. Instead, it's more like a systematic catalog of log models — exploring the full range of seismic responses to rock properies. ### Practical Seismic Data Analysis Hua-Wei Zhou (2014). Cambridge University Press, 496 pages, ISBN 978-0-521-19910-0. List price USD 75,$67.50 at Amazon.com, £40.50 at Amazon.co.uk

Zhou is a professor at the University of Houston. His book leans towards imaging and velocity analysis — it's not really about interpretation. If you're into signal processing and tomography, this is the book for you. Mostly black and white, the book has lots of exercises (no solutions though).

Rob Simm & Mike Bacon (2014). Cambridge University Press, 279 pages, ISBN 978-1-107-01150-2 (hardback). List price USD 80, $72 at Amazon.com, £40.50 at Amazon.co.uk Simm is a legend in quantitative interpretation and the similarly lauded Bacon is at Ikon, the pre-eminent rock physics company. These guys know their stuff, and they've filled this superbly illustrated book with the essentials. It belongs on every interpreter's desk. ### Seismic Data Analysis Techniques... Enwenode Onajite (2013). Elsevier. 256 pages, ISBN 978-0124200234. List price USD 130,$113.40 at Amazon.com. £74.91 at Amazon.co.uk.

This is the only book of the collection I don't have. From the preview I'd say it's aimed at undergraduates. It starts with a petroleum geology primer, then covers seismic acquisition, and seems to focus on processing, with a little on interpretation. The figures look rather weak, compared to the other books here. Not recommended, not at this price.

NOTE These prices are Amazon's discounted prices and are subject to change. The links contain a tag that gets us commission, but does not change the price to you. You can almost certainly buy these books elsewhere.

Comment

### Matt Hall

Matt is a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Scientific, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Matt is into geology, geophysics, and machine learning.

# A culture of asking questions

When I worked at ConocoPhillips, I was quite involved in their knowledge sharing efforts (and I still am). The most important part of the online component is a set of 100 or so open discussion forums. These are much like the ones you find all over the Internet (indeed, they're a big part of what made the Internet what it is — many of us remember Usenet, now Google Groups). But they're better because they're highly relevant, well moderated, and free of trolls. They are an important part of an 'asking' culture, which is an essential prerequisite for a learning organization

### Stack Exchange is awesome

Today, the Q&A site I use most is Stack Overflow. I read something on it almost every day. This is the place to get questions about programming answered fast. It is one of over 100 sites at Stack Exchange, all excellent — readers might especially like the GIS Stack Exchange. These are not your normal forums... Fields medallist Tim Gowers recognizes Math Overflow as an important research tool. The guy has a blog. He is awesome.

What's so great about the Stack Exchange family? A few things:

• A simple system of up- and down-voting questions and answers that ensures good ones are easy to find.
• A transparent system of user reputation that reflects engagement and expertise, and is not easy to game.
• A well defined path from proposal, to garnering support, to private testing, to public testing, to launch.
• Like good waiters, the moderators keep a very low profile. I rarely notice them.
• There are lots of people there! This always helps.

### The new site for earth science

The exciting news is that, two years after being proposed in Area 51, the Earth Science site has reached the minimum commitment, spent a week in beta, and is now open to all. What happens next is up to us — the community of geoscientists that want a well-run, well-populated place to ask and answer scientific questions.

You can sign in instantly with your Google or Facebook credentials. So go and take a look... Then take a deep breath and help someone.

### Matt Hall

Matt is a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Scientific, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Matt is into geology, geophysics, and machine learning.

# Plant a seed for science and tech

Cruising around the web last weekend looking for geosciencey Christmas presents, coupled with having 3 kids (aged 9, 5, and 3) to entertain and educate, I just realized I have a long list of awesome toys to share. Well, I say toys, but these amazing things are almost in a class of their own...

### Bigshot camera

A full kit for a child to build his or her own camera, and it's only \$89. Probably best suited to those aged 7 up to about 12. Features:

• comes with everything you need, including a screwdriver,
• a crank instead of a battery,
• multiple lenses including anaglyphic 3D,
• a set of online tutorials about the components and how they work — enlightening!

### LittleBits

Epic. For kids (and others) that aren't quite ready for a soldering iron, these magentic blocks just work. There are blocks for power, for input (like this pressure sensor), and for output. They can, and should, be combined with each other and anything else (Lego, Meccano, straws, dinosaurs) for maximum effect. Wonderful.

### Anything at all from SparkFun

... and there's Adafruit too. I know we had Tandy or RadioShack or whatever in the early 1980s, but we didn't have the Internet. So life was, you know, hard. No longer. Everything at SparkFun is affordable, well-designed, well-documented, and—well—fun. I mean, who wouldn't want to build their own Simon Says

And this is just a fraction of what's out there... Lego MINDSTORMS for the bigger kids, GoldieBlox for smaller kids, Raspberry Pi for the teens. I get very excited when I think about what this means for the future of invention, creativity, and applied science.

Even more exciting, it's us grown-ups that get to help them explore all this fun. Where will you start?

Comment

### Matt Hall

Matt is a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Scientific, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Matt is into geology, geophysics, and machine learning.